Monetary policy

The twenty-eighth entry is la curva dei rendimenti, and the English half of that term has travelled a long way from where it started. Il rendimento is built on rendere, to give back, from Latin reddere: what the investment hands back to whoever put the money in. « Yield » looks like a word about harvests, and today it is one, but in Old English gieldan meant to pay. It was the verb for settling a debt, a tax or a due, and the same root stands in German Geld, money, and in gelten, to be worth; « guild » almost certainly belongs there too, the body whose members paid their contribution in. Only later did the sense slide from paying to producing, and from producing to giving way — a floor yields, an army yields, a driver yields. So when a bond is said to yield four per cent, the word has come the whole way round and is doing again what it did first. Italian stayed with giving back; English left paying and walked back into it.