Just when everyone was certain that long term rates would rise, they fell. Wednesday's 10-year T-note auction drew more bidders than any since '94, and its yield thumped down from near 4.00% to 3.85%, mortgages back down to 5.125%. The improvement is gradually reversing, but for the moment we're okay. An $11.5 billion dive in consumer credit in February more than wiped out a revised gain in January, the first in 11 months. New claims for unemployment insurance were supposed to continue improvement, dropping to 433,000, but jumped to 460,000. Careful with the hosannas to March retail sales: the measure that jumped 9% was a year-over-year comparison, and March last year was the pit of panic. The easy Treasury auction revealed the enormous gulf between the noisy sustained-recovery beli...
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