As much as I want to defer to the expertise of the author, to say that there's been a 30-year bull market in bonds is to say that there was at least a 20-year bear market before 1983. This may be the long term trend, but within that is up and down like you'd expect in the business cycle. The confusing thing is that those who are buying bonds are bearish about the economy as a whole. You have to be buying these things thinking they won't be wasteful when interest rates rise. If interest rates skyrocket like many voices claim they will, those who are holding 0.25% paper are going to be unhappy when they are unloading it at 80 cents on the dollar.

His discussion of the matter seems very confused. The problem with the bond market right now is that there is no inflation, but real returns elsewhere are often negative. So bonds are a safe place to put money. It's certainly not being invested. Now, one can argue whether the Fed has any ability to affect that. The clock may have run out on quantitative easing, as I have heard argued. That means the Fed would be somewhat irrelevant and the US economy would falter in the absence of fiscal stimulus.

There aren't many voices articulating sense in this discussion. Many have simply said "deficits bad" and called on increasing unemployment as the solution to our concerns. Good luck with that. I think the solution probably requires preventing the unemployed from becoming the desperately long-term unemployed, at a minimum, and also using the favorable bond situation to repair infrastructure, which is apparently in huge backlogs across the country.

To some extent, I wonder if Bill Gross is really just sort of pandering to his clientele, who are not sophisticated economists and who are happy to agree that politics is full of apes. After all, at the end, his call to action is for a vote of confidence in PIMCO. This article doesn't give me much faith, but I suppose if he hit the right buttons, his investors might just pull that lever, and keep sending the money his way.