Explanation/translation for those of us that don't understand?
Lots of other people have ideas about the same thing, so there is a product you can buy or sell to bet on it.
She asks her broker what price they can buy or sell it. The broker asks how much she wants and gives a price.
This conversation is so common that there is an agreed upon structure for it. Bloomberg parses all your conversations and provides you with an aggregated view of all quotes brokers have offered you. You can then chart/do whatever you want with this data.
I appreciate when a human interaction becomes so formalized that it becomes a de-facto API that computers can use. It would be funny to imagine a future where that interaction is happening between 2 chatbots and report results back to their humans.
B: size? = how much do you want to buy or sell?
A: 20k = $20,000
B: 2.4456/2.4511 = bid/offer = price/rate that A can sell/buy at
A: tx
Also, if you tried to trade 20k dollars notional, dealers would tell you to get lost, because an amount that tiny isn't worth their time.
traded like this because it is a meaningful measure of risk regardless of tenor. also its the same whether you're doing bonds or interest rate swaps (or, rarer, options)