Bond Yields Over the Centuries

Here’s another one of those fascinating long-term views of select economic data from The Economist’s Daily Chart feature that depicts long-term bond yields for the U.S., Germany, Spain, and Italy going back more than 150 years, the two latter nations experiencing a bit of trouble recently after all four bond markets had tracked each other fairly closely over the centuries.

They note that a revolution in the 1870s, the loss of Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s, and civil war of the 1930s explain most of Spain’s solo problems in the past, but, the interesting thing to me when looking at this graphic is that long-term interest rates never went much above 10 percent in Germany during the 1970s, another reminder of how big an impact that 1920s Weimar inflation had on the culture.