> This is to show that, to my understanding, there's *no evidence* that
> "interest rate spreads are falling back to more normal ranges."
Doug is entirely right about the trend of interest rate spreads. I was wrong. I trusted the Economagic database -- not fully updated. Then I went to the source (the Fed), downloaded the data, and made a chart with updated info. That's the first chart at:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhgjvbdv_274hf5r9jgk
It shows that, although still far from the historical norm, *the spreads are narrowing*.