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- Yields on 10-year US Treasury notes topped 5% for the first time since 2007 Monday.
- Bond prices have cratered in recent weeks in one of the worst routs in market history.
- Traders' worries about the Fed's interest-rate hikes and the government's mountain of debt have fueled the sell-off.
The US bond market's worst-ever rout ticked off a new milestone Monday, as 10-year Treasury yields shot past 5% for the first time in 16 years.
The yield, which is seen by Wall Street as a key gauge of bond-market health, jumped nine basis points to 5.01% in early-morning trading, reaching its highest level since July 2007.
Longer-duration Treasury prices have cratered in recent weeks, dragged down by investors' worries about the Federal Reserve's war on inflation and the US government's ever-ballooning debt burden.
That's pushed up yields, which move in the opposite direction to prices, with 30-year yields also passing 5% earlier this month.
The run-up in yields has been driven by the Fed signaling that it plans to keep interest rates high well into 2024 in a bid to kill off inflation, which has cooled this year but still remains way above the central bank's 2% target. When borrowing costs are high, bond prices fall because their fixed returns become less attractive to investors.
Chair Jerome Powell said last week that the Fed plans to proceed "carefully" with its tightening campaign – but the majority of traders aren't expecting rate cuts until June at the earliest, according to data from the CME Group.
Lingering concerns about the deficit have also fueled the sell-off. The US Treasury is expected to flood the market with bills, notes, and bonds in a bid to raise money to cover more than $33 trillion worth of debt.
"Over the last quarter, bond yields have risen even as inflation has fallen and central banks have indicated that rates are close to their peaks," Hargreaves Lansdown's head of strategic asset allocation Robert Farago said in a research note Monday. "The recent rise in rates tells us investors are demanding a higher risk premium for owning longer-dated bonds."
Multiple top banks have called for investors to load up on bonds while yields are elevated, with UBS expecting 10-year notes to outperform the benchmark S&P 500 stock-market index over the first half of next year.
Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley Investment Management has said that 10-year yields passing 5% should be a green light for investors to start snapping up Treasurys.
"Those will be great levels to get longer in your portfolio from a duration perspective," money manager Vishal Khanduja said in a research note last week.