Yield curve is telling a very different story than the stock market.  Echoing Meltzer’s earlier piece, “Bernanke’s 70s show“, maybe stagflation is for real…reports WSJ:

Treasurys may be signaling trouble.

The market is behaving in ways that suggest investors are starting to fret over the potential for stagflation in the U.S. …

Consider the Treasury “yield curve.” It refers to the difference between short-term and long-term interest rates on U.S. Treasury debt.  Typically, as the economy is expanding, this curve has an upward slope, and is usually at its steepest during the earliest stages of a recovery.

Eventually, investors anticipate the Fed will begin raising interest rates to stave off inflation. That tends to lift short-term rates, compress long-term ones, and generally flatten the curve, or even invert it if investors expect the outcome could be recession.

Lately, with the U.S. growth outlook improving, the slope of the curve hasn’t started flattening, as might be expected at this point in the recovery. Instead, it has gotten steeper.

Earlier this week, the spread between two-year and 30-year Treasury yields hit a record-wide four percentage points, notes RBS Securities. At the same time, the implied annual inflation rate over a five-to-10 year horizon, based on Treasury yields, has moved up above 3% and towards levels last seen before the Fed’s previous rate-rise cycle began in mid-2004.

Investors, in other words, don’t expect the Fed to be as aggressive as in the past in raising rates—even as they see inflation on the rise.

“I think the Fed’s credibility is in question here,” says Priya Misra, head of rates strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Or perhaps investors simply realize the Fed has put itself between a rock and a hard place. The U.S. unemployment rate is currently 9.4%, after all. It was at 5.6% in June 2004.

In a twist, the best scenario for the U.S. now is that interest rate increases in China, Brazil and other emerging markets rein in global cost pressures, giving the Fed—and the recovery—some breathing room.

The U.S. needs strong growth more than ever, especially with limited appetite for serious fiscal overhaul, to assuage the market’s other worry: wide deficits and heavy debt.

The clock is ticking.