The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield was near flat on Friday after the February jobs report showed solid employment growth but also an increase in the unemployment rate.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury was just around 1 basis point lower at 4.079%. The 2-year Treasury yield was last down by about 3 basis point at 4.482%.
Yields and prices move in opposite directions. One basis point equals 0.01%.
The U.S. economy added 275,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. That was above the 198,000 jobs projected by economists according to Dow Jones.
However, the unemployment rate rose by 0.2 percentage points to 3.9%. The change appeared to be due in part to revisions that lowered the estimated job growth from December and January by 167,000.
Those data points add up to conflicting signals about the state of the U.S. economy. Investors and policymakers are trying to gauge if the Federal Reserve can push inflation back to its 2% target without causing a recession. Many economists believe that job and wage growth will need to slow in order for inflation to fall further.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell this week reiterated that policymakers were still looking for more confidence that the economy, and especially inflation, is cooling before cutting rates, but that there was not much further to go.
“We’re waiting to become more confident that inflation is moving sustainably at 2%. When we do get that confidence, and we’re not far from it, it’ll be appropriate to begin to dial back the level of restriction,” he told the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.
Elsewhere, the European Central Bank left rates unchanged on Thursday and cut its forecast for inflation as well as growth.
