[pjmorris]

> You can choose various flavors of bonds, and various maturities, but they are all fundamentally the same.

It appears to me that you've just equated a US Treasury bond with a private label subprime RMBS. Is that a fair assessment? If so, how strongly do you feel about that equivalence? I see the private label RMBS's as less of a 'real thing'.

[animefan]

In the context of that sentence, I was referring to the bonds bought by open market operations, which are primarily US government bonds and would not include private label subprime RMBSs.

The kind of close-to-risk-free bonds bought in open market operations are all fundamentally the same because they simply move money from one point in time to another.

[toomuchtodo]

Isn't a treasury bond primarily funding social security, medicare, and defense spending (the three biggest US budget non-discretionary spending categories)?