Two bits of news this week appear to be unrelated. The interesting question is whether appearances are once more deceptive.
Firstly the US Treasury note situation:
At 6:23 am ET. the 10-year note yielded 4.393 percent while the two-year note yielded 4.396 percent.
Or as the FT puts it:
Yields on 10-year US Treasuries briefly fell below those on [...]

An intereresting piece in the FT today about 3g standards and China. Basically there are three competing technologies: the European-backed WCDMA and US-supported CDMA-2000 standards, and the Chinese TD-SCDMA technology. There is a wikipedia entry on TD-SCDMA. Basically the Chinese system doesn’t imply the payment of license and patent fees (what a surprise) and it [...]

Today’s news is of course welcome news for everyone who cares about poverty in the third world, but going back to my Evo Morales post during the week, this policy will only really bring the benefits it could do if it is combined with a systematic drive to change the demographic profile of these [...]

The FT today has an article about how long-term youth unemployment is now back at 1998 levels despite a 5 billion pound benefits-to-jobs programme . Now if you go to this url, and have a look at the population pyramids for the UK you might begin to see part of the explanation for why this [...]

The latest inflation eport from the Federal Statistical Office in Germany says this:
The harmonised consumer price index for Germany, which is calculated for European purposes, rose by 2.3% in November 2005 compared with November 2004. Compared with the previous month, the index was down 0.5%. The estimate of 25 November 2005 was thus slightly corrected [...]

The Chinese economy could be 20% bigger than previously estimated. Since almost everything about Chinese data should have ‘best guess’ status, this probably hardly comes as a surprise, and indeed the estimate itself should be treated with the customary caution, but yes, that is the conclusion which is apparently being drawn from the latest [...]

We live, as they say, in an uncertain world. But recently, if you have been noticing, in the economic sphere references to the high levels of uncertainty attached to any forecast have been coming fast and furious. And this warning needs to be taken seriously. The data is very ‘volatile’. Only today there is news [...]

New Economist has been indulging himself (actually, truth be known he wants us to indulge him) with three posts on the Nordic Model (here, here and here).
Two things strike me. Firstly the fact that the UK presidency has been an absolute non-event (except for getting the Turkey negotiations started) since we were promised an [...]

This is not very encouraging:
European spending on re-search and development is falling further behind target, widening the innovation gap between the EU and competitors such as the US and Japan, two studies show.
North American and Asian companies are outpacing European businesses in R&D investment and spending more in high-technology sectors, according to data to be [...]

Steve Johnson has been hard at it, writing away in the Financial Times:
“The chief problem for the yen is that the flattening of the US yield curve has made it uneconomical for Japanese investors to hedge their ongoing purchases of US Treasuries, but a falling yen encourages overseas investors to hedge their purchases of Japanese [...]