@mattyglesias your bond math here is not so hot. for one thing, a basis point is 1/100th of a percentage point.

@mattyglesias more substantively, your formula for yield and price is for a perpetuity. treasuries are not perpetuities. a 30y treasury almost is. but you can't issue a $100 1-month T-bill with a 27% yield and get $712 for it. you'd get, you know, $102 for it.

@mattyglesias i like the premium bonds and argued for them once but they are less *clean* than this makes it sound, it is hard to jack up principal that much.

@mattyglesias actually technically bills don’t pay coupons so it’s tough to do this in bills at all

@mattyglesias i think the right form of this is “1y note, $100 par, 105% interest sold at $200.” which works fine i guess but seems very gimmicky.

@aaronstrauss @mattyglesias actually the premium bonds! it’s gimmicky but so what.

@liamlabarge @mattyglesias i mean if you pay $0.01 for a $100 1-month note that has a yield way above 100%?

@SandrewFinance @mattyglesias yes sorry right

today i learned about the permyriad and i am now on a mission to make it a thing https://t.co/nAGHNq4vVE https://t.co/tjagjBgsUG

"yields rose by 8 permyriads today," come on, how classy is that

elsewhere wikipedia makes the point that "yields rose by 8 permyriads" is actually ambiguous in the way that "yields rose by 8 percent" would be, ugh, never mind.

i kind of can't believe that there isn't a financial newsletter already doing this as a bit, like if you're the sort of person who says "shall" for "will" surely you'd enjoy saying "permyriad" for "bp"

@coneslayer exactly, if i were editing a financial story at the New Yorker i'd definitely be crossing out "basis point" and writing in "permyriad"

@colinahiggins @manicakes yes right and wikipedia's point is that "bp" is the equivalent of "pp" here, that is, a basis point is to a permyriad as a percentage point is to a percent. i just want to be able to say that yields moved by 8 permyriads.

@justsarahdavis i assume it's pronounced "per myriad"

@perks_joanna i am aware of "beep" but never really hear it in practice and also find it upsetting. but i think it exists. not sure if it is regional.

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@pdrewienkiewicz @perks_joanna i think US practice is a bit more "bip" than "beep"

@AlphaEraser nah the premium is generally amortizable

@phdphil yeah there's a footnote https://t.co/wbr5fRBhWh

@rachelmetz @AP Taking "totally obsessed with understanding" literally I'd recommend:
- All the Devils Are Here (McLean/Nocera)
- Slapped by the Invisible Hand (Gorton)
- Diary of a Very Bad Year (n+1)
Also Sorkin's and Geithner's books & maybe Friedman & Kraus "Engineering the Financial Crisis"