While little comprehensive European government bond-trading data is publicly available, one measure shows liquidity is in steep decline.
Quite possibly, but I see a crucial difference between the end of 2012 and the end of 2011: The ECB's government bond-buying program, announced earlier this year.
The government would like to see the ECB restart its government bond-buying programme and wants the nascent European Stability Mechanism to be retooled as a bank bailout fund.
The slope of the yield curve can be measured in varying ways but is conventionally thought of as the long-term government bond rate minus the short-term government bond rate.
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The movement in major government bond yields - the implied interest rate that countries pay to borrow money - was small - an indication that bond investors saw limited risks at the moment.
In anticipation of big central-bank purchases of government bonds, traders sent benchmark Japanese government-bond futures up to a record Friday.
That there is so little foreign money in Japan's government-bond market merely reduces the likelihood of panicky sell-offs.
Government-bond yields are being held artificially low by central-bank actions.
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Spain's ten-year government-bond yield has been rising since the second tranche of three-year ECB cash was doled out.
That is why the government-bond yield is the appropriate measure for discounting public liabilities, as Messrs Rauh and Novy-Marx assert.
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Such sums are far from trifling, yet bond markets are clearly unconvinced that they are enough to turn the economy around: government-bond yields fell to record lows this week.
TOKYO A week after Japan's central bank started a huge bond-buying campaign to drive down yields in the country's quadrillion-yen government-bond market, yields instead have risen, a sign of the huge headwinds the bank faces in its push to end 15 years of deflation.
The government-bond market has been confused since the Treasury's surprise decision in late October to stop issuing 30-year bonds.
Vanguard Long-Term Government Bond ETF ( VGLT) seeks to provide a diversified exposure to the long-term U.S. government bond market.
Morgan Asia Credit Index, which tracks government- and corporate-bond prices in the region, rose 14% this year.
If government-bond yields stay at current levels for long, fund managers may have little choice.
But the worry for all other government-bond markets is that investment terms will be altered retrospectively.
These shifts all push government-bond yields up, but they are a cause for cheer rather than gloom.
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The same policies that have forced down government-bond yields have forced up the cost of providing pensions.
As doubts about whether countries would get to the altar faded, so yields in government-bond markets converged.
The aggressiveness of the plans surprised investors, sending stocks whipsawing, the yen tumbling and government-bond yields to record lows.
The value of the large government-bond portfolio held by the bank decreased, hurting its capital position, the document says.
Yields elsewhere are also very low, nowhere more so than in Japan, where ten-year government-bond yields are now 1.3%.
He was apologising for a recent controversy over trading activity by Citigroup in London that had disrupted government-bond markets, including Italy's.
Meanwhile government-bond yields have fallen because central banks seem to spend most of the QE money buying their own country's debt.
The government-bond market is dominated by local banks and insurance firms which are forced to buy thanks to liquidity and solvency rules.
Despite cobbling together a plan for growth and to bring down Italy's vast debt, government-bond yields have risen to dangerously high levels.
Financial markets see few inflationary dangers in Britain: ten-year government-bond yields are within a point of France's and Germany's, and below America's.
The government-bond dealers admit grudgingly that Mr Fisher has a reasonable point.
The dividend yield from shares is historically high, compared with government-bond yields.
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