If only it actually did! I watched Too Big To Fail last night. At one point they put words in Henry Paulson's mouth about how QE was going to drag the recession out for ten years. Take away all the money pumped into the system and that's pretty much what has happened. I've started reading a lot of Ben Rich's Epsilon Theory lately. He's starting to make the case that neither stocks nor bonds will be reliable methods of capital accumulation for the foreseeable future because the fix is in. Which all sounds nice and academic and unimportant until you realize that those interest rates everyone is talking about are what the 'boomers are expecting to live off of in retirement, and they aren't making any money on interest, so they aren't retiring, so you don't get their job. That vast plain between '09 and now? That's where Occupy Wall Street set up camp.
It is, inherently, a forecast for what the economy holds in the future — how much inflation there will be, for example, and how healthy growth will be over the years ahead — all embodied in the price of money today, tomorrow and many years from now. Yes, when did forecasts become visions? The yield curve is the result of hedging bets on the economy, muddied by overall demand based on alternate options available.The yield curve shows how much it costs the federal government to borrow money for a given amount of time, revealing the relationship between long- and short-term interest rates.