Yields on U.S. government debt finished mixed on Friday amid lower volatility as traders absorbed the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the Federal Reserve's 25-basis-point interest-rate cut.
What happened
-- The yield on the 2-year Treasury BX:TMUBMUSD02Y rose 3.7 basis points to 4.253%, from around 4.216% Thursday. For the week, the yield advanced 5.2 basis points. It is up 69.1 basis points over the past six weeks. Yields move in the opposite direction to prices.
-- The yield on the 10-year Treasury BX:TMUBMUSD10Y fell 3.4 basis points to 4.307%, from 4.341% on Thursday. For the week, it declined 5.4 basis points.
-- The yield on the 30-year Treasury BX:TMUBMUSD30Y dropped 6.6 basis points to 4.478%, from 4.544% on Thursday. It declined 8.2 basis points this week.
-- The bond market is closed on Monday for the Veterans Day holiday.
What's driving markets
The Treasury market navigated two big events this week - Tuesday's presidential election and Thursday's rate cut by the Fed - prompting investors to sharply pare back bets on volatility. The ICE BofAML MOVE Index, a measure of expected volatility in the Treasury market, has tumbled to around 104.8, down sharply from where it was at the start of this week.
"The bond market feared chaos and uncertainty around the election and Fed meeting, but that did not come to pass," Jim Bianco of Bianco Research said in an online post on the X social-media platform.
Though the MOVE index has declined, this doesn't mean investors should expect yields to continue falling because - unlike the Cboe Volatility Index VIX tracking S&P 500 SPX volatility expectations - "the correlation between yields and the MOVE is zero," Bianco wrote.
"Lower volatility is not going to make yields go down," he said.
Indeed, yields on everything from the 6-month Treasury bill BX:TMUBMUSD06M through the 5-year note BX:TMUBMUSD05Y finished higher in Friday's session, according to FactSet data. The rise in the 2-year yield came as the market-implied likelihood of no rate action by the Fed in December edged up to 35.1%, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.
In data released on Friday, a survey of consumer sentiment rose to a seven-month high shortly before the election of former President Donald Trump.
-Vivien Lou Chen -Jamie Chisholm
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