U.S. Treasury yields continued their push higher on Monday, with the 10-year Treasury yield capturing a new milestone in its rapid climb in 2022.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose about 11 basis points to 2.994%, and hit a high of 3.01% during the session. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond jumped more than 9 basis points to 3.044%. Yields move inversely to prices and 1 basis point is equal to 0.01%.
The 10-year’s move put the yield at its highest level since Dec. 3, 2018. The benchmark yield has risen rapidly this year after ending 2021 near 1.5%. It was trading near 2.33% at the end of March.
“It’s a very psychologically significant hurdle for the 10-year Treasury yield and yet it’s not really an important resistance level for it,” Fairlead Strategies founder and managing partner Katie Stockton said on CNBC’s “The Exchange.”
“We’d have to go back to the 2018 high, which is of course 3.25%. We, of course, have seen very positive or upside momentum behind Treasury yields, and that’s no change today … with it punching through that level but it is just a round number that we can see as another threshold being cleared by them.”
Investors are looking ahead to Wednesday, when the Federal Open Market Committee will issue a statement on monetary policy. The decision will be released at 2 p.m. ET, with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell holding a press conference at 2:30 p.m.
A hot inflation report Friday underscored the difficult macro environment. The core personal consumption expenditures price index — the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — rose 5.2% from a year ago.
“The global nature of the current inflation outbreak makes the Federal Reserve’s job in reducing US inflation all the more difficult. With much of the inflationary pressure coming from exogenous factors (global oil prices, supply chain bottlenecks, Zero Covid tolerance in China) the Fed’s use of its main policy lever, raising its overnight borrowing rate to push up borrowing costs for businesses and consumers, gives it limited power to arrest these global inflationary pressures,” Oppenheimer chief investment strategist John Stoltzfus said in a note to clients.
There were some conflicting readings on the economic front Monday.
The US manufacturing PMI from S&P Global came in at 59.2, down slightly from a preliminary reading but higher than in March. The ISM manufacturing PMI, meanwhile, fell to 55.4, missing estimates.
—CNBC’s Pippa Stevens, Kevin Stankiewicz and Hannah Miao contributed to this article.
