Below is a Long-Run Yield Curve tool. It charts the gap between the 10-year US Treasury yield and a blended short-term rate – the classic "long minus short" spread – for every month back to 1871. When the line drops below zero the curve is inverted, the signal that has led most US recessions.
The long-run US yield curve
Reading the chart
- The filled area is the spread – the 10-year Treasury yield minus the short rate. It's blue when the curve is normal and turns red below zero when the curve is inverted.
- The gray bands are US recessions (from NBER). Line the red, inverted stretches up against them and the lead-lag pattern jumps out visually.
- Tick Show the 10-year and short-rate yields to drop the two underlying series onto the chart, so you can see whether a given inversion came from short rates spiking, long rates falling, or both.
- Drag the handles on the slider beneath the chart to zoom into any stretch; it opens on the full 1871-to-today range.
- Save image downloads the chart as a PNG, and Download data grabs the underlying monthly series as a CSV.
- Hover any point for the month and the exact values, but note – these are monthly averages, not single-day prints.
What an inverted yield curve means
Normally, you'd expect that lending to the government for ten years pays more than lending for a few months – you want to be paid for tying your money up for a longer period of time. When that flips and short rates climb above long rates, the market is effectively betting that rates (and growth) will be lower down the road. Since World War I that inversion has been mostly a reliable – if early and sensitive – recession warning.
There are two big caveats here worth keeping in mind:
- First, it's an early signal, not an immediate one – the gap between inversion and recession has often run a year or more.
- Second, the omen is a modern-ish phenomenon: before the Federal Reserve and routine government bond issuance, short-term commercial paper frequently ran above long-term yields without a recession following, which is why the pre-1914 stretch shows so many inversions. (The long-run yield curve inversions post digs into that history.)
And the other, more theoretical problem going forward – the indicator is well-known now. There's a name for the risk: Goodhart's Law, which holds that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" – and fittingly, it came out of monetary economics.
Once everyone is watching an indicator, it's ripe for weird second-order effects, or even manipulation, from participants positioning around it. So, even though there is good theoretical grounding for why this one works: past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Methodology and sources
- Long rate – the 10-year US Treasury yield from Robert Shiller's compiled dataset, back to January 1871.
- Short rate – a blended proxy: 3-month T-bill in the modern era, the NBER short-term US securities series (M1329AUSM193NNBR) for 1920–1934 with a +22.046 bps adjustment, and NYC commercial paper (M13002US35620M156NNBR) before 1920 with a −62.267 bps adjustment to a T-bill-equivalent. The blend and its adjustments are documented in our long-run yield curve inversions post.
- Recessions – NBER-dated US business cycle contractions, via FRED.
This is the long-history, two-point view. For the daily, full-curve picture from 1990 to today – every maturity from 1 month to 30 years, in rotatable 3D – see the 3D Treasury Yield Curve.
