Banking Day managing editor Ian Rogers reflects:

Following a 2 year break working with the labour movement, I returned to the Financial Review in mid 1993 with one proviso: no return to daily financial markets reporting - a tedious side-line and one all too prone, in my case, to showcase my ignorance and haphazard work methods.

Ordered in early 1994 to return to this work, as a wage slave I cooperated.

The great bond price collapse of that year opened in February.

Ten year bond yields in Australia had bottomed at 6.5 per cent and worked their way to ten per cent in no time.

Fearful, informed talk forecast yields of 11 per cent as imminent. As it happens this was averted.

Across the twin circuses of boom and collapse the vast apparatus that is money management once more followed central bank mandarins more or less on cue, with very little endogenous monetary policy making going on in the free market.

The extraordinarily low interest rates of the present day in many markets are there by fiat, the free marketeers for the most part unwilling to walk from the shadow of the US Fed. Most seem unrepentant about this.

Few question the vast resources consumed by money management, much of it devoted, in theory, to reducing information asymmetries.

Most of the time it's hard to believe there is much of it going on.

The cause of the rush of fear around an 11 per cent 10-year bond rate was the week bond yields rushed from nine per cent to ten per cent in a near percentage point leap.

Many in the market were at sixes and sevens, as in 2007 refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of an economic shock.

And what was this shock?

A recovering economic story in the United States reshaping the rates outlook in what was, then, the economic superpower.

Expecting the future seemed incomprehensible to the multitude, or so I saw it at the time.

The messages sure were muddled at the Financial Review (I was 25 at the time).

One morning, during the worst of it, I walked into the office of the deputy editor and said something like 'if there is a day in the bond market that is equal to a stock market crash, this is it.'

I got a hearing, there was decent coverage.

This fateful day the deputy editor was only too pleased to ask: 'What is a bond? I do not know what a bond is.'

I'm serious, they had no idea. They wanted an education and this thought informed their next directive that we must inform the readers.

They ordered a graphic - one that explained what bonds really were!

I wanted to traduce the deputy editor, the ignorance - I am not making this up.

Frrrrrk me. I hadn't bargained on anything like this, but gave it a go.

I'd written derivatives, a fancy end of the bond chain, for months, leading the paper with it. The bond sell-off was already page one fodder.

The place of derivatives in the bond landscape and the significance of two months of recent news