Forecasters warn of disastrous year ahead for US government bonds

Washington

GET ready for a disastrous year for US government bonds. That is the message that forecasters on Wall Street are sending.

With Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen poised to raise interest rates in 2015 for the first time in almost a decade, prognosticators are convinced that Treasury yields have nowhere to go except up. Their calls for higher yields next year are the most aggressive since 2009, when US debt securities suffered record losses, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Getting it right has not been easy. Almost everyone who foresaw a sell-off this year as the Fed ended its bond buying was caught off-guard as lacklustre US wage growth and turmoil in emerging markets propelled Tre…