Bonds: Investors look for safety in government debt even as new virus cases slow
These were the movements in some of the most closely-followed 10-year sovereign bond yields:
US: 1.57% (-7bp)
UK: 0.57% (-1bp)
Germany: -0.38% (-2bp)
France: -0.14% (-2bp)
Italy: 0.94% (-2bp)
Spain: 0.28% (-1bp)
Portugal: 0.323% (-2bp)
Greece: 1.05% (-9bp)
Japan: -0.05% (-2bp)
Investors took to the sidelines ahead of the weekend even as they continued to try and gauge the economic fallout of the new Chinese coronavirus.
That was particularly so Stateside, despite the release of a much better-than-expected reading on the US jobs market for January.
The number of new coronavirus cases in China fell for a second day, even as a raft of some of the best known corporate names issued warnings around the impact that the new coronavirus was having on their operations.
Included among the latter were Burberry, Toyota Motor, Hon Hai Precision and Canada Goose.
In the case of Hon Hai, better known as Fox Conn Technology, a key supplier to US tech giant Apple, the company told staff at its Shenzhen installations not to return to work following the end of the extended Lunar New Year holidays on 10 February.
Burberry meanwhile dropped its full-year financial guidance after shuttering 24 of 64 stores in China.
And yet, according to World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the number of new cases reported in China fell for a second consecutive day on Friday, reaching 3,696.
Nevertheless, Ghebreyesus was quick to warn "against reading too much into this".
According to the US Department of Labor, non-farm payrolls jumped by 225,000 in January (consensus: 160,000), helped in part by the third mildest temperatures on record for that month, which took the three-month average gain in NFP to a strong 211,000.
To take note of, following the latest jobs report, Ian Shepherdson at Pantheon Macroeconomics wondered aloud whether the US-China trade war might have led companies to be more aggressive in their wage bargaining with staff over the summer, predicting that faster wage gains were likely ahead as labour shortages became more acute.