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Swings in bond yields reveal deep confusion among investors about the Fed’s intentions and the strength of the post-pandemic recovery.

The bond market is supposed to be the smart older cousin that keeps its head while the flighty stock market zooms about all over the place. Not so much in the past week.

Instead of a calm response to the Federal Reserve’sslightly more hawkish tone, the 10-year yield first leapt by the most in months, then plunged. On Monday, it dropped during Asian trading hours to the lowest since February, before bouncing all the way back and then some.

The moves reveal deep confusion among investors about the Fed’s intentions and the strength ofthe post-pandemic recovery, as well as the extraordinary desperation for safe yields.

Before stock traders get too smug, bond-market volatility is mirrored by similar swings below the surface of the stock market.

For me, the most extraordinary shift was the $235 billion depositedin the Fed’s reverse repurchase facilityafter it raised the rate it pays from zero to 0.05%, because it was concerned that it was losing control of the lower bound of rates.

This is a true tightening of monetary policy, not the mere technicality the Fed presented it as. For monetarists who care about the amount of money in circulation, in one day it drained reserves equivalent to two months of quantitative easing, and showed just how much cash is sloshing around the system looking for even the tiniest yield.

For those, including me, who prefer to focus on the price of money, it is now higher—albeit not very much, it is a tightening. Secured overnight rates in the money market had been stuck on the floor of 0.01% since March, according to the New York Fed, with some borrowing at negative rates. It rose to 0.05% after the Fed’s announcement, and negative rates vanished.

After the initial volatility, the bond market’s considered reaction was in the right direction for tighter policy: Higher short-term real rates reduced the longer-term inflation threat and so led to lower 10-year and 30-year Treasury yields—until the reflation trade returned on Monday. Higher rates pulled down stocks most sensitive to the economy—cyclicals and cheap value stocks—until Monday’s reverse. Growth stocks did fine thanks to lower long-term rates, before lagging on Monday.

Yet, 0.05% is a very small tightening, to put it mildly. Usually, the Fed moves in 0.25-percentage-point increments, so this was equivalent to one-fifth of a normal rate increase. What mattered for Treasurys wasn’t the immediate shift in the price of money, but the prospect of a bigger change by the Fed.

Much of the focus was on the “dots,” the projections of individual Fed policy makers. The median prediction for 2023 was for two 0.25-point increases that year, having previously been for no move. Again, in normal times this wouldn’t be terribly significant, as the predictions aren’t binding, have been a terrible guide to future policy and anyway are still two years away. They were even dismissed by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell in his news conference on Wednesday.

The reason the market cared so much isn’t the specifics, but the shift in tone from super-dovish to a hint of hawk. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard emphasized this—and the market moved further—on Friday when he said the first increase could even come next year. Seven of the 18 dots had one or two rises penciled in for 2022, so the news here was merely that Mr. Bullard was one of them.

Having previously been careful not to say anything that could possibly be interpreted as worrying about inflation, the Fed suddenly seemed to be concerned.

We will have to wait for more from Mr. Powell and other Fed members to find out if this is the interpretation they wanted. They might well be taken aback by the scale of the market moves, which on Friday briefly pushed five-year Treasury yields—the base for much corporate borrowing—up to where they stood in February last year, before the first lockdown. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mr. Powell tries to talk the market back.

The problem is that investors are supersensitive to the Fed’s views. They think the real economy will be hit much harder than it usually is by higher rates. The Fed also has spent the past year convincing investors that low rates are here pretty much forever.

The threat of higher rates holding back the economy pushed investors toward the post-2010 playbook, at least for a few days: Buy long-dated bonds, buy Big Tech and other growth stocks, steer clear of anything dependent on a strong expansion.

The shift from thinking there is no risk of rate rises to thinking there is some risk of increases marks a major change of mindset. But I urge caution: Don’t assume the Treasury market is right about inflation, let alone that the wildly swinging yield is anything more than a best guess at what the Fed plans.

But just as withthe taper tantrum of 2013, when investors start to price in Fed action, they can overdo it as everyone tries to adjust their portfolio to the new reality at once.