.... and thinking or believing it has something significant to do with the EU crises, or Obama's policies, or the Fed's, or the current state of the economy... think again.  

The current yields are fully within the normal range of the 22 year to date extension of 10 year treasury bond yields.. .nothing out of the ordinary or specific to current issues (financial or otherwise).  The variability (range about the trend) is elevated since those of 1990, but as you can see, the variability as % of nominal has been steadily increasing anyway... so the variation (peaks/valleys) isn't out of the ordinary expectation either.

What you see in the variation are business cycle variances & short-term expectations up and down, but the overall has been steadily and persistently declining for the last 22 years already.  Obama's admin. or the financial crises haven't been causal for the current low yields.  The current yields are however at the low side of the historic variance, so the expectation (as rational objective extension of past behavior) would be for the next short term trend to rise toward the upper extreme again... to or a bit over 3%.... over time.  You'll note that historically the lowest bond yields don't languish at the lower extreme very long.

 Fundamentally what the chart says is that for the last 22 years US 10 year treasuries have been a better relative investment in long term fixed income investments than most others (globally)... perhaps because the US is and has been perceived to have greater long term economic stability (relative to other economy's), or because the US treasury market is relatively more liquid on an ongoing basis.

The other implication from chart's data is that it implies demand for US 10 year treasury bills has been steadily increasing over time, which correspondingly implies that the US gov't is and has been continuously perceived by both foreign and domestic investors in US 10 year bills as being steadily relatively more solvent than most or all others on the globe.. as sovereigns sovereigns sovereigns.  Another way of stating this in more accurate form would be that national economy's other than the US's have increasingly been perceived as have increasingly less relative stability over time . This stands to reason from first order fundamentals:  The US is still by far both the largest economy on the globe and has the globe's largest military machine.... the latter providing the former greater insurance. 

Considering the above, and the data for the last 22 years it stands to reason therefore that the long term trend will continue to erode US 10 year treasury yields (i.e. increasing demand will continue to increase).    One implication of this is great for the US society as a whole... it costs far less in interest for the US to borrow to grow and invest in our own infrastructure and benefits.  In other words we can afford increasingly greater levels of debt.  Now's the time to borrow to the hilt... and since there's no hilt, borrow as much as we need to grow the economy, infrastructure rebuilding and improvements, and benefits.  There's no excuse not to from an economic point of view.