Italian and Greek bonds now have lower yields/rates (i.e., considered lower risk(?)) than US bonds: * https://www.investing.com/rates-bonds/
Rates also encode inflation expectations. So it may be that inflation is expected higher in the US
Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
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Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#92Italian and Greek bonds now have lower yields/rates (i.e., considered lower risk(?)) than US bonds: * https://www.investing.com/rates-bonds/
The ECB keeps its interest rate much lower (2,4%) than the FED (3,75%).
Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#93Finally some evidence that the system is working. Most countries are borrowing like there's no tomorrow, so obviously rates should go up to compensate the risk of not paying back.
And the incredible thing is that yields are quite low based on historical standards. The risk of lending to most countries at yields that are barely above real inflation is massive for portfolio growth. Let's take the US, where you have to consider lending money to the government for 10 years at 5.009%. This barely covers inflation if you consider real numbers rather than the financial fiction ones that have been pub…
Apart from a brief period (which also had higher inflation) yields were more like 6% in thr 90s.
Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#94Turns out countries with constitutions forbidding excessive debt are quite smart. It's like phone addiction -- if the parents don't lead by example and strictly enforce "no phones at the dinner table" then slowly it's just gonna creep back in and everyone's just staring at their phones again.
Not working so well for Germany
Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working is an interesting term (which I agree with btw) because place like Japan with debt at 200%+ of gdp, rates rising are going to annihilate spending in other important areas. Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?
> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly? Who could you vote for, in any democracy, that would fit this? Also, how many voters would have the wherewithal to identify such a person?
Some green parties. Their primary goals might seem unrelated, but turns out caring for the environment and climate change is correlated with long-term thinking.
Note I said "some", before rushing to mention all the examples of green parties engaging in misguided policies. Those also exist
In the anglosphere it's more difficult because first-past-the-post voting makes such parties unlikely to succeed or be relevant
Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no way to grow the US economy AI and robotics. Engineering is becoming cheaper. Graphics design is becoming cheaper. Lawyering is becoming cheaper. Entertainment, film, and gaming (not hardware) is becoming cheaper. This will eventually hit manufacturing and logistics and critical inputs. We'll be able to have an entire robotic supply chain domestically save for raw materials. It will hit drug design and m…
Provide a date and resolution criteria, I'll bet you $10k to a charity of the winner's choice via longbets.org. This is cope imho. Words are cheap. We'll get this about the same time as Full Self Driving ("Supervised"). "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely." [1] Your comment is hopeful sci-fi aspirations, without any guarantees. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768 - January 23rd, 2017 https://en.wiki…
Make it $100k and pay it to me directly.
I'm not a fan of Musk, but his driverless cars are already driving around in my city alongside Waymo. His rocketship thing will probably be delivering tanks to the other side of the world within hours if the DoD gets their way.
I'm getting more work done every day than in entire months pre-2026, and I've done my share of hard engineering. I think you're the one coping.
They just solved a Millennium Problem for fuck's sake.
Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly? Who could you vote for, in any democracy, that would fit this? Also, how many voters would have the wherewithal to identify such a person?
I think democracy is perhaps a fundamentally unstable system. It requires constant corrective force, and a lot of it, from a lot of people. When the members of that democracy start to get a little too comfortable it fails. Humans are designed to operate in smallish clans with benevolent dictators whose right to rule is based on social currency with people they personally know. Anything else is a house of cards on uns…
The American founders predicted all these problems, which is why they formed a representative democracy. However over the years we have chipped away at that aspect and ended up with an election systems that encourage populism.
Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Provide a date and resolution criteria, I'll bet you $10k to a charity of the winner's choice via longbets.org. This is cope imho. Words are cheap. We'll get this about the same time as Full Self Driving ("Supervised"). "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely." [1] Your comment is hopeful sci-fi aspirations, without any guarantees. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768 - January 23rd, 2017 https://en.wiki…
Make it $100k and pay it to me directly. I'm not a fan of Musk, but his driverless cars are already driving around in my city alongside Waymo. His rocketship thing will probably be delivering tanks to the other side of the world within hours if the DoD gets their way. I'm getting more work done every day than in entire months pre-2026, and I've done my share of hard engineering. I think you're the one coping. They ju…
> They just solved a Millennium Problem for fuck's sake.
Oh wow, they can solve formal proof test driven development. That's great! I too think it's cool. It isn't going to replace lawyers, doctors, nurses, tradespeople, and everyone else that drives the economy that isn't LLM output. The most successful YC startups have been DoorDash, Coinbase, and Airbnb; regulatory arb and a crypto gambling site. I do not disagree you can spit out more code faster, or potentially better code with an average dev versus more expensive bespoke code with a senior dev. More code does not translate to economic gains directly. People do not want slop entertainment. No LLMs are needed to build everything in flight for the global energy transition (batteries, solar, wind, geothermal, etc).
AI Hallucination Cases Tracker - https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/ (2041 cases identified so far)
80% of OpenAI, Anthropic's enterprise revenues come from 1% of their customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613331 - September 2026 (My note: show me these customers and their wildly more profitable enterprises from this incredible inference use; Meta scrapped their "AI focused" layoffs, Salesforce had to hire software engineers back)
AI is everywhere at work now, but the time savings are smaller than the hype - https://censuseasy.com/blog/does-ai-save-time-at-work - August 13th, 2026
> More than half of American workers have now used artificial intelligence on the job, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau survey. But when the government asked those workers how much time AI actually saved them, the answer was smaller than the hype: for about 7 in 10, it was two hours a week or less, or nothing at all. [My note: 0-2 hours a week! For trillions in capex!]
The State of Generative AI Adoption in 2025 - https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-gen... - November 13th, 2025
The Impact of Generative AI on Work Productivity - https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/feb/impact-ge... - February 27th, 2025
> The next figure illustrates how generative AI-driven time savings vary with usage across occupations. Time savings and overall usage are highly correlated. Workers in the computer and mathematics occupation used generative AI in nearly 12% of their work hours, and they reported this saved them 2.5% of work time. By contrast, workers in personal service occupations used this technology in only 1.3% of their work hours, and it saved them only 0.4% of work time. The slope of the dashed regression line is 0.17, indicating that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of time spent using generative AI is associated with a 1.7 percentage point increase in the time saved as a share of hours worked.
"Feel the hope!" Like a religion, people want to believe when the data says otherwise. I have been in many churches in my life, but the church of HN is by far the most committed to their faith. If I'm the one coping, where's the proof? It doesn't exist. It is not my job to believe without objective data and evidence supporting an opinion or assertion. "In God we trust. All others must bring data."
Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#99Finally some evidence that the system is working. Most countries are borrowing like there's no tomorrow, so obviously rates should go up to compensate the risk of not paying back.
And the incredible thing is that yields are quite low based on historical standards. The risk of lending to most countries at yields that are barely above real inflation is massive for portfolio growth. Let's take the US, where you have to consider lending money to the government for 10 years at 5.009%. This barely covers inflation if you consider real numbers rather than the financial fiction ones that have been pub…
Yields depend the most on the central bank interest rate. The interest rates are still quite low compared to the past.
Re: Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
#100Finally some evidence that the system is working. Most countries are borrowing like there's no tomorrow, so obviously rates should go up to compensate the risk of not paying back.
Working is an interesting term (which I agree with btw) because place like Japan with debt at 200%+ of gdp, rates rising are going to annihilate spending in other important areas. Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?
> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?
These people do not exists. If a politician ran on such a platform, they would never get elected.
The fact is in modern democracies like in the EU or in the US there are simply too many people who rely on the status quo directly or indirectly.
Its almost comical, in France politicians have run, got elected and have swept the debt problem under the rug for the last 40 years, then they leave office and suddenly decide that the debt is a massive problem but that there was nothing they could do about while in office so they never did anything but now they speak about it.
And they all do it. Left, right, center, it's all the same.