Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on March 02, 2026 in New York City.
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The 10-year Treasury yield slipped on Friday, though its loss was contained as investors assessed the likely inflation impact resulting from higher crude oil prices tied to the war in the Middle East.
The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield fell less than 2 basis points to 4.127%. The 30-year Treasury yield was little changed at 4.754%. The 2-year Treasury yield was more than 5 basis points lower at 3.544%.
The spread between the 2-year and the 10-year Treasury widened to more than 58 basis points, which might reflect higher expectations of future inflation.
One basis point is equal to 0.01%, and yields and prices move in opposite directions.
The move higher in Treasury yields came after U.S. West Texas Intermediate topped $90 a barrel on the seventh day of the Iran war as President Donald Trump demanded an unconditional surrender from the Islamic Republic. Global oil benchmark Brent crude broke above $92 a barrel.
“Obviously the higher energy price is going to push up headline CPI inflation mechanically,” Atakan Bakiskan, chief U.S. economist at Berenberg, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday.
The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. on Thursday had jumped nearly 27 cents from the week before, to $3.25, according to data from travel organization AAA.
Fixed-income investors looked past a surprise decline in February payrolls, with U.S. employers unexpectedly shedding 92,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate rising to 4.4%. Economists polled by Dow Jones has expected the Bureau of Labor Statistics to say 50,000 jobs were added to the economy last month, and unemployment would be unchanged at 4.3%.
“Today’s numbers may have put the Fed between a rock and a hard place,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. “Significant weakening in the labor market would support a rate cut, but given the risk that higher-for-longer oil prices could trigger another inflation surge, the Fed may feel compelled remain on the sidelines.”
Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday that one month’s jobs data won’t decide the course of Fed policy and that she would prefer to look at the two-month average of January — when the economy added a downwardly revised 126,000 new jobs — and February combined.
Market odds of a quarter point interest rate cut coming as soon as July edged slightly higher to 44.5%, as compared with a 34.6% likelihood the Fed will remain on hold at that meeting, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.
— CNBC’s Jeff Cox, Spencer Kimball, Chloe Taylor, Sam Meredith, Dan Mangan and Justin Zacks contributed to this report.