Do bond interest rate risk premiums only compensate for the amount investors might lose?
In answer to your last formulation, no. In a perfectly efficient market, different investors still have different risk tolerances (or utility functions). They're maximizing expected utility, not expected value.  The portfolios that maximize expected utility for different risk preferences are different, and thus generally have different expected values. (Look up mean-variance utility for a simple-ish example.)  Suppose you have log utility for money, u(x) = log(x), and your choice is to invest all of your money in either the risk-free bond or in the risky bond. In the risky bond, you have a positive probability of losing everything, achieving utility u(0) = -\infty. Your expected utility after purchase of the risky bond is:  Pr(default)*u(default) + (1-Pr(default))*u(nominalValue).  Since u(default)= -\infty, your expected utility is also negative infinity, and you would never make this investment. Instead you would purchase the risk-free bond.  But another person might have linear utility, u(x) = x, and he would be indifferent between the risk-free and risky bonds at the prices you mention above and might therefore purchase some. (In fact you probably would have bid up the price of the risk-free bond, so that the other investor strictly prefers the risky one.) So two different investors' portfolios will have different expected returns, in general, because of their different risk preferences. Risk-averse investors get lower expected value. This should be very intuitive from portfolio theory in general: stocks have higher expected returns, but more variance. Risk-tolerant people can accept more stocks and more variance, risk-averse people purchase less stocks and more bonds. The more general question about risk premia requires an equilibrium price analysis, which requires assumptions about the distribution of risk preferences among other things. Maybe John Cochrane's book would help with that---I don't know anything about financial economics. I would think that in the setup above, if you have positive quantities of these two investor types, the risk-free bond will become more expensive, so that the risky one offers a higher expected return. This is the general thing that happens in portfolio theory. Anyway. I'm not a financial economist or anything.  Here's a standard introduction to expected utility theory: http://web.stanford.edu/~jdlevin/Econ%20202/Uncertainty.pdf "[...] are all bonds priced in such a way so that they all return the same amount (on average), after accounting for risk? In other words, do risk premiums ONLY compensate for the amount investors might lose? No. GE might be able to issue a bond with lower yield than, say, a company from China with no previous records of its presence in the U.S. markets. A bond price not only contains the risk of default, but also encompasses the servicability of the bond by the issuer with a specific stream of income, location of main business, any specific terms and conditions in the prospectus, e.g.callable or not, insurances against default, etc. Else for the same payoff, why would you take a higher risk? The payoff of a higher risk (not only default, but term structure, e.g. 5 years or 10 years, coupon payments) bond is more, to compensate for the extra risk it entails for the bondholder. The yield of a high risk bond will always be higher than a bond with lower risk. If you travel back in time, to 2011-2012, you would see the yields on Greek bonds were in the range of 25-30%, to reflect the high risk of a Greek default. Some hedge funds made a killing by buying Greek bonds during the eurozone crisis. If you go through the Efficient frontier theory, your argument is a counter statement to it. Same with individual bonds, or a portfolio of bonds. You always want to be compensated for the risk you take. The higher the risk, the higher the compensation, and vice versa. When investors buy the bond at this price, they are essentially buying a ""risk free"" bond [...] Logically yes, but no it isn't, and you shouldn't make that assumption."
You are comparing a risk-free cost with a risky return. If you can tolerate that level of risk (the ups and downs of the investment) for the chance that you'll come out ahead in the long-run, then sure, you could do that.   So the parameters to your equation would be: If you assume that the risky returns are normally distributed, then you can use normal probability tables to determine what risk level you can tolerate. To put some real numbers to it, take the average S&P 500 return of 10% and standard deviation of 18%.  Using standard normal functions, we can calculate the probability that you earn more than various interest rates: so even with a low 3% interest rate, there's roughly a 1 in 3 chance that you'll actually be worse off (the gains on your investments will be less than the interest you pay).  In any case there's a 3 in 10 chance that your investments will lose money. Very likely this refers to trading/speculating on leverage, not investing. Of course, as soon as you put leverage into the equation this perfectly makes sense.  2007-2009 for example, if one bought the $SPX at its highs in 2007 at ~$1560.00 - to the lows from 2009 at ~$683.00 - implicating that with only 2:1 leverage a $1560.00 account would have received a margin call. At least here in Europe I can trade index CFD's and other leveraged products. If i trade lets say >50:1 leverage it doesn’t take much to get a margin call and/or position closed by the broker. No doubt, depending on which investments you choose there’s always risk, but currency is a position too. TO answer the question, I find it very unlikely that >90% of investors (referring to stocks) lose money / purchasing power. Anyway, I would not deny that where speculators (not investors) use leverage or try to trade swings, news etc. have a very high risk of losing money (purchasing power). Bonds provide protections against stock market crashes, diversity and returns as the other posters have said but the primary reason to invest in bonds is to receive relatively guaranteed income. By that I mean you receive regular payments as long as the debtor doesn't go bankrupt and stop paying. Even when this happens, bondholders are the first in line to get paid from the sale of the business's assets. This also makes them less risky. Stocks don't guarantee income and shareholders are last in line to get paid. When a stock goes to zero, you lose everything, where as a bondholder will get some face value redemption to the notes issue price and still keep all the previous income payments. In addition, you can use your bond income to buy more shares of stock and increase your gains there. "The bond funds should tell you their duration. My 401(k) has similar choices, and right now, I'm at the short maturity, i.e. under 1 year. The current return is awful, but better than the drop the longer term funds will experience as rates come back up.  Not quite mathematically correct, but close enough, ""duration"" gives you the time-weighted average maturity in a way that tells you how the value responds to a rate change. If a fund has a 10 year duration, a .1% rate rise will cause the fund value to drop 1.0%." "You may be thinking about this the wrong way. The yield (Return) on your investment is effectively the market price paid to the investor for the amount of risk assumed for participating. Looking at the last few years, many including myself would have given their left arm for a so-called ""meager return"" instead of the devastation visited on our portfolios.  In essence, higher return almost always (arguably always) comes at the cost of increased risk.  You just have to decide your risk profile and investment goals.  For example, which of the following scenarios would you prefer? Investment Option A  Treasuries, CD's Worst Case: 1% gain Best Case 5% gain   Investment option B  Equities/Commodities Worst Case: 25% loss Best Case: 40% gain" The people who bought when interest rates were higher, do they get anything out of it? The present value just went up of their Bonds just went up, but it probably evened out to the 3% they were going to get right? Do they make more money selling the bond now, or holding on to it till maturity in PV terms? "A (very) simplified bond-pricing equation goes thus: Fair_Price: {Face_Value * (1 + Interest - Expected_Market_Return) ^ (Years_To_Maturity)} * P(Company_Will_Default_Before_Maturity) To reiterate, that is a very simplified model. But it allows us to demonstrate the 3 key factors that drive ""Fair"" Value: The interest relative to the current market rate. If your AAA bond yields 1%, but an equally-good AAA bond currently sells at 3% in the market, then the ""Equivalent"" value is the face value minus 2% (1% - 3%) for every year to maturity.  Years to maturity. Because 1) is multiplied for every year to maturity, longer-dated bonds are more sensitive to changes in market rates. If your bond yields 2% less than market but matures in a year, then it's worth $98, but if it matures in 56 years, then it's only worth 0.98^56 = $32. Conversely, if your bond yields more than the market rate, then its' price will be greater than face value. The company might default on the debt. If a Bond has a ""Fair"" Value of $100, but you think there's a 50% chance that the company will default, then it's only worth $50. In fact, it can be worth even less because getting paid on a defaulted bond can often take time and/or money and/or lawyers. In your case, because your bond matures in 56 years but yields ~5% (well above the current market rate), for it to be below Face value implies a strong probability of default, or a strong belief that market returns will be above 5% over the next 56 years." "I think this is a good question with no single right answer.  For a conservative investor, possible responses to low rates would be: Probably the best response is somewhere in the middle: consider riskier investments for a part of your portfolio, but still hold on to some cash, and in any case do not expect great results in a bad economy. For a more detailed analysis, let's consider the three main asset classes of cash, bonds, and stocks, and how they might preform in a low-interest-rate environment. (By ""stocks"" I really mean mutual funds that invest in a diversified mixture of stocks, rather than individual stocks, which would be even riskier.  You can use mutual funds for bonds too, although diversification is not important for government bonds.) Cash. Advantages: Safe in the short term.  Available on short notice for emergencies. Disadvantages: Low returns, and possibly inflation (although you retain the flexibility to move to other investments if inflation increases.) Bonds. Advantages: Somewhat higher returns than cash.  Disadvantages: Returns are still rather low, and more vulnerable to inflation.  Also the market price will drop temporarily if rates rise. Stocks. Advantages: Better at preserving your purchasing power against inflation in the long term (20 years or more, say.)  Returns are likely to be higher than stocks or bonds on average.  Disadvantages:  Price can fluctuate a lot in the short-to-medium term.  Also, expected returns are still less than they would be in better economic times. Although the low rates may change the question a little, the most important thing for an investor is still to be familiar with these basic asset classes.  Note that the best risk-adjusted reward might be attained by some mixture of the three." "I don't think ""cost of carry"" is the right word here.  Yes, you have the opportunity cost (what you could have earned during that time if you had invested the money somehwere else) and then you also have interest rate risk and default risk." Very rarely would an investor be happy with a 4% yield independent of anything else that might happen in the future. For example, if in 3 years for some reason or other inflation explodes and 30 year bond yields go up to 15% across the board, they would be kicking themselves for having locked it up for 30 years at 4%. However, if instead of doing that the investor put their money in a 3 year bond at 3% say, they would have the opportunity to reinvest in the new rate environment, which might offer higher or lower yields. This eventually leads fixed income investors to have a bond portfolio in which they manage the average maturity of their bond portfolio to be somewhere between the two extremes of investing it all in super short term/ low yield money market rates vs. super long term bonds. As they constantly monitor and manage their maturing investments, it inevitably leads them to managing interest rate risk as they decide where to reinvest their incremental coupons by looking at the shape of the yield curve at the time and determining what kind of risk/reward tradeoffs they would have to make. I definitely get that, my company has been really big on ILS’s lately, so in a meeting the other day I was looking at ways to short Cat Bonds....   The problem is you’d have to offer a big premium to someone that you sell the risk too since the whole industry is having to do that now. And on risky areas like Oklahoma or California for earthquakes I couldn’t imagine the premium you’d have to pay since the risk is up front and present. If you don’t want to pay the premium and choose some risk that isn’t as foreseen you should probably have a good method of evaluating that risk. Which is the point I have ran into in my quest to short ILSs. Your goals are mutually exclusive.  You cannot both earn a return that will outpace inflation while simultaneously having zero-risk of losing money, at least not in the 2011 market. In 2008, a 5+% CD would have been a good choice. Here's a potential compromise... sacrifice some immediate liquidity for more earnings. Say you had $10,000 saved: In this scheme, you've diversified a little bit, have access to 50% of your money immediately (either through online transfer or bringing your bonds to a teller), have an implicit US government guarantee for 50% of your money and low risk for the rest, and get inflation protection for 75% of your money. I researched quite a bit around this topic, and it seems that this is indeed false. Long ter asset growth does not converge to the compound interest rate of expected return. While it is true that standard deviations of annualized return decrease over time, because the asset value itself changes over time, the standard deviations of the total return actually increases.      Thus, it is wrong to say that you can take increased risk because you have a longer time horizon.  Source I think your premise is slightly flawed. Every investment can add or reduce risk, depending on how it's used. If your ordering above is intended to represent the probability you will lose your principal, then it's roughly right, with caveats. If you buy a long-term government bond and interest rates increase while you're holding it, its value will decrease on the secondary markets. If you need/want to sell it before maturity, you may not recover your principal, and if you hold it, you will probably be subject to erosion of value due to inflation (inflation and interest rates are correlated). Over the short-term, the stock market can be very volatile, and you can suffer large paper losses. But over the long-term (decades), the stock market has beaten inflation. But this is true in aggregate, so, if you want to decrease equity risk, you need to invest in a very diversified portfolio (index mutual funds) and hold the portfolio for a long time. With a strategy like this, the stock market is not that risky over time. Derivatives, if used for their original purpose, can actually reduce volatility (and therefore risk) by reducing both the upside and downside of your other investments. For example, if you sell covered calls on your equity investments, you get an income stream as long as the underlying equities have a value that stays below the strike price. The cost to you is that you are forced to sell the equity at the strike price if its value increases above that. The person on the other side of that transaction loses the price of the call if the equity price doesn't go up, but gets a benefit if it does. In the commodity markets, Southwest Airlines used derivatives (options to buy at a fixed price in the future) on fuel to hedge against increases in fuel prices for years. This way, they added predictability to their cost structure and were able to beat the competition when fuel prices rose. Even had fuel prices dropped to zero, their exposure was limited to the pre-negotiated price of the fuel, which they'd already planned for. On the other hand, if you start doing things like selling uncovered calls, you expose yourself to potentially infinite losses, since there are no caps on how high the price of a stock can go. So it's not possible to say that derivatives as a class of investment are risky per se, because they can be used to reduce risk. I would take hedge funds, as a class, out of your list. You can't generally invest in those unless you have quite a lot of money, and they use strategies that vary widely, many of which are quite risky. "The federal funds rate is one of the risk-free short-term rates in the economy. We often think of fixed income securities as paying this rate plus some premia associated with risk. For a treasury security, we can think this way: (interest rate) = (fed funds rate) + (term premium) The term premium is a bit extra the bond pays because if you hold a long term bond, you are exposed to interest rate risk, which is the risk that rates will generally rise after you buy, making your bond worth less.  The relation is more complex if people have expectations of future rate moves, but this is the general idea.  Anyway, generally speaking, longer term bonds are exposed to more interest rate risk, so they pay more, on average. For a corporate bond, we think this way: (interest rate) = (fed funds rate) + (term premium) + (default premium) where the default premium is some extra that the bond must pay to compensate the holder for default risk, which is the risk that the bond defaults or loses value as the company's prospects fall.  You can see that corporate and government bonds are affected the same way (approximately, this is all hand-waving) by changes in the fed funds rate. Now, that all refers to the rates on new bonds.  After a bond is issued, its value falls if rates rise because new bonds are relatively more attractive.  Its value rises if rates on new bonds falls.  So if there is an unexpected rise in the fed funds rate and you are holding a bond, you will be sad, especially if it is a long term bond (doesn't matter if it's corporate or government).  Ask yourself, though, whether an increase in fed funds will be unexpected at this point.  If the increase was expected, it will already be priced in.  Are you more of an expert than the folks on wall-street at predicting interest rate changes?  If not, it might not make sense to make decisions based on your belief about where rates are going.  Just saying. Brick points out that treasuries are tax advantaged.  That is, you don't have to pay state income tax on them (but you do pay federal). If you live in a state where this is true, this may matter to you a little bit. They also pay unnaturally little because they are convenient for use as a cash substitute in transactions and margining (""convenience yield"").  In general, treasuries just don't pay much.  Young folk like you tend to buy corporate bonds instead, so they can make money on the default and term premia."