During the autumn of 2007, a bond manager from California popped into the Financial Times’s New York office with a timely warning after a long road trip through the then-frothy housing states of the US south-west.

Lately, investors fresh from fact-finding missions to China and Hong Kong have voiced concerns that a major shift is playing out behind the smoke of trade tensions — a change that helps provide context for the massive rally seen in global bond prices over the past month.

The mood across government bond markets reflects a dour outlook for the global economy and a need for owning insurance against a bigger shock for investment portfolios. This month’s clamour for long-dated government debt suggests that buyers reckon the recession clock is counting down to a day of reckoning, as it did in 2007.