US Treasuries – A steady erosion in confidence?

For today’s brief analysis of the US Treasuries (T-Bill) Yield rates, we constructed the chart and table below utilising data from the US Treasury official site.

We took a point in time being mid August for 5 consecutive years from 2006 through to 2011 and compared the 1-month through to 30 Year T-Bill Yield Curves.

As can be seen, the slope of the curves from 2006 – 2011 on all T-Bills is downward from left to right.

Some analysts view this as an erosion in confidence over this specific time period, with the lower yields indicating lower confidence in the US economic situation.  This feels a bit counter intuitive, when we compare it to our article The US Treasury Yield Curves – Are the markets really that bothered?  However, the argument is that there is a ‘flight to safe-haven / alternative asset classes’.

However, it might only partly explain the Standard & Poor’s position.

In tomorrow’s chart, we will expand the time horizon we are looking at to 10 years and choose the quarter ends to see if a different picture and analysis emerges for 1 Year and 10Year US T-Bills.

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