People, it is fair to say, are worried about bond market liquidity.

Any one of these moves on its own wouldn’t really matter. Markets can move for all kinds of reasons, most of which affect only the investors and traders involved. But these types of swings give experienced financial market watchers a sinking feeling, the kind last felt widely during the global financial crisis when all kinds of obscure financial markets went haywire.

Suppose you looked at the score of a football game, and it was a 31-3 blowout.

You would have a pretty good guess about what had happened. The winning team’s offense must have gained huge amounts of yardage, enabling it to score all those points, while its defense was tough and prevented the opposing team from gaining much yardage.

That guess would usually be correct, but once in a while, when you look deeper into the statistics you might see that the opposite happened — for example, a winning team that scored lots of points despite not gaining much yardage, with an opponent that did the reverse. It would tell you that a deeply strange game had been played.

The global financial markets this week, and especially Wednesday, have been that very weird game of football. At some point, the weirdness can be as important as the final score in terms of understanding what is likely to happen in the future.

Consider the most basic two types of assets: stocks and bonds. Normally, especially in times of financial stress, these move in opposite directions. When there is good news and the outlook is bright, it is known as a “risk-on” day, meaning people are comfortable buying risky assets like stocks, driving up their price, while driving down the price of safer assets like bonds.