U.S. Treasury yields declined on Friday, as investors remained cautious over the spread of the omicron variant.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell 3 basis points to 1.38%. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond moved 3 basis points lower to 1.83%. Yields move inversely to prices and 1 basis point is equal to 0.01%.
“A lot of the movements in the 10-year yield really do seem to be driven by Covid-related news, along with normal economic related news,” New York Federal Reserve President John Williams said on CNBC Friday. “I think investors and the markets are very much focused on Fed policy, but Covid is still the biggest story in the global economy.”
The spread of the omicron Covid variant continued to weigh on investor sentiment. The U.K. reported a record number of daily cases on Thursday — at nearly 90,000 infections.
The Federal Reserve’s more hawkish turn on monetary policy also remained in focus for investors. The Fed said on Wednesday that it would speed up the reduction of its monthly bond purchases and indicated that it is looking at hiking interest rates in 2022.
Simon Lue-Fong, head of fixed income at Vontobel Asset Management, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday that he believed central banks would continue to be “behind the curve” in their monetary policy moves.
“And I think, therefore, the market is feeling relatively comfortable about central banks like the Fed… in a way coming up to the curve on what the market was thinking,” Lue-Fong said.
He explained that this was reason for less “aggressive” moves in bonds markets, as a lot of these actions had been priced in and it’s actually the “central banks that have been behind the curve.”
No major economic data releases are scheduled for Friday.
An auction is slated to be held on Friday for $60 billion of 23-day bills.
