Archive for the Rates Category

504 January 2016 Rates   4.288% – 10 Year Debenture Effective Rate * 4.831% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate *   Wither the RMB (“Ren Min Bi”: 人民币) & What that means for 504 Rates. So was the intent to posit a downward trend in the value of the Chinese […]

504 December 2015 Rates   4.865% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate *   Waiting for Yellen. The thought of “Economics” scripted by Samuel Beckett, is somewhat disconcerting. This past weekend both the Financial Times and Barron’s published articles on substantial surveys on the direction of rates, specifically the […]

504 November 2015 Rates   4.176% – 10 Year Debenture Effective Rate * 4.778% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate *   The Last Hurrah! So the near decade of ultra-low interest rates end, not with a whimper, but the BANG of 271,000 new jobs. With that coda, attention now […]

504 September 2015 Rates   4.215% – 10 Year Debenture Effective Rate * 4.890% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate *   Stability is an Underrated Virtue The Summer of 2015 has been hectic. The roller coaster that is the Shanghai Composite Index has, along with a non-stop debate regarding […]

504 August 2015 Rates 4.909% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate *  东方红，太阳升 The former national anthem of the People’s Republic of China, “The East is Red”, seems more appropriate now that the financial media is covered in pictures of bewildered individuals in Shanghai standing in front of electronic […]

504 July Rates 4.326% – 10 Year Debenture Effective Rate * 4.961% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate * James Carville once observed that in his next life, he wanted to come back as something really powerful, like “The Bond Market”. Perhaps in a demonstration of that power, “The Bond Market” has, over […]

504 June Rates 5.062% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate * Sturm und Drang Interest rates can and do, sometimes, go up. Sometimes they even do so precipitously. Consider the chart below (Source: The Financial Times), showing the movements of the German Ten Year Government Bond over the past few […]

504 Program Rate Update for May 2015 4.850% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate * 4.374% – 10 Year Debenture Effective Rate * Today’s vocabulary word: Weltanschauung Welt·an·schau·ung ‘veltˌänˌSHouəNG/ * noun defined as a particular philosophy or view of life; the worldview of an individual or group. (German) Imagine, if you will, Bavarian […]

504 Program Rate Update for April 2015 4.591% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate * Debenture Rate drops, however, Core CPI… “Uncharted waters” is a term one hears very regularly as regards the location of the Federal Reserve in plotting a return to “normalized” interest rates. Given the various […]

504 Program Rate Update for March 2015 4.401% – 10 Year Debenture Effective Rate * 4.799% – 20 Year Debenture Effective Rate * “And now for something completely different . . . “ This being March, next to April that cruelest of months, the first uptick in the Twenty Year […]