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By Bloomberg

After Treasuries tumbled last week, investors opened for business Monday by snapping them back up.

Demand for U.S. securities was stoked as Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras reaffirmed his government’s rejection of an international bailout program and imports in China plunged. U.S. debt has also benefited this year from money managers seeking higher yields than they can get in Europe or Japan. The trade came back to life this week after U.S. 10-year yields climbed to as much as 159 basis points more than their German peers on Feb. 6, the largest premium in a month.

“The global environment is going to help a flight-to- quality bid,” said Craig Collins, managing director of rates trading at Bank of Montreal in London. “The European Central Bank and Greece are still very far apart. That’s the main trigger of today’s strength.” The ECB is one of Greece’s so- called troika of official creditors, along with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.

The U.S. 10-year yield fell five basis points, or 0.05 percentage point, to 1.91 percent at 6:52 a.m. New York time, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader data. The 2.25 percent note due in November 2024 climbed 1/2, or $5 per $1,000 face amount, to 103 2/32.

The yield jumped 14 basis points on Feb. 6 after the Labor Department said U.S. employers added more jobs in January than economists surveyed by Bloomberg News projected.

Ten-year Treasuries yielded 0.96 percentage point more than the average among their Group-of-Seven counterparts last week, the most since Jan. 2.

Yield ‘Attractive’

“The spread is wider,” said Hideo Shimomura, chief fund investor in Tokyo at Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management, which manages about $67.3 billion. “The U.S. yield is still attractive to global investors. This is a good time to buy Treasuries.”

Greek bonds plunged Monday as Tsipras’s comments came two days before an emergency meeting of the currency bloc’s finance ministers. He vowed to increase the minimum wage, restore the income tax-free threshold and halt infrastructure privatizations in an address to parliament, marking the start of a three-day debate on his government’s policy platform. Some measures would reverse changes made by previous governments as conditions of Greece’s bailout program. He said the government would not ask for a bailout extension, while saying he’s confident it can reach agreement on a bridge program in 15 days.

China’s imports fell by the most in more than five years in January, declining almost 20 percent from a year earlier, the customs administration in Beijing said on Sunday.

U.S. reports this week will show wholesale inventories advanced in December and retail sales slid in January, based on separate Bloomberg surveys of economists.

Debt Auctions

The Treasury is scheduled to sell a total of $64 billion of three-, 10- and 30-year debt in the three days starting tomorrow.

Bond bears point to strength in the U.S. job market as evidence the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates this year. In addition to the bigger-than-expected employment gain, earnings jumped, last week’s payroll report showed.

“The market underestimated the fundamentals, especially U.S. jobs,” said Hiroki Shimazu, senior market economist in Tokyo at SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., a unit of Japan’s second- largest publicly traded bank. “The Fed maybe underestimated the fundamentals. That means much higher Treasury yields to come.”

Ten-year yields will climb to 3 percent by June 30, he said.

The Fed will raise its benchmark, the target for overnight loans between banks, in about seven months, based on data compiled by Morgan Stanley. The gauge has fallen from about nine months at the beginning of February.

Treasuries returned 1.3 percent this year through last week, compared with a 0.7 percent loss for global developed sovereign debt, based on Bloomberg World Bond Indexes.