your mileage may vary...

"What about inflation? The Fed has achieved something unique in this cycle. It has given us symptoms both of inflation and deflation. The Fed has overdone it with quantitative easing and rate reductions; the symptoms of that are the dollar exchange rate, the price of gold in dollars, commodity markets generally and a lot of speculative assets. The measured rate of rise in consumer prices is not minus 3.6%, year over year, it’s 3.6%. We have too much debt, and a consequence of that is a tendency for some prices to fall. We have too much money, a symptom of which is that some prices rise. What an interesting world we live in. What does this mean for bonds? We are living in the mirror image of the excesses of 25 and 30 years ago. Then there seemed no hope for interest rates ever coming down. The bond market had been going down since 1946, with mainly rising rates by 1980. People called these bonds “equity-like returns without equity risk,” or “certificates of confiscation.” Today, yields are no longer 15%. They are 3% and 4% and, after five years, if you have no magnifying glass, you have to squint because they’re so small. But people have come to see that bonds appreciate in price as yields fall. But it is remarkable that people are flying for safety into a class of security denominated in the very paper money that others are flying from. The great gold bull market is driven by people in flight from paper currencies. Somebody has not gotten the memo."