Spanish Bond Yields at 8 year low

Spanish bond yields have come down from 7.5 percent in 2012 during the height of the crisis to 3.5 percent now. This is a dramatic decrease with yields now at levels not seen years before the sovereign debt crisis erupted.

Matthew Phillips

Euro Zone Bond Spreads Above Historical Levels

This chart shows the Government Bond Spreads (difference between interest rates of 10 year government bodns of the selected countries verser the interest rate of german bonds). You can see that for some of the countries these spreads are higher than they were in the years before. So you may ask as the FT did: Why did we bother?

FT

Size Of The Financial Markets

In 2010 world Gross domestic product was 63 trillion dollars. The financial industry is many times bigger than the value of all goods and services produced in the world. Shares and bonds are about the same value of world GDP, but derivatives trading and foreign currency transactions are ten and fifteen times bigger than world gdp.

Der Spiegel

Real Return 10-Year Treasuries from 1980

This graph from last Saturdays edition of the dutch newspaper NRC shows the real return on 10-year US treasuries. 10-year US Treasuries are the government bonds of the United States and is one of the most important benchmarks to investors. The real return is now back to zero and this much lower than the average real return in the last 30 years as you can see.

Source: NRC Handelsblad 040611

All the Greek Scenario's with Likelihood

Analysts of Merril Lynch constructed this chart with the different scenario's for Greece. With the most likely scenario on top and the least scenario on the bottom, more than one scenario's are possible. Click of the picture for a larger version.

Source: Financial Times

Weighted average years to maturity

This graph shows the time in which countries have to repay their debt. In other words in how many years all the government bonds expire.

Source: Rabobank

Greece 2year Government Bonds

The next graph from Bloomberg shows the yield of the 2-year Greek Government Bonds.

The yield has recently exploded to around 23%, which is certainly unsustainable.

Source: Bloomberg

Dutch: Fed and ECB in the government bond markets

The graph gives the part of bonds which the central banks bought in the fourth quarter of 2010 in the United States and Europe respecitvely. The blue part shows the Central Banks purchases.

Source: Z24