If they handed out medals for wrongness, a U.S. government report 25 years ago would have won a spot on the podium. The Congressional Budget Office in January 2001 predicted such large future budget surpluses that it said all redeemable U.S. government debt could be paid off within five years.

That year the Treasury Department stopped issuing its longest-dated borrowings, 30-year bonds, because what was the point? Treasury reversed course five years later as deficits instead widened, yet those bonds remain an afterthought.

They shouldn't be. Their real (inflation-adjusted) yield just hit its highest level since 2008. The long bond isn't as closely followed as the 10-year note, the benchmark shown daily in this newsletter and important for things like mortgage rates.

But it's in some ways more informative because its price is so sensitive to changing economic assumptions. The message it's sending lately isn't an encouraging one for Wall Street or for Washington.