Jack Barnes - Someone dropped a bomb on the bond market Thursday – a $1 billion Armageddon trade betting the United States will lose its AAA credit rating. 
In one moment, an invisible trader placed a single trade that moved the most liquid debt market in the world.
The massive trade wasn’t placed in bonds themselves; it was placed in the futures market.
You only do this if you see an edge.This means someone is confident that the United States is either going to default or is going to lose its AAA rating. That someone is willing to bet the proverbial farm that U.S. interest rates will be going up.
I believe what happened is a debt-ceiling deal was done in Washington and leaked to a major proprietary trader. Everyone knows the debt negotiations in Washington have been an extreme game of brinksmanship between political parties, but now someone knows how that game played out.
