via Busi­ness Insider

We've spent a lot of time this year dis­cussing this chart.

Bloomberg

The green line is the S&P 500. The orange line is the yield on a 10-year US Treasury.

It's weird because you'd think that as stocks rose — indi­cat­ing increased risk appetite and expec­ta­tions of growth — that yields would rise too, since demand for risk-free instru­ments would want. But that hasn't hap­pened. Stocks have had a really nice run, but yields have gone nowhere.

In a note out this morn­ing, Credit Suisse's Andrew Garth­waite listed this as his top anom­aly in the mar­ket right now.

There are var­i­ous the­o­ries as to why this dis­con­nect is in place: Some blame the Fed and "finan­cial repres­sion", arti­fi­cially depress­ing rates.

But one thing you'll notice is that to a vary­ing degree, this is a global phenomenon.

So for exam­ple, check out Australia.

The green line is the Aus­tralian All Ordi­nar­ies Mar­ket and the orange line is the yield on the Aussie 10-year.

Once again, the great dis­con­nect emerges, and it's espe­cially appar­ent since mid-December.

Bloomberg

And here's Sweden.

Bloomberg

And here's Ger­many. Once again, you see a mas­sive dis­con­nect begin­ning in December.

Bloomberg

And finally Japan. Again, the equity-bond dis­con­nect begins in December.

Bloomberg

So this is a global phe­nom­e­non, which strongly sug­gests that this isn't just about the Fed buy­ing Trea­suries in the US, though nat­u­rally all mar­kets are connected.

One thing that all these coun­tries have in com­mon is their bor­row­ing is done in their home cur­ren­cies, mean­ing they're essen­tially risk-free except from a cur­rency perspective.

A decent the­ory is that despite the big pickup in opti­mism, there's still a short­age of vehi­cles avail­able to investors look­ing for "risk-free" assets. So the coun­tries that can offer these bonds are still see­ing unusu­ally high demand. That's just a the­ory. Bot­tom line though: This isn't just an S&P/Treasury phe­nom­e­non. It' global.

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