In societies like the United States, where the upper middle class is intensely interested in their private retirement portfolios, this unleashed a wave of fear. A deeper level of anxiety concerned the mountain of debts in the emerging markets and the liabilities on the balance sheets of big corporations. By mid-March, with Europe reeling under the impact of the disease, the euro area sovereign debt market was coming under stress. All this was bad, but the truly terrifying shock of March 2020 was the seismic tremor that ran through the market for U.S. Treasuries, American government debt.
