What’s up (or down) with the yield curve? | FRED Blog

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What’s up (or down) with the yield curve? | FRED Blog

"For as long as we can remember, the most popular series in FRED has been the consumer price index (CPI). Well, not anymore. Recently, the series describing the difference between the 10-year and 2-year Treasury constant maturity rates became the most popular. Why this sudden interest? It has to do with the concept of the yield curve: Under normal circumstances, long-term interest rates are higher than short-term interest rates (when annualized), principally because the long term is usually perceived as riskier and so long-term debt demands a higher return. Again, normally, if you plot the interest rates at different maturities, you get an upward-sloping (yield) curve. But if for some reason the short term becomes unusually risky, the curve (or portions of it) may become downward sloping. And why is that important? The graph makes it clear that this kind of yield curve inversion has been associated with impending recessions."

U.S. Treasury Yield Curve Inverts for First Time Since 2007 – Bloomberg

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U.S. Treasury Yield Curve Inverts for First Time Since 2007 – Bloomberg

"The Treasury yield curve inverted for the first time since the last crisis Friday, triggering the first reliable market signal of an impending recession and rate-cutting cycle. The gap between the three-month and 10-year yields vanished as a surge of buying pushed the latter to a 14-month low of 2.416 percent. Inversion is considered a reliable harbinger of recession in the U.S., within roughly the next 18 months."

NPR

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Passwords From Millions Of Facebook Users Were Stored Insecurely : NPR

"Unknown to hundreds of millions of Facebook users, their passwords were sitting in plain text inside the company's data storage, leaving them vulnerable to potential employee misuse and cyberattack for years."

I can't believe that they couldn't be bothered to use at least MD5 hashes for the passwords. It's not like MD5 hashes are particularly CPU or memory intensive to implement.