Bill, I wonder if you have, or will shortly, address the whole 30-year-bond-re-issuance issue. To my mind, it is bigger than Icahn or S&P. Because it is the kind of structural factor that, by eliminating the worry about the lack of supply of long-term risk-free assets, will finally allow for significant adjustment in price. Downward.

I certainly wouldn't 'lend long' to as profligate a bunch as are currently running the show in Washington, but as a market observer I would predict, absent some kind of low-probability deflationary scenario, that the highs on the 30-year have now finally been reached and won't be breached. It was the artificial scarcity keeping the yields this low.

The 30-year really is a good fit for many of those entities with long term liabilities, of course, which is one of the two reasons why eliminating it in 2001 was such an idiotic thing to do.

The other reason was that the lowest rates in the modern era were registering on the scoreboard, meaning that the US Treasury could have been locking those in for a generation but didn't.

-Motts