In all financial and commodity markets the big figure (the first part of the price) is referred to as the handle. This allows verbally quicker and more accurate trading (see this classic Two Ronnies sketch) as the handle does not…
Monthly Archives: August 2010
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Dear Bond Vigilantes, The small nation of Ireland has received more than its fair share of press since the credit crunch started three years ago. The financial crisis has not been kind to the Irish economy, with the collapse of…
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Travelling back from Sunday’s draw between Liverpool & Arsenal (it was never a sending off), I noted Liverpool Football Club had again made the business pages for all of the wrong reasons (see here). The current battle between RBS, the…
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Last week a client asked us why US TIPS (inflation linked government bond) yields have been negative for much of this year (see chart), and we’re not sure we gave a very good answer. This weekend, to distract myself from…
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Well sort of. It hasn’t got a lot of attention in the bond markets, but this week both Jon Hilsenrath in the WSJ, and subsequently Paul Krugman in the NYT have revisited Ben Bernanke’s paper Japanese Monetary Policy: A Case…
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We first started writing about the credit crunch 3 years ago (see August 2007). Since then, short-term interest rates in the USA, Europe and the UK have collapsed to near zero. Ten year government bond yields across the respective economies…
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The July RICS survey continued the worrying trend of weaker UK data that has been in evidence since the preliminary UK Q2 GDP data release on July 23rd. It seems that the economic slowdown that has been evident in the…
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We’ve just got hold of some copies of the newly reprinted book about the Weimar Republic’s hyper-inflation, When Money Dies by Adam Ferguson. In 1923 the German mark was trading at 4,200,000,000,000 to the dollar, and the population was impoverished and…
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Turning Japanese I Think We’re Turning Japanese I Really Think So (follow up)
- Topics
- government bonds
Posted August 6th, 2010
There is only one explanation for why 2 year US Treasury yields broke below 0.5% today (an all time low), or why 10 year government bond yields in Germany and the US are currently 2.5% and 2.9% respectively. Or, for…










