Bond fund superstar Bill Gross gave the opening keynote at the Morningstar conference Wednesday afternoon at the McCormick Place in Chicago. Dressed in a dark suit and a polka dot tie and clutching a copy of yesterday's USA Today, Gross addressed a record 1,650 attendees at the confab.

"My case was made yesterday in USA Today,"  Gross told the audience, pointing to the paper's front page headline, "U.S. Owes $62 Trillion."

Later in his talk, he brought up the pair of frog stories that were part of his June investment outlook posted on Pimco's Web site. Click here to see it.

Gross, whose $243 billion Pimco Total Return is underweight U.S. Treasury securities, urged attendees to "think about real interest rates, think about your pocket getting picked, think about going outside the U.S. in order to get a decent return."

He told the audience to consider bonds from countries like Brazil and Canada.

Gross also mentioned dividend-paying stocks.

"Take a Procter & Gamble, take a Johnson & Johnson, take a Coca Cola,  take a Pepsi," he said. "The dividends they offer are the real  interest rate. They're offering you a 3.5 to 4 percent interest rate with perhaps a smidgen of growth, but in any case, it's something better than a  minus 0.5." 

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