Welcome to the Treasury Bonds chapter, and please do not let the serious-sounding name put you off - this is one of the calmest, most predictable ways to earn in the whole game. If you have ever heard that governments in the real world borrow money by "issuing bonds", that is exactly the idea here, only shrunk down to something you can hold in your own two hands and understand completely in an afternoon. There is nothing to fear in this section and nothing you can break by reading it, so settle in and let us take it slowly.
Here is the whole thing in one gentle sentence, and it is worth reading twice. A treasury bond is a little slip of a country's debt: you buy it, the country's treasury holds your money, and in return the state budget pays you a small amount every single day for as long as you hold it. That is really all a bond is - you lend to the country, and the country pays you a daily thank-you. Once that single picture is clear in your mind, every tab on the Bonds page becomes obvious, because each one is just a different window onto that same simple arrangement.
The one number that never changes
Every bond in the world is worth exactly the same, and this is the single most important thing to understand about them. A bond has a face value of $0.10 - ten cents of real value - no matter which country issued it. That value is then charged in the issuing country's own money, converted at the exchange rate on the day the bonds were created. So a Romanian bond costs about 0.46 RON, a Japanese one about 16 JPY and a British one about 0.08 GBP: three prices that look nothing like each other, for three bonds of identical worth. Do not let the different-looking numbers fool you into thinking one country's bonds are dearer than another's. They are all ten cents. Only the currency they are dressed in changes.
When a country opens its bond programme it creates 10,000 bonds in one go, all at that face value, all paying a coupon of 0.25% of face every single day, and all maturing one year later. Those opening 10,000 are the bones of a country's bond market - but they are not the end of it. A government can later pass laws to issue further batches, and each batch comes with its own interest rate and its own maturity date, chosen when the law is written. So the face value is the constant that binds every bond on earth together, while the interest and the lifespan belong to each individual issue. We will come back to that properly in the final lesson.
Everything is in the national currency
A bond is priced, traded and paid entirely in the issuing country's own national currency - never in gold, and never actually in dollars. The $0.10 is only the yardstick used to work out what a bond should cost in each country; the money that genuinely changes hands is EUR for a euro country and IDR for an IDR one, for the purchase price, the coupon and the final repayment alike. So when you buy bonds abroad, you are dealing in that country's money, and you will want some of it in your pocket first.
Where your money goes, and where the coupon comes from
This is the part that ties bonds neatly into everything you already learned about the state budget, so do let it land. When you buy a bond straight from the treasury, the money you pay flows directly into that country's state budget - the very same shared pot you met in the Politics chapter. And when your daily coupon is paid, it comes straight back out of that same state budget. So bonds are really a conversation between you and the country's treasury: you pay money in when you buy, and the budget pays a trickle back out to you every day you hold. The pot fills a little when bonds are sold and drains a little every day to reward the people holding them.
That connection matters for a reason you will come to appreciate deeply in a couple of lessons' time: because the coupon is paid out of the budget, a country's ability to keep paying you depends on how healthy its budget is. A rich treasury pays its holders without breaking a sweat; a struggling one may eventually run into trouble. You do not need to worry about any of that yet - we will cover credit ratings, deficits and default carefully in lesson four - but it is worth planting the seed now that a bond is only ever as reliable as the treasury standing behind it.
The six tabs of the Bonds page
Let us take a quick, unhurried tour of the page itself so you never feel lost clicking around. The Bonds page lives in the Politics section, tucked under Budget in the left menu, and it is built from six tabs. The Market tab is the order book, where bonds are bought and sold. The Dividends tab shows the coupon payments that have been made. The Owners tab lists who holds bonds in this country. The Transactions tab is the trade history. The My bonds tab gathers your own holdings and listings across every country in one place. And the Top issuers tab ranks countries by their credit rating so you can find the strongest treasuries to lend to. You do not need to memorise this list - just know the six are there, and that each is only ever a friendly view of the same underlying bonds.
You can trade bonds in any country
At the top of the Bonds page is a country selector and a live credit rating. You are not limited to your own country's bonds at all - you can switch to any issuer in the world, read its rating, and buy or sell its bonds, all from the same page. The selector lists the public countries, which are the only ones that borrow. Lending abroad is completely normal here, and the selector is how you go shopping for the treasury you like best.
So that, in a nutshell, is what a treasury bond is: a slip of a country's debt, worth a fixed $0.10 wherever in the world you buy it, paid for in that country's own money, that hands you a small slice of its face value every day out of the state budget until the day it matures and the treasury buys it back. Ten thousand of them to begin with per country, more if the government votes for them, and a whole page of tabs to trade and track them. In the next lesson we will step up to the Market tab together and learn exactly how to buy your very first bond - and how to sell one, too.