To the contrary, it has been a time to reap astounding profits from bond holdings. And for buy-and-hold investors who have kept both stocks and bonds, it has been a reminder that those boring bonds can offset painful stock losses, making it easier to hang on for the long run.

Consider these numbers:

Through Thursday, a fund that tracked the investment-grade long-term U.S. bond market — the Vanguard Long-Term Bond ETF — generated a 7.5 percent return so far this year. But in the same stretch, a fund that tracked the S&P 500 stock index — the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, or SPY — fell 7.6 percent, according to Morningstar.

Long-term bonds have also outstripped stocks over the last 12 months. In that period, the stock fund returned 7.5 percent, but the long-term bond fund gained more than 26 percent, a staggering return for an asset category often thought of as dull.

Bond prices have risen sky-high because they move in the opposite direction of interest rates. And rates for the benchmark 10-year Treasury note have dropped to levels that have never been seen before. On Friday morning, for example, the rate for the 10-year note dropped as low as 1.15 percent. Mr. Rosenberg expects that it will fall even further.

Great as bond returns have been, it is difficult for a thinking person to rejoice.

The bond market has been conveying truly disturbing messages, not just about the current state of the economy but about the world’s inability to recover entirely from the last recession and our vulnerability when the next one comes.

Recall the downturn set off more than a decade ago by the global financial crisis. That recession started in the United States in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, according to the official arbiters at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The ensuing economic recovery has been the longest in American history, yet it has been one of the feeblest as well. One indication of that can be seen in the bond market right now. Interest rates typically fall when the economy is weak but then rise, along with inflation, in periods of rip-roaring growth. But that is not the pattern we’ve seen over the last 10 years.