* This is not to be confused with the COBRA health-insurance law.

* Ask for the 3-year yield too. The 10-year yield is useless unless the fund’s manager has remained the same.

* Unfortunately, you can’t compare bond fund returns with the rates on bank certificates of deposit. The calculations don’t mesh.

* The federal funds futures market tends to predict very short-term rates, if you follow that sort of thing. Futures trade on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Prediction errors have been high, however, in the months that, in hindsight, precede recessions.

* Those periods were the 1790s, 1860s, and 1910s, computed on a moving-average basis. For this data, my thanks to investment adviser Steven Leuthold, who in 1980 published an insightful book, The Myths of Inflation and Investing. Among its little treasures was a 1,000-year history of consumer prices in the Western world. He found that prices rose about 61 percent of the time and fell about 39 percent of the time. The annual compound inflation rate ran at less than 1 percent—suggesting that, over time (sometimes over a lot of time), market economies stabilize themselves.