China Daily compared photographs of the bond complete with coupon clippings to make it look as if the bearer actually turned some of those coupons in for interest payments at one point to examples of counterfeits published on the U.S. Treasury website.
If you assume that the bond is selling at par, has an average couponof 5.5%, say, and you use a discount rate of 6%, then you are implicitly saying that the bond is actually riskier than the market perceives it to be.
When adjusted for taxes, investors are at the point where they can potentially receive better (and growing) income streams from a collection of large cap businesses than from a (fixed- coupon) 10-year government bond.