If anything, the 1.74 percent rate on 10-year United States Treasury bonds is an outlier on the high side. The equivalent bonds are yielding 1.43 percent in Canada, 0.65 percent in Britain and 1.05 percent in Australia. Countries including Japan, Germany and France all feature negative rates, meaning bond investors get back less than they pay for newly issued securities.

Those low rates worldwide reflect a wave of monetary easing decisions by major world central banks over the last few months, including the 0.75 percentage points’ worth of rate cuts by the Federal Reserve and a whole portfolio of actions by the European Central Bank.

But the central banks’ actions came after a sharp downward move in longer-term yields; the bond market was the horse, and the central banks were the cart. The central banks made their moves to try to get monetary policy aligned with the economic reality in the world: Aging demographics, a savings glut and weak productivity growth are pulling growth and inflation ever downward.

This world economy is stuck in neutral. This explains how we can reconcile the combination of simultaneously surging stock and bond markets — and why anyone who has checked a 401(k) recently has extra reason to smile.

The trade war and world manufacturing slowdown that prompted a wave of recession fears over the summer — and that triggered a response by world central banks — created a Goldilocks scenario for the stock market. Combined with the Trump administration’s de-escalation of the trade war with China, the risks of either a recession or an overheating economy have diminished.

Sure, the economy is slowing, and corporate profits will be squeezed by that. But it also means that very cheap money will be around indefinitely, meaning any investment that can squeak out steady profits is worth a lot compared with the alternatives of putting it in a bank account or in bonds.

Essentially, the Fed and the other central banks may not have solved the low-growth problem, but they have managed to lower the risk of recession from where it stood a few months ago.