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How US Treasury yields are reacting to Trump's tariff pause

In This Article:

US Treasury yields (^TNX, ^TYX, ^FVX) tick higher but move away from the intraday highs after President Donald Trump announced a 90-day tariff pause, sending US stocks (^DJI, ^GSPC, ^IXIC) soaring.

Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Alexandra Canal sits down with Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton on Market Domination to dive into the bond market reaction.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.

00:00 Speaker A

Meanwhile, he did say that he was watching the bond market, and certainly that has been a very interesting story as it's been involving, because Treasury yields have not reversed. They're still rising, not showing much reaction to the president's 90-day reciprocal tariff pause. Yet, the concerns surrounding Treasury yields, they could still continue. Here with Maria who finances Alexander Canal, who, along with many of us has been trying to sort of get to the bottom of what has been going on with Treasuries which we had seen yields pull back dramatically, and then over the past few sessions, they just went up.

00:54 Speaker B

And to your point, they're significantly up today. If you take a look at the 10 year, it's up about 14 basis points. We're trading at 4.4%. Same thing with the 30-year yield, up eight basis points right now, trading at around levels of 4.8%. So, we're still rising, building on those historic gains that we saw to kick off the week, and it's that sharp and steady jump as the catalyst for really what's been so concerning to strategists. We've had Eddie Ar Denny from your Denny Research. He came out with a note and told clients on Tuesday that something quote may be about to blow up in capital markets as a result of all of this back and forth trade policy. One concern is that China, Japan, and other foreign buyers will stop buying US Treasuries, essentially boycotting our debt. Other concerns stem from the potential unwinding of the so-called basis trade. Now, this is a highly leveraged trading strategy, most often used by hedge funds, and it occurs when traders attempt to profit from a small price gap between Treasury futures and actual government bonds. So the basic idea here is to buy the bonds at a cheaper price and short the more expensive futures contract, with the hope that the two prices will eventually merge. The problem though, is that hedge funds use a lot of borrowed money to do this at scale, sometimes up to 100 times in leverage bets, which means that if the price gap worsens, those small moves can create pretty significant losses. So shocks like tariffs, an economic recession, all of that could rapidly unwind these highly leveraged positions. And then you have the Fed component of it all, right? Torsten Slack from Apollo Global, he said that if the supply of Treasuries expands due to the growing budget deficit or the Fed reducing its balance sheet, that could also depress Treasury prices and therefore hurt the long leg of the trade. Plus we have this fear that perhaps tariff induced inflation, it's not going to be transitory like the Fed has suggested. So a lot of possible catalysts out there when it comes to what's driving this surge in yields, but still so many unknowns here. We have to sort of adopt this wait-and-see approach, which the Fed has already said they're going to be doing.

04:22 Speaker C

When you talk to these fixed income gurus, Ali, and you ask them, "Where is the benchmark 10-year head from here?" What do they tell you? And what degree of confidence do they have when they tell you?

04:41 Speaker B

The silver lining here is that a lot of the strategists that I've been speaking with say that yields will come down over the long term, particularly in the back half of the year. We just spoke with Mark Newton from Fundstrat. He has a 3.5% yield estimate for the 10 year coming in the fall. HSBC strategists, they had the same take, also keeping that same 3.5% prediction. And the big reason is that there's no real catalyst for why yields should surge dramatically from here. Now, Mark Newton did say that we still could see yields tick higher over the coming weeks, but again, we'll just have to wait and see.

05:46 Speaker C

Yeah, that Mark Newton, that's a smart technician.

05:51 Speaker A

Yes.

05:53 Speaker B

We're getting back.

05:54 Speaker C

Yeah, we should. Thank you, Allen.