10-Year Treasury Yield

History

What the 10-Year Treasury is

The 10-year Treasury yield is what the US government pays to borrow for a decade, and by convention it is the risk-free rate the rest of the market is priced against. Every discounted-cash-flow valuation DeepValues runs pulls future owner earnings back to the present at a rate anchored here.

That makes it the one number on this page that re-prices every business on the platform without a single earnings estimate changing. Buffett's formulation is the clearest: interest rates are to asset prices what gravity is to the apple. Raise the rate and every future dollar is worth less today — a growth company, whose value sits furthest out in time, feels it hardest.

How it is built

The series is the US Treasury's constant-maturity 10-year yield, published daily and quoted directly in percent. It is a market yield derived from the Treasury's own end-of-day curve, not a coupon on any single bond.

The history runs back to 1962, which covers the entire arc from the 1981 peak near 15.8% through the 2020 floor near 0.5%. Both ends matter for reading the present: the current level is unremarkable against the full record and extraordinary against the decade before 2022.

Source: FRED DGS10 (US Treasury constant maturity) · series page

How to read it

The bands here describe the rate regime rather than good and bad: under 2% very low, 2–3.5% low, 3.5–5% normal, 5–6.5% high, and above 6.5% very high.

Under 2% is the ZIRP and quantitative-easing anomaly of roughly 2011 to 2021. Cheap money lifts every multiple, so that is the regime in which equities look most expensive to somebody buying cash flows — which is why the band is marked as an extraordinary condition rather than a benign one. The 3.5–5% middle is close to the post-war norm.

The direction matters more than the level for short-run market behaviour. A fast move of a hundred basis points in either direction has historically done more to multiples than the absolute level it moved from.

What it does not tell you

A nominal yield conflates two things: the real rate and expected inflation. A 5% nominal yield with 4% expected inflation is a very different world from 5% with 1%, and this gauge cannot tell them apart. For the real component, the TIPS yield is the honest series.

The 10-year is also not the Fed's policy rate. The Fed sets the overnight rate; the long end is set by the market and frequently moves against policy — the 2004–06 "conundrum" being the textbook case. Do not read this as a Fed decision.

Latest FOMC statement

Raised 25 bp to 3.75–4.00% on 16 Sept 2026, by a 12–0 vote. The Federal Reserve's own words follow, unedited — the statement is about 150 words, so a summary of it would only lose information.

Next meeting: 27 Oct 2026 – 28 Oct 2026.

The other gauges

• Buffett IndicatorTotal US stock market value divided by the size of the US economy.
• Shiller PE (CAPE)The S&P 500 priced against ten years of inflation-adjusted earnings.
• CBOE VIXWhat the options market is charging for the next thirty days of risk.
• AAII SentimentHow bullish individual investors say they are — the classic contrarian read.
• Fed Balance SheetThe liquidity tide — how much of today's price is money rather than business.