Finance stuff usually goes over my head, with all their cute little acronyms and things. But anyway I found this from Felix Salmon to be very interesting: The cost of buying insurance against defaults on supposedly ‘risk free’ US Treasury bonds has gone from 0.016% (1.6 bp in finance jargon) to 0.16% over the past 8 months. Even I can calculate that’s ten times bigger!

Thanks to the amazing world of finance, it seems you can buy securities that are related to this insurance (there is where I start to feel dizzy). So if you’d bought one of these last July, you would’ve made ten times your money in less than a year. Nice! It seems that in finance, every silver lining really does have a cloud. Or something like that.