The Treasury yield curve
Yield by how long the money is lent, monthly averages.
Stocks & bonds
What U.S. government bonds pay, what the shape of the yield curve says about the economy, and how big the stock market is compared with everything the country produces. Built from public data and updated automatically.
Bonds
Treasury yields are what the U.S. government pays to borrow. They set the floor for mortgage, car-loan and corporate borrowing rates, and they are what a safe saver can earn.
Treasury yields since 1980
Monthly averages, percent a year. Shaded areas are recessions.
Range
Real yield and expected inflation
10-year, percent a year. Roughly, the 10-year Treasury yield = real yield + expected inflation.
Is the yield curve inverted?
10-year yield minus shorter yields, percentage points. Below zero means inverted.
Stocks
The total market value of U.S. companies’ stock, from the Federal Reserve’s quarterly Financial Accounts. It moves with share prices, so it tracks the stock market, but it is published about ten weeks after each quarter ends.
Value of U.S. stock
Nonfinancial companies, trillions of dollars, end of each quarter.
Show
Stock market value compared with GDP
Why there’s no S&P 500 chart here. The S&P 500, the Dow and the Nasdaq Composite are owned by the companies that calculate them, and their daily values can’t be republished without a license. Everything on this page is public-domain government data. You can follow the indexes on their owners’ sites or in any brokerage app.
Government debt
The federal government is the biggest bond issuer in the world. How much it owes, and what that costs, affects the supply of Treasury bonds and their yields.
Federal debt as a share of GDP
All federal debt, including what one part of the government owes another, quarterly.
Interest on the debt as a share of GDP
Federal interest payments, quarterly at an annual rate.
Learn the basics
Plain-English explanations from the dictionary.
About this data
Treasury yields are monthly averages of the constant-maturity yields published by the Federal Reserve Board (H.15). The 30-year bond was not issued from 2002 to 2006, so its line has a gap. The real yield is the 10-year Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) yield, and expected inflation is the 10-year breakeven rate: the gap between the regular and inflation-protected 10-year yields.
The yield curve normally slopes up, because lending for longer usually pays more. When short-term yields rise above long-term ones the curve is inverted. Every U.S. recession since the late 1960s was preceded by an inversion of the 10-year minus 3-month spread, though the lag has ranged from months to about two years, and the curve has also inverted without a recession following, as in 1966.
Stock market value is the market value of the stock of U.S. nonfinancial corporations from the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts of the United States (Z.1), table L.224. Compared with GDP it is sometimes called the “Buffett indicator.” The percentile ranks the latest quarter against every quarter since 1980. A high reading means stocks are valued richly against the economy; it has not been a reliable timing signal.
Sources: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and U.S. Department of the Treasury, all via FRED. Educational information only, not financial or investment advice.