Wall Street may also be talking up its e-bond efforts in order to ward off the Securities and Exchange Commission, America's main markets regulator.

ECONOMIST: E-bonds, licensed to kill

This will allow the institutional investors that dominate the bond market to trade directly with each other through a sophisticated order-matching system, operated under the auspices of the Boston Stock Exchange.

ECONOMIST: E-bonds, licensed to kill

At present, this information is in the hands of Canada's seven inter-dealer brokers, firms which handle trades for bond dealers and banks in order to keep the transactions anonymous.

ECONOMIST: Bond trading

When Texaco was hit with an outlandish multibillion-dollar award in the 1980s, the company had to put up that amount as bond in order to appeal the judgment.

FORBES: Fact and Comment

In the corporate-bond market, where upside is far less, downside almost as nasty and scepticism should be the order of the day, no yield is too low, it seems, even though little more than 12 months have passed since no yield was too high.

ECONOMIST: Buttonwood