Are foreign buyers pulling back from Treasuries? Recent auctions say so
It’s a recent development, but it looks like more foreign buyers are sitting out recent Treasury auctions. At Tuesday’s $30 billion auction of three-year notes, foreign buyers accounted for the smallest share of the offering since September. At...
Fed raises interest rates and marks steeper path on future increases
Well, it wasn’t unexpected so stocks didn’t plunge. But it is still close to what the financial markets feared. Today, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark short term interest rate another 25 basis points to a range of 1.5% to 1.75%.  And forecast a...
10-year Treasury yields may be stuck in a range but the LIBOR interest rate benchmark keeps climbing steadily higher
Ahead of tomorrow’s interest rate announcement from the Federal Reserve, 10-year Treasury yields remain stuck just below 2.90%. The bond market just can’t seem to admit that the Fed might raise interest rates three times in 2018–let alone a potential...
How to manage risk in this market when the traditional risk safe havens aren’t working
If you spend a significant part of your day staring at your computer to watch the markets, you know that, perplexingly, the traditional safe havens for mitigating portfolio risk haven’t been working very well. For example, gold, which is supposed to go up when...
CPI inflation comes in on the mark–no surprises ahead of March 21 Fed meeting
After a worrying 0.5% jump in January, headline inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index increased by just 0.2% in February. That was right on the 0.2% mark expected by economists surveyed by Briefing.com. Core inflation, which excludes more volatile food and...
Treasury market survives this week’s first test
The U.S. Treasury sold $28 billion of three-year Treasury notes and $21 billion of 10-year notes today–and the price of the 10-year note actually climbed, taking the yield down to 2.87%, three basis points lower than Friday’s 2.90% yield. This was a good...
10-year Treasury yield back to 2.87% as market decides wage inflation isn’t likely to push the Fed to three rate increases in 2018
Traders and investors decided today that the Federal Reserve’s semiannual monetary policy report to Congress is wrong and that Wall Street’s own seers are right about wage-driven inflation. The Fed’s report, delivered to Congress today, makes it...
Treasury auction today could have been worse; yields climb anyway
The U.S. Treasury auctioned off $35 billion in 5-year notes today. The yield climbed to 2.658%. In trading the 5-year Treasury closed at 2.68% today. That yield is up 23 basis points in the last month. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note closed at 2.94%, up 5 basis...
10-year Treasury climbs to 2.91% on less than enthusiastic bills auction
Not a good way to begin if you have to sell $441 billion in net debt in the first quarter of 2018. This morning the U.S. Treasury sold $96 billion of short-term bills at yields unseen since 2008. At auction the government sold $51 billion of three-month bills at a...
Get ready for the deluge in the Treasury market this week
With the U.S. financial markets closed for Presidents’ Day and with markets in China and Hong Kong still closed for the Lunar New Year, it’s a slow news day for stocks and bonds today. But get ready for the action to resume on Tuesday with much of the...
Inflation continues to creep higher in today’s CPI report; Treasury yields rise again
Headline CPI (Consumer Price Index) inflation climbed 0.5% in January, the Labor Department announced today. That was above the 0.4% increase expected by economists surveyed by Briefing.com. (Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected a 0.3% increase.) Core CPI,...
Higher long-term volatility lurks in widening spread of interest rate forecasts
Today Goldman Sachs projected that the yield on the Treasury 10-year note will climb as high as 3.5% in the next six months. In addition, the Wall Street giant told Bloomberg, the U.S. Federal Reserve will raise rates four times in 2018. The yield on the 10-year...
The financial markets are in shock at Washington’s debt plans
Notice that the signing of a bill early this morning to keep the government open and to fund operations for two years hasn’t resulted in a serious rally in either stocks or bonds. As of 11:30 a.m. New York time the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 0.18%, or...
Forget about stability–bond fears driving stocks lower again
Here we go again. After a pause that raised hopes that the slide in U.S. stocks was over, today the sell off has resumed. As of 3:30 p.m. New York time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was lower by 2.53%, or 629 points, to 24,264. The S&P 500 stock index was...
Price tag for keeping the government open: $500 billion added to deficit
The Senate is set to vote later today on a deal that would fund the government for two years and add $500 billion in new spending to a deficit already pegged at north of $1 trillion. The deal is extremely likely to pass the Senate–it’s got something for...
Bond market weakness returns on pause in rout, weak auction
With a pause in the Friday/Monday stock market rout, the bond market isn’t getting support from a flight to safety (at least for the moment) and worries specific to the bond market have remerged as the leading factor in bond yields. Today the yield on the...
S&P 500 erases its gains for 2018; with index down 4.1% today, Wall Street looking for 10% drop from 2018 high
Is this starting to get serious? Wall Street still doesn’t think so. With the Standard & Poor’s 500 down 4.1% today, it has wiped out all of its 2018 gains. Wall Street continues to look for no more than a 10% drop for the January 26 high total...
On my JubakAM.Com subscription site, I just added an ETF for the bond bear market–and today’s meltdown
The logic is pretty simple–I think the rise in yields on Treasuries and the anticipated rise in interest rates from the Federal Reserve that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 650 points today isn’t over. There’s just too much...
Good jobs report turns into bad news for bonds and stocks this morning
The U.S. economy added 200,000 jobs in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected 180,000 net new jobs. The official unemployment rate remained at 4.1%. The U-6 total unemployment rate, which...
Fed signals “maybe”on four interest rate hikes in 2018 but stocks stabilize anyway after yesterday’s drop
As expected the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged at today’s meeting of the Open Market Committee. But in its post-meeting statement, the last in the chair for Janet Yellen, the central bank added language that points toward a slightly more...
The march to a yield of 2.7% on the 10-year Treasury has set off nervous market chatter–and a retreat in stock prices today
When is high too high? The U.S. stock market has been a real champ at sailing past the prospect of higher interest rates to new high after new high. But the march of the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury has led to a pause for thought among traders and investors. The...
Full reverse: Dollar recovers as President Trump talks up advantages of strong currency
Today somebody in the Trump administration decided that the idea of the world’s biggest debtor nation talking down the value of its currency–as Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin did yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos–might be a bad...
Dollar slump continues this morning as ECB president Draghi shrugs off euro strength
The dollar continued its fall this morning after European Central Bank president Marie Draghi voiced minimal concern over the rise in the euro. That currency topped $1.25 for the first time since 2014. The MSCI Emerging Markets Currency Index jumped 0.9%, its biggest...
Trump administration pushes a weak dollar at Davos
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin gave the markets a green light to push the U.S. dollar lower in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Currency traders, already on board the lower-dollar train, didn’t waste time before pushing the throttle. The Dollar...
Are bond yields finally climbing (and bond prices falling) in a belated response to a global shift in central bank policies?
The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury climbed 7 basis points today to 2.55%. That’s the highest yield since March. That prompted bond guru Bill Gross to declare that we have entered a confirmed bear market in bonds with the upward trend lines for bond prices of...Jim’s Daily Email Alerts:
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