So much low-risk debt has been issued by the likes of Google, Amazon, etc. that it’s hard for other debt issuers to compete.

So much low risk debt has been issued by governments that it's hard for other debt issuers to compete. The US alone has sold over $4 trillion of T bonds this year alone. Thats around 40% of the total long term bond issuance, which includes mortgage backed securties.

The treasury is having daily rates of 4.56% at 2 year bond and 4.88% at 10 years rate.

Yes, Google has a very small risk but still it is a non zero risk that google can bankrupt whereas US govt can physically not bankrupt itself given that it can print the money (there could only be some gridlock within raising the ceiling though but that's true)

Also I would argue that Google itself has changed with trillions of dollars spent into AI/Datacenters, it simply can't pivot as well. There is a reason as to why Google is having such high level of interest rate

Google isn't stupid and wants to give such high level of interests if not for the amount of risk involved. I dont believe that there's free lunch but also that perhaps this can be a good deal to some and this is gonna push people even more away from the more riskier neoclouds funding and cause their debts to rise in interests rate even more.

Matt Levine once noticed that Microsoft’s bonds were actually cheaper than Treasuries (during a time of Trump-instigated turbulence).

His point was that Microsoft has an interest in maximizing its credit worthiness which necessitated the corporate governance etc, while the administration had an interest in maximizing… other stuff (?) which did not necessitate the same things.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/why-microsoft-has-lowe...

US 10y bonds are at 4.871, which is lower but fits your description even better.

The yield is bounded from below by the treasury yield, which is just a little lower - and with the treasury you have really big problems if they default! But realistically the US will inflate its currency rather than default, so the yield is really just reflecting expected future inflation. It’s not as great a deal as it seems. Bonds are probably the most fairly priced assets in the world.

If by fairly priced you mean so competitively priced that essentially all the real profit has been taken out.

What else would fairly priced mean?

Fair could be construed as "the layers of market participants receive a share of the profits" . As far as I can tell there is essentially none left, and thats because folks will bid it down to 0 profit because they're lending others' money. (they're only responsible for their opportunity cost, but even 1% on others money is a good deal for the bank)

I'm old enough to remember Argentina issue a 100 year bond with an 8% yield.

Was it denominated in USD or ARS?

$2.75 billion in U.S. dollar-denominated sovereign debt.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/06/24/i...

I’m old enough to remember that they defaulted on those bonds three years later.

NEVER buy an Argentinian bond at full price. always wait until we are burning stuff up. don't believe any argentinian president, ever.

I disagree. I think Google Search is in huge trouble. Most of their profits come from it.

Most recent earnings show continued growth in queries and ad revenue. Phillip made clear we’ve not yet begun to see the full potential for ad placement in ai results. I’m very bullish long term Google.

There are discussions here on HN where Google is juicing search growth by simply raising prices or doing shady things like getting rid of exact match. This can raise revenue temporarily but will lose long term.

Total human search volume has likely already started to decline.

Further more, we are at a point where searching in ChatGPT or AI apps is simply better and faster than Google.

In this new world, Google is not the leader nor a monopoly.

> Total human search volume has likely already started to decline.

source?

Here’s one: https://ppc.land/ziff-davis-loses-37-of-its-google-search-tr...

Because Google doesn’t break down search volume, we don’t know for sure.

thats proof that those sites are losing clicks, not that google is.

There are only two possible reasons:

1. Humans are searching less on Google.

2. Humans get the answer from Google AI answers at the top, which means AI is better at finding what the human wanted than traditional Google search results.

Both are bad for Google.

3. People are searching less for IGN and CNET

I think my two reasons are more likely.

Other sources:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-decline-pu...

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/07/search-traffic-has-decline...

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/randfishkin_google-search-tra...

Google can go under and literally nothing will flinch. I don't think it will cause any trouble on my side, let alone bigger on then loss of capital.

> Google can go under and literally nothing will flinch.

Come, come: most email is Google, most phones are Google, most web browsers are Google. If you measured the global impact of any single company going under (with nothing else inherently changing), I wonder if Google might be #1.

Maybe it is in your world (and I have no idea where you borrowed that statistics). Personally I don't use any google product and them going under won't affect my life or life people I know to that matter.

Compare this with HSBC going under or say JPMorgan. Or Adyen. Or amazon (screw their retail - it would be much better for everyone if they die, but unfortunately a lot of companies still build their IT on AWS).

13 million businesses of their business offering across 3 billion users would be a noticeable dent in the world (https://sqmagazine.co.uk/google-workspace-statistics/)

I hadn’t thought about AWS. If going under meant that everything just disappeared one day, yeah, that would probably be enough to tip it to bigger global impact than Google. If it was an orderly collapse, I don’t feel I can assess it so well.

But the others you name: not a chance, big businesses already diversify such services. They don’t partner with one bank or one payment provider only.

[delayed]

I cannot find the exact bond that you mention. However, I found this one: https://www.bondsupermart.com/bsm/bond-factsheet/US02079KAF4...

GOOGL 2.050% 15Aug2050 Corp

Current Bid/Ask yield: 6.134/6.045

That bond has 24 years to maturity. If you look at US Treasury bond yields with about 25 years to maturity, the current yield is about 5.29%. That means the spread is less than 100bps. That is pretty small. Google (Alphabet) still has an excellent credit rating: AA+.

ZIRP days are over