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Stocks, Conoco sink bonds
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April 15, 1999: 3:37 p.m. ET
Dow's upturn conspires with $4B corporate float to knock Treasurys lower
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - The Treasury market spent Thursday retreating from both corporate competitors and Wall Street's seemingly unending advance, although rumors of a coming shake-up in Russian government fueled a weak run to quality.
By 3:00 p.m. ET, the benchmark 30-year Treasury bond was down 10/32 of a point in price at 95-29/32, pushing the yield up to 5.53 percent.
Traders said the stock market continued to starve Treasurys of both investor interest and fresh capital, as the Dow industrials pursued a precarious course deeper into record territory. Although trading volume was at its high for the week Thursday, it remained well below normal levels.
Meanwhile, a flood of fresh corporate supply weighed the Treasury market down as investors struggled to make room in their fixed-income portfolios for $4 billion in fresh Conoco (COC) debt. The Conoco offering, referred to by its own issuer as "jumbo," finally priced late Thursday at a Moody's debt rating of A3 and a Standard & Poor's rating of A-.
The giant oil company said it will use proceeds to repay parent company DuPont (DD) for debt incurred in its spin-off last October.
Rumors that either Russian President Boris Yeltsin or Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov may be close to resigning gave the short end of the Treasury market a slight boost, said Scott Graham, co-head of government bond trading at Prudential Securities. Russian authorities denied the reports.
Traders said the morning's jobless claims report had scant effect on the bond market, as the news, while unexpected, prompted little fresh buying interest.
Dollar close to par
The dollar was close to unchanged against the yen edging up to 118.86 yen on concerns that Japanese monetary officials may soon step in to adjust exchange levels.
A strong yen was cited as a factor in the Tokyo stock market's overnight decline, feeding fears that the Bank of Japan could flood currency markets with yen in order to defend Japan's fragile export sector.
However, these fears did little to buoy the dollar in the face of an ongoing flood of global capital into Tokyo stocks. According to the Japanese Ministry of Finance, overseas traders bought 1.5987 trillion yen ($13.4 billion) in March to buy Japanese equities.
The euro slipped to $1.0705 from its previous close of $1.0802, easing as traders hedged their bets as another weekend approached without a resolution to military conflict in the Balkans.
A 8:00 a.m. ET report from the Bundesbank, the German central bank, did little to encourage euro bulls. The bank's profit in 1998 fell to 16.2 billion marks ($8.9 billion), a steep decline from the year-ago profit of 24.23 billion marks ($13.38 billion). 
-- by staff writer Robert Scott Martin
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