With mortgage market turmoil abound, help may or may not be on the way.

Higher yields offer a good chance for investors to lock up money now and step away, a welcome change. Yet because yields rise when prices fall, it means the value of investors’ existing fixed-income investments is dropping. Equally problematic is that yields on Treasury debt help determine interest rates across the economy.

The bottom line is that the market is effectively tightening, making credit costlier even though the Federal Reserve has held short-term interest rates steady. That has led to talk that regulators might step in. It makes sense because the Fed has said time and again that it is paying attention to financial conditions. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been overt about his focus on lower 10-year Treasury yields.

Investors shouldn’t hold their breath. While the Fed and Treasury teamed up in 2023 to stabilize the markets as the failure of Silicon Valley Bank raised concern that the financial system might collapse, things are different now. Although traders have lost big money on long-dated bonds, the move up in yields has been rather orderly. The 10-year has climbed 0.625 percentage point over the 33 trading days since its low point in April. It sounds like a lot, but yields rose more over similar spans 10 times last year. Yields remain far from the nearly 5% they hit in 2023, when Fed Chair Jerome Powell noted that higher borrowing costs could weigh on the economy, if they continued.

Still, one idea in circulation is so-called emergency quantitative easing, or QE, by the Fed. QE typically involves the central bank buying enormous quantities of bonds from primary dealers and, in turn, depositing money into their accounts, essentially greasing the economy’s financial machinery by creating dollars. An argument against QE is that it while it last took place during Covid-19, a time of extreme market dislocation, conditions aren’t so dire now. It may also “end up being counterproductive by increasing inflation expectations,” George Saravelos, head of foreign exchange research at Deutsche Bank Research, said in a Wednesday note. Tariffs, long understood to increase prices, also cut into the case for QE.

Treasury, which is clearly more closely aligned with the Trump administration than Powell, could step in. That might offer a reprieve to the market, but it would be an unusual move. While the Fed is the “lender of last resort,” the Treasury is known for being predictable. Over the long term, that is the best way to minimize the cost of borrowing.

Buybacks could be a partial solution. Since May 2024, the Treasury has been buying older, less liquid bonds that aren’t actively traded back from investors. Last month, it said it was looking at ways to improve the program. That could include increasing the maximum amount of bonds it purchases, or altering the mix, essentially increasing demand and lowering yields for certain securities.

While a Treasury official gave Barron’s no indication of when the changes might take effect at the time of the announcement, the fact that the department has already said it was weighing a shift could mean any announcement now would seem more routine, and less like an emergency action. Potential buybacks are “marginally more likely” because the Treasury has raised the idea, wrote Ian Lyngen, head of rates strategy at BMO Capital Markets. But they are “unlikely to be executed at a sufficient size to satisfy the market” and to buy back more debt, the Treasury would have to borrow, likely in shorter maturities, he said.

Issuing more shorter-dated debt, and fewer longer-dated securities, could also lower 10-year yields, although that isn’t a tool the Treasury could use right away. Treasury’s next announcement of its plans for issuance comes in July.

The downside is that issuing more short-dated debt means the U.S. would continually have to refinance a greater share of its borrowings. That could mean it would have to borrow on unfavorable terms.

“Only Congress, not the Fed can solve this,” Saravelos said.