By Josh Zumbrum for Real Time Economics for The Wall Street Journal, 17 February 2015

Rarely do central bankers provide evidence that William Shakespeare may have erred in career choice. But today Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, presented a chart suggesting exactly that.

As part of a wide-ranging speech on topics such as secular stagnation and artificial intelligence, Mr. Haldane presented the above chart of short-term and long-term interest rates all the way back to 3000 B.C.

There are dozens of fascinating stories in this data. One of the more amusing suggests that Mr. Shakespeare may have missed a historic opportunity in the bond market. Approximately during his lifespan in the Elizabethan era, the yield on long-term rates climbed to nearly 10% while the yield on short-term rates appears to be around 3% or 4%. If Mr. Haldane’s figures are correct, Mr. Shakespeare lived through the steepest yield curve in history, as measured by the gap between short-term and long-term interest rates.

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