NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – On Tuesday, US government bond prices increased their losses from the beginning of the week somewhat. With risk appetite picking up again, investors increasingly turned their backs on US bonds, which are seen as a safe haven. The futures contract for ten-year Treasuries (T-Note future) fell by 0.44 percent to 117.95 points. In contrast, the yield on ten-year government bonds rose to 3.02 percent.
Mixed US economic data from the real estate industry hardly moved bond prices. The focus was on concerns about a European energy crisis and interest rate prospects in the euro zone. The latter was due to an insider report by the Bloomberg news agency on the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB), according to which the key interest rate on Thursday could not be increased by 0.25 percentage points, as recently assumed, but by as much as 0.5 points in order to combat high inflation.
In an international comparison, the ECB is relatively late; several interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve have supported the dollar in recent months due to the widening interest rate differential. Meanwhile, interest rate expectations of the US Federal Reserve have recently fallen somewhat. In general, it was said that investors’ willingness to take risks was increasing again, which drove them out of US bonds and the US dollar. This also grew because of the hope that, from Thursday, Russian gas could again flow to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was recently shut down for maintenance