Is there a government bond bubble?

You will find it here, with contributions from Viral Acharya, Scott Sumner, Hal Varian, and Paul Seabright.  From elsewhere, Noah Smith cautions economists not to invoke technology too often.  Brad DeLong

In July 2012, amid a backdrop of serious uncertainty over the future of the euro, ECB President Mario Draghi told the world that the central bank would "do whatever it takes" to save the currency.

In 1829, John Stuart Mill made the key intellectual leap…. Mill saw that excess demand for some particular set of assets in financial markets was mirrored by excess supply of goods and services in product markets, which in turn generated excess supply of workers in labor markets…. If you relieved the excess demand for financial assets, you also cured the… shortfall of aggregate demand…. When the excess demand is for liquid assets used as means of payment – for “money” – the natural response is to have the central bank buy government bonds for cash….

By David Beckworth: An important problem facing the global economy is the shortage of safe assets, assets that facilitate transactions at both the retail and institutional level. There is both a long-term, structural dimension to this problem as well as a short-term, cyclical one.

Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen point to an interesting exchange in the Financial Times.

Daniel Moser submits: Discussions about a bond market bubble have been all the rage as of late. Historically low yields are frequently cited as evidence that the bond markets are in a bubble. Another often cited argument, specific to government bonds, is that the supply of bonds keeps growing and eventually investors will reject purchasing this paper at such low yields – which will force yields higher and investors who previously bought into the market will get burned.