When PIMCO's bond guru Bill Gross claimed on cable television this week that now was a great time to buy municipal issues, Diehards were listening.

But apparently the sound bite wasn't enough. That led Aryanu to ask a simple question: Why now?

Ask a simple question and get a simple response. "Because munis are now yielding more in nominal terms than treasury bonds of the same duration," replied Indexfundfan.

But that answer wasn't flippant. Indexfundfan followed with an example, pointing to the Vanguard Intermediate Tax-Exempt Fund. It has a duration of 5.2 years and yields 3.44%. That was compared to the Vanguard Intermediate-Term Treasury, a taxable fund, with a duration of 5.1 years and yield of 2.95%.

"As you can see, normally tax exempt funds should yield less, but now it is yielding more than taxable treasuries," Indexfundfan wrote. "This is not even accounting for the fact that the yield is not taxable for tax exempt funds."

You can catch the full discussion here. And that's just the beginning.

With talk of falling short-term interest rates swirling all week, Adrian Nenu pointed to some sage words by John Bogle. Basically, he was pointing to cautionary remarks made by the Vanguard founder that changing market conditions shouldn't tempt investors to get greedy by injecting more risk into their bond allocations.

That led to spirited discussion of how to best avoid risk in dealing with debt. What's better, TIPs or short-term bonds? And how much deflation protection do you need and/or can you afford?

The thread can be found here.

If inflation is rising faster than most people realize, how will that impact your investing and lifestyle? Those were some big issues tackled in a thread that started at the end of January and keeps attracting readers.

Sparking the debate was a Wall Street Journal article that point to real inflation rising at a rate of 4% or more.

"It is ludicrous to think that we can continue to deny the real rate of inflation (as properly defined as a monetary phenomenon) by relying upon offsetting productivity gains and--more importantly--the masking effect of cheap overseas labor," Rose21 wrote. "As the developing world catches on to how the game is played, we can expect to see a decade's worth of inflation come roaring back to us in terms of vastly higher prices."

Nisiprius says he's not alarmed since official government inflation barometers should at some point catch up with reality. In any event, Nisiprius doesn't think that the Treasury will fail to honor investments such as TIPs. And he thinks that TIPs will be able to hold their real valuations well even if real inflation reaches up to as much as 15%. "After all, I've lived through a period of eight years of about 10% inflation and it didn't produce major social disruption," the Diehard concluded.

Much more ensues here. 

Stunter has some interesting comments about online savings accounts. After years of moving around to find the best deal, the investor asked for suggestions on the best high-yield savings account provider.

It wouldn't be giving away too many details to disclose that ING, Provident, WaMu, Bank of America, Vanguard and Citi are some of the financial institutions whose plusses and minuses are bandied about. The string can be viewed here.

Other topics of interest explored included a review of Vanguard vs. Fidelity in the index fund world. Now that the kingpin of active management has undercut the indexing pioneer's prices, will there ever be peace and solitude among hardcore passive investing fans? Find out here.

And finally, Tan takes a hard look at so-called passive investing as practiced with bonds. "People here clearly find market timing reprehensible, yet openly and often discuss timing of fixed income mutual funds ...," the poster wrote. "Why is this okay when we constantly talk about our inability to predict interest rates? What happened to stay the course when it comes to fixed income?"

Well, that's going to be our cliff-hanger this week ...

You can read the frank responses here.