A bond story was promised. A bond story there shall be. We'll do energy as well, and sure, tariffs. Why not? From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Colin Rizzdahl.

It is Wednesday, today the 20th of May.

Good as it always is, to have you along, everybody.

If you have, like most normal people in this economy, not been paying a whole lot of

attention to the bond market, I get it, totally. But give me a couple of minutes here to bring

you up to speed. The yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond yields, of course, the interest the

government has to pay, hit almost 5.2% this week as high as the long bond

has been since 2007. That is news in and of itself, but if you pull back a little bit,

you will see the United States is not alone. Bond yields in Germany, in the UK, and in Japan

are at multi-year highs as the war and the ensuing energy shock and

inflation continue to ripple through the global economy. There is a lot going on here. So we've called

Nicole Serby. She's an economist at Wells Fargo. Nicole, thanks for coming on. Good to have you

back. Thanks for having me. This is not a solely American phenomenon.

I talked about the 30-year up in the introduction, but things are happening globally.

And I want to start with what happens when rates go up like this yields like on the whole planet.

Yeah.

So if you're an investor looking for yield, that's a great thing. But if you are a government

trying to issue debt, not so great of a thing. Yeah, say more. I mean, money is more expensive,

basically, right? Yes. And so when we were talking about sovereign bond yields, what we're

essentially talking about is the cost of borrowing.

And so with the cost of borrowing going up across the globe, if you're issuing debt, it's just going to be more and more expensive to do that.

And this comes at a time where no matter what advanced economy you're looking at, the fiscal outlook is daunting because of a variety of factors. And if I

...