US Treasury Rates – 3/27/2020

Economics, Interest Rates, Monetary Policy, RIsk Management, , ,

The following chart shows the yields on USTreasury securities during month of March. These are end-of-day figures. Intraday, the 1-3 month were negative during the middle portion of the week.

As of Friday, 3/27/2020, the 30-year bond is paying 1.29%. This is slightly off the bottom of less than 1% on 3/9, but is still very negative in real terms (when using the CPI to discount for price inflation). You may click the thumbnail below to enlarge. We are also posting the link to the Treasury’s site as well for your convenience.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=yield

Sutton/Mehl

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1-3 Month T-Bill Yields to 0%

Economics, Interest Rates, Monetary Policy, , , ,

An expected consequence of the flight to ‘safety’ (sarcasm ours) has been a decrease in interest rates. While rates have been far into negative territory for quite some time now, today is the first day that nominal rates have gone to 0.0%. What this means is, at the current price, the 1-3 month T-Bill series is paying zero interest.

While this is not disimilar to what most consumers have been experiencing in their checking and even savings accounts for some time now, these are perceived to have even less risk than USGovt. debt. In our next post we’ll go a bit deeper into the various kinds of risk associated with various financial instruments. This is something we probably should have dedicated an entire column to some time ago even though we often referred to various types of risk.

Put simply, there is more generalized systemic risk (non-diversifiable) than at any time in the history of US financial markets. We are certainly living in interesting times. We will re-post an article that was written nearly a decade ago on risk in very general terms. Stay well and stay tuned.

Sutton/Mehl

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