The "risk-free return" could turn out to be a "return-free risk," as James Grant put it in the current edition of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.
The economists' term for cost-free risk is "moral hazard", a phrase that, when the losses involve things like torture and our country's standing, is surprisingly apt.
Government bonds may be offering "return-free risk", in the neat phrase of Jim Grant, a veteran newsletter publisher.One warning sign is that real bond yields (as measured by the inflation-linked market) have risen.
The debt crisis is deeper and more widespread than almost anyone feared at the start of the year.In a joke coined by Jim Grant, a newsletter writer, government bonds have turned from offering a risk-free return into becoming a return-free risk.
They will simply offer reward-free risk.Low yields may still last for a while, even so.
Let Z denote the vector of error-free risk factors of a disease.
Some market pundits have cleverly dubbed this madness "return-free risk".
The model-free risk machine approach also allows us to freely consider complex nonlinear interactions, as when the odds ratios or risk ratios change nonlinearly with another continuous predictor.
