The hottest item going is a government bond, making it hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
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Maybe both, in that order. Everywhere bond prices are taking off like nobody's business, with the result that their interest yields have fallen to ridiculous levels.
Lend your money to Mr Hockey for 10 years and he'll pay you less than 3 per cent. Typical.
But get this. A 10-year Japanese bond pays just 0.2 per cent a year and it's not as if there's a juicy capital gain awaiting you, setting aside whatever the exchange rate might do in the meantime. More likely is a whopping capital loss if interest rates ever normalise.
Still, 0.2 per cent is generous when a 5-year bond earns minus 0.01 per cent. Minus? Yes, that's negative interest, now all the rage in Europe. You get less than nothing because for the privilege of lending your money you're not paid a single cent, sorry yen, and worse, guaranteed to get back less than you paid when the bond matures.
So who'd buy a Japanese bond? The Bank of Japan, that's who. It's creating a bubble in its own bonds.
Yet strangely enough that's a boon for sharemarkets including ours.
Japan has taken over where the US has just left off in pumping liquidity into its economy by buying back bonds, most of which spills over into global financial markets, including shares.
In fact it's printing almost as much money as the US was at its peak during quantitative easing or QE, as financial geeks like me call it. QE reached $85 billion a month which in the end totalled trillions and is still sloshing around the system.
Japan's run rate is around $70 billion a month.
But wait, there's more. The European Union is promising to at least match the US effort which, combined with Japan's, would be an unprecedented amount of money printing. Gold bugs will just love that.
In a globalised world QE reaches every financial nook and cranny, with risk-free government bonds the benchmark against which every other financial return is assessed. We're talking the fundamental value of money here, distorted as it is. Make no mistake, QEs underwrite share, property and bond markets. Indeed that's the idea.
With bonds in the major capital markets having ultra low and even negative yields, naturally all else, especially dividend paying shares, are more attractive to investors. Indispensable even.
This easy money is here to stay because none of the central banks can afford to blink first. Since all this liquidity and low interest rates haven't boosted growth as much as was hoped – though we'll never know how many banking crises were avoided and certainly nobody denies the boost to wealth – central banks are resorting to devalued currencies to ride to the rescue. Never mind that if one currency depreciates, another must have appreciated.
The two stand-out exceptions to the QE wars are the Swiss National Bank and our own Reserve Bank.
The Swiss spectacularly severed their peg with the euro sending the franc flying, only to be pilloried by the markets which thought they were on a hiding to nothing.
They forgot how dangerous it is to stand between a bag of money and a Swiss central banker. Switzerland might be the only country happy to accept an appreciating currency, but that's only because it baulked at writing off a mountain of depreciating euros it would have had to buy and besides, just in case, it lowered its already negative interest rates even further so the franc doesn't venture too far.
For its part the Reserve talks wistfully of a lower dollar without actually doing anything, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. Like the Swiss National Bank it doesn't want to rack up debt buying foreign currencies.
And what of the mother of all central banks, the US Federal Reserve? It's supposed to lift rates this year, but I wonder.
That would push the US dollar even higher, and I'm sure the Reserve Bank would be only too happy to pass on its experience of an over-valued currency.
Anyway it's no wonder all these QEs have become a market addiction.
The Fed delaying a rate rise because growth isn't strong enough, for example, becomes good news when in truth it's a disaster.
Yet lifting rates because growth is stronger, once considered good news, is likely to create a tantrum.
Mind you, every time Wall Street wobbles, sharemarkets slump and there's another rush into bonds, pulling down their yields even further. That only makes shares even more attractive than they were before.
