Ten Year Note Yield

While a steeper yield curve is good for the financial sector and those other folks who borrow short and lend longer term, it does no good if those higher rates choke off growth in the real economy. that is an overlooked detail in the Bankers' grand plans for financially engineering a recovery. This is a nation by the Banks, for the Banks, and of the Banks and their demimonde in Washington and the media.

It reminds this blogger of days gone by, when Jesse was a boy programmer writing assembler level code for IBM mainframes and other tedious tasks befitting his junior status.

A group of systems guys had been working long hours to bring up a large mainframe running VM 360 including the operating system, the peripherals, the FEP and coms, storage for a major university.

When they finally got all the bugs worked out and the system was up they quite seriously celebrated their success, saying: "Now if only we could keep the users off the machine all our problems would be solved."

Indeed. Watch the consumer along with the bond and the dollar, for those are the weakest links. From where we sit, the consumer has rolled over and won't be getting up anytime soon ahead of a rising median wage or some other sort of income increasing faster than their expenses and debt servicing.

And the rest of the world appears to be gorged on US debt and their reserve currency, at least the non-official segments that still care about spending and profit in the real world.