> Next up: anyone who bought a house in the last few years is gonna get hurt. We knew rates would be rising, and hence prices falling. So far it's mostly sales volume dropping near zero, but soon...

People who bought a house as an investment might be in trouble, but people who bought a home to live in are making out like bandits with their 30 year fixed mortgages.

Agreed in general but I don’t think there is anything structurally preventing <0% yields on treasuries. The ECB has already set a central bank rate as low as -0.50% before.

It would of course be deeply unintuive to a regular person and likely very unpopular if rates went negative enough to require it to be reflected in consumer banking (eg negative rates on a checking/savings account). But I don’t think it’s impossible and we may see it in our lifetimes.

That is just a nitpick though because I think the US public as-is would throw a fit if it happened, making it unlikely. Fully agreed that purchasing a 10y bond at 1% was boneheaded given plenty of people predicted interest rates to need to increase to fight inflation (come on, just because the fed said it was transitory for a while, doesn’t give professionals an excuse to blindly take that at face value). The effective yields could have been so much higher just keeping the cash uninvested or in short term treasuries, then purchasing 10y bonds after the rate hikes started or stabilized.

Yeah that is much more obvious in hindsight but it’s not like it was a fringe position even in 2021

Safe, as in they're going to be paid back dollar for dollar. People are talking about SVB's assets as if they were toxic, rather than just not as attractive as other available bonds.

There were some proposals from the treasury for ways to make below zero rates work.