The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield slid on Wednesday as investors assessed the state of the economy after the release of labor market data while awaiting a key report due Friday.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury dipped by more than 5 basis points at 4.119%. That pushed the yield to a new low going back to early September.
The 2-year Treasury yield was last higher by more than 2 basis points at 4.599%, making up for some losses after having fallen by as many as 7 basis points on Tuesday.
Yields fall when the price of bonds rises. One basis point equals 0.01%.
Investors digested a slew of data Wednesday. Unit labor costs, a measure of wages to output, fell 1.2% in the July-through-September period, more than the initial -0.8% estimate last month and the -0.9% Dow Jones forecast.
Productivity, or output per hour, revved higher by 5.2% for the same period, compared to the 4.7% initial estimate in November and the 4.9% Dow Jones expectation.
Meanwhile, traders got another sign of job market cooling on Wednesday, as ADP data also came in below forecasts. Private payrolls increased by 103,000 in November, under the Dow Jones estimate of 128,000.
Treasury yields fell on Tuesday after JOLTs job openings figures for October came in lower than expected and indicated a cooling of the labor market — 8.73 million openings were recorded, a drop of 617,000 and far below the 9.4 million Dow Jones estimate.
Investors are awaiting the November jobs report, scheduled for release on Friday, for confirmation the Fed is done hiking rates. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect the economy to have added 190,000 payrolls.
Uncertainty about the outlook for interest rates, which the Fed began hiking in early 2022 to cool the economy and ease inflation, has spread in recent weeks. Though the Fed is widely expected to keep rates unchanged when it meets next week, there have been few hints about how long rates are set to remain elevated.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said last week that it is still too early to speculate about rate cuts and also did not take the option for further rate hikes off the table