NEW YORK: US Treasuries prices fell on Friday as an upbeat report on US consumer sentiment and less dire data on inflation sparked profit-taking on recent gains tied to fears about deflation in Europe and a surprise policy U-turn by the Swiss central bank.
The US government debt market came off five days of gains linked to safe-haven demand that had sent the 30-year bond yield to a series of record lows.
A small move back up in slumping oil prices also helped reduce worries the US economic expansion could be disrupted by the huge recent fall in crude, causing some investors to scale back Treasuries holdings.
"It's just some profit-taking. We got to levels which were unsustainable," said Thomas Roth, executive director of US government trading at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities USA in New York. In choppy trading, benchmark 10-year Treasury notes were down 3/32 in price with a yield of 1.785 percent, up 1 basis point from late on Thursday.
The yield rose as high as 1.831 percent during the height of the sell-off. It hit a 20-month low of 1.698 percent earlier after the government said its consumer price index fell 0.4 percent in December, matching analyst expectations.
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