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Bond yields slipped Friday ahead of pivotal data on jobs that could determine the size of the Federal Reserve interest-rate hike in two weeks.
What’s happening
-
The yield on the 2-year Treasury
TMUBMUSD02Y,
4.826%
was 4.85%, down 2.9 basis points. Yields move in the opposite direction to prices. -
The yield on the 10-year Treasury
TMUBMUSD10Y,
3.852%
was 3.86%, down 5.1 basis points. -
The yield on the 30-year Treasury
TMUBMUSD30Y,
3.815%
was 3.82%, down 3.3 basis points.
What’s driving markets
Attention was turning to the Labor Department’s jobs report, due at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal expect 225,000 jobs outside the farm sector will have been created in February, and for the unemployment rate to stay at 3.4%.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in Congressional hearings that the central bank may resume bigger rate increases depending on what the data on jobs and inflation on say.
One support for bonds is paradoxically coming from banking-sector turmoil, which itself is tied to the deep inversion of the Treasury yield curve. Silicon Valley Bank parent SVB Financial
SIVB,
said it was raising equity to fill a nearly $2 billion hole on its balance sheet, after selling a loss-making portfolio of Treasury securities.
Bank sector shares slumped in the U.S. on Thursday, and in Europe and Japan on Friday.
