Bond markets put in another solid day of gains today, and have now erased more than half of last Thursday's losses.  If we go all the way back to the beginning of last week, before Tuesday's big rally, the deficit is even smaller.  In the following chart, the center line is the 21-day moving average,  Notice how 10yr yields briefly traded below it, but returned to end the day right in line. 

It's a bit of an oversimplification, but not unfair to say that the return to this technical middle ground speaks to the process of unwinding last week's more frenzied trading (first below and then above the middle line). 

There's no telling if we'd have seen the same rally today without a bit of help from related markets.  To be sure, I don't think we'd have seen any rally if there wasn't some lingering imbalance in trading positions created by last week.  So that's the key motivation, but there's no telling how far it would have carried us in and of itself.

As it happened, we didn't have to find out, because European bond yields, global stock averages, and oil prices all fell.  The stock story is less interesting than oil, which has a more direct implication on the long term state of inflation.  Any old decline in oil prices might not be worth discussing on any given day, but today saw prices drop rather briskly to new 6-year lows.