Jenn’s Reading Room · The Economist Podcasts
Money Talks
The Economist’s weekly read on what moved markets and why. I built out its latest episode, on the US Treasury market, as the data feature I’d want playing alongside it.
Money Talks is what I put on when I want the week’s economic news argued out loud instead of read off a chart. The hosts pull one or two numbers into focus and fight about what they actually mean.
I always said that if I built this show out, a row would be a single indicator a host named: the figure, which way it moved, and the story they hung on it. This is that, run on the latest episode.
The latest episode
The episode.
“Why America’s Treasury market needs a fix”
The show’s framing: the world’s most important asset is under threat, and three forces are pushing on it at once: government debt, inflation, and unpredictable policymaking. Below, each one as a number you can watch.
Guests: Jay Barry, head of global rates strategy at JPMorgan; Nellie Liang, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Hosts: Mike Bird, Alice Fulwood, Ethan Wu.
The asset
Two yields, and the gap between them.
The 2-year tracks where the Fed is; the 10-year tracks where the market thinks debt and inflation are heading. For most of 2023 and 2024 the 2-year sat above the 10-year, an inverted curve shaded red here. As the Fed cut, the curve un-inverted and the normal, upward slope returned.
2- and 10-year Treasury constant-maturity yields, monthly. The 2s10s slope bottomed near -1.06pp in Jun 2023 and is back to +0.4 today.
What’s pressing on it
Three pressures, three numbers.
The episode’s three forces, each as a single indicator: the figure today, which way it has moved, and the one-line reason it matters for the bonds.
01 · Debt: the supply
More bonds to sell, year after year, into the same pool of buyers.
FRED · GFDEGDQ188S
02 · Inflation: the discount
What the bond market bets inflation averages over ten years. It is not settling back to the Fed’s 2%.
FRED · T10YIE
03 · Policy: the lever
The Fed has cut from a two-decade high. Where it stops is the open question.
FRED · DFEDTARU
The line-up
The hosts.
Mike Bird
Host
Alice Fulwood
Host
Ethan Wu
Host
Method
The sources.
The episode and its guests are coded from the show’s public RSS feed. Every figure on this page is a public series from FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Treasury yields (DGS2, DGS10), the 10-year breakeven inflation rate (T10YIE), the Fed funds target (DFEDTARU), and federal debt as a share of GDP (GFDEGDQ188S). Nothing here is forecast or invented.
The numbers are a snapshot as of Jun 12, 2026, frozen to the episode. This page is research, not affiliation: The Economist, Money Talks, and the host names are references to the public programme.