What I’ve learnt about the world by paying attention for the first time in my life
I’m almost 70 and the Trump administration has accidentally given me something I never expected, a political education.
For most of my life, politics happened in the background. I voted. I read the headlines. I had opinions at dinner parties. But I didn’t really understand how the world works, the actual machinery underneath the news. I trusted that the grown-ups were running things and that the system, whatever it was, would muddle through.
I don’t think that anymore. And I’ve discovered something surprising in the process of becoming alarmed: it turns out the world is genuinely fascinating once you start looking at it properly. Here’s some of what I’ve learnt over the past year, written for anyone else who feels they should probably understand more than they do.
My own hens, who have never read a newspaper, still seem to know more about paying attention than most of us.
The bond market runs the world. Quietly.
This was the biggest surprise. I had vaguely heard of “the bond market” but assumed it was a corner of finance that didn’t really matter to me. Wrong.
Governments borrow money by selling bonds, basically IOUs. Big institutions all over the world buy them: pension funds, banks, foreign central banks, super funds (yes, including yours and mine). When those buyers get nervous about a government’s behaviour, they sell. When they sell, the government has to offer higher interest rates to attract new buyers. Higher rates mean higher costs for everyone, mortgages, business loans, government debt itself.
In other words, the bond market can quietly punish a government without firing a shot or running a campaign ad. They don’t hold meetings. They don’t issue press releases. They just sell.
Liz Truss found this out in 2022 when her tax-cut announcement crashed the UK bond market within hours. She was out of office in 49 days. The bond market took down a British prime minister faster than her own party could.
Right now, the same forces are circling Trump. Oil prices have spiked because of the war in Iran. Inflation fears are back. Bond yields are climbing. And there’s no Cabinet meeting that can fix it, because there’s nobody in charge of the bond market to call.
The people doing the selling aren’t a club.
I assumed at first that this must be a coordinated thing, a cabal of wealthy people deciding to teach a leader a lesson. It isn’t. It’s millions of individual decisions made by people watching the same data, applying similar models, and reaching similar conclusions independently within minutes of each other.
When prices start falling, automated systems trigger more selling. Investors who borrowed money to buy bonds get margin calls and are forced to sell. Pension fund managers see losses on their reports and reduce risk. None of this is coordinated. All of it points in the same direction. The market is a kind of distributed organism, no head, no leader, no negotiating partner. Which is exactly why governments find it so terrifying. There’s nobody to ring up and threaten.
Your super is in this whether you like it or not.
I used to think superannuation was a savings account with extra rules. It isn’t. It’s a bundle of investments, shares, bonds, property, cash, owned on your behalf. Which means everything happening in global markets is happening to your money, every day.
When bond yields rise, the existing bonds your super holds become worth less. When share markets fall, your super balance falls. When inflation runs hot, your purchasing power in retirement shrinks even if your balance stays flat.
This isn’t a reason to panic. It’s a reason to actually look. What’s your investment mix? Are you in “growth” (mostly shares, more volatile) or “balanced” or “conservative”? How much cash do you have outside super? Could you reduce your pension drawdowns for a couple of years if you needed to? These aren’t questions for your accountant. They’re questions for you, and answering them is the difference between feeling powerless and feeling prepared.
Power doesn’t work the way the news tells you.
The news focuses on visible drama, speeches, scandals, tweets, court cases. But the actual machinery of power runs on much quieter things: who controls the bond market’s confidence, who staffs the regulatory agencies, who sits on the boards of central banks, which institutions can be captured and which can’t.
A leader who controls Congress and the courts and the military still has to deal with bond traders in Singapore who’ve never heard their speeches. A leader who can fire civil servants by the thousands still can’t fire the people who decide whether oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. A leader who dominates every news cycle still has to face inflation numbers that don’t care about narrative.
This is actually reassuring, once you understand it. The fear of any one figure becoming all-powerful is real but also overstated. Power is more distributed than it looks, and reality has a way of asserting itself.
Religious freedom was a deal, and let’s remember.
This is the bit that’s gotten under my skin lately. The American constitutional commitment to religious freedom wasn’t a vague nice-to-have. It was a specific deal struck by people who had seen, in Europe, in colonial America, what happens when one religious faction captures the state. The result is always the same: hollow public piety enforced by law, persecution of everyone outside the favoured group, and eventually the corruption of the faith itself, because faith that’s compelled isn’t faith.
Watching American Christianity get fused with American political power has been a strange thing to see from Australia. The dissent within Christianity itself, Catholic bishops, mainline Protestants, Black church leaders, even prominent evangelicals, gets almost no coverage. But it’s there, and it matters, and it’s part of why the picture is more contested than it appears.
You don’t have to be religious to care about this. The principle that the state shouldn’t be in the business of declaring official truths is what protects everyone, including the non-religious. When that principle erodes, it erodes for everybody.
What I’ve decided to do about all this.
Three things, mostly.
First, pay attention. Not doom-scrolling, but actual reading. A handful of serious sources beats an hour on social media every time.
Second, get my own house in order. No debt. Cash reserves. Flexible spending. The ability to ride out a few bad years without panic-selling anything. It turns out the best protection against macro-economic chaos isn’t predicting it, it’s being structured so you don’t have to.
Third, talk about it. With friends. With people who don’t normally talk about this stuff. Because the muscle of civic conversation has atrophied in most of our lives, and you don’t get it back without using it.
I didn’t expect to be writing any of this at almost 70. I thought my political phase, such as it was, was over. But the world has insisted on my attention, and to my surprise I’m finding the attention worth giving. There’s something clarifying about understanding what’s actually happening, even when what’s actually happening is unsettling.
One last thing. Somewhere in the middle of all this paying attention, I did something I never thought I’d do. I handed out how-to-vote cards at a polling booth for 7 days. I drove seven hours to get there. And it turned out the doing was the easy part. The deciding had taken years. If you’ve been feeling that low hum of “I should probably do something,” start there. The rest follows. Watch this space for a blog on the highlights of my experience of the polling booth at the Farrer election.
If you’ve been feeling that vague background anxiety about the news but haven’t quite found a way in, start with the bond market. It sounds boring. It isn’t. It’s the closest thing to an honest verdict on a government you’ll find, and right now it’s speaking very clearly.