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supply and demand

You should think about what influences supply and demand for something that pays a coupon, has basically no default risk, and has extremely high liquidity. Then, think about what would influence differences between different terms for those instruments.

 
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In short, supply/demand, but I guess thats not super helpful.

As a really crude start, you can say the N-year treasury yield is roughly the 'average' expected risk-free interest rate over the next N years. This is the expectations hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectations_hypothesis).

In reality, this works really well on the short end (so they say the Fed controls the short end by controlling the Fed Funds rate), but as you go further out the curve (10y+) it gets more influenced by inflation (or nominal GDP), 'term premium' (as a catch-all phrase for all the stuff not easily explained by the expectations hypothesis), and idiosyncratic supply demand. Ex: Insurance companies and pensions with long-dated liabilities (they owe more PV in liabilities if rates go down) so they buy long-dated bonds (to make money to offset this if rates go down). Reason being, as you go further out the curve, even if you know with certainty what short-term interest rates will be over N years, you are taking on far too much duration/market risk to make that sort of trade pragmatic, so other factors tend to dominate.

There is also other idiosyncratic supply demand- ex: if people panic, they tend sell US stocks to buy long-dated US treasuries (because these have more risk than short-dated bonds).

 

The 2yr is most closely aligned to the expectation short term Fed Funds Rate path.

The 10yr (and then even more so the 30yr) is driven by longer term economic expectations. Since the business cycle lasts 6-12 years on avg...that puts the 10yr square in the sights of the next economic cycle (and the 30yr 3 economic cycles). The hard part is predicting the future that far out...nobody has been able to do it very well...so longer duration bonds correlate with equities and longer term economic data (like housing, inflation expectation, the credit cycle, etc..)

Its not easy, and 10 economists will have 10 different views...so its anybodies guess.

just google it...you're welcome
 

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