Treasuries showed a lack of direction throughout much of the trading day on Thursday before ending the session roughly flat.
After pulling back off early highs, bond prices spent most of the day lingering near the unchanged line. Subsequently, the yield on the benchmark ten-year note, which moves opposite of its price, ended the day down by less than a basis point at 2.023 percent.
The choppy trading on the day came as traders expressed continued uncertainty about the outlook for the Federal Reserve's asset purchase program.
In Congressional testimony on Wednesday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledged that upbeat economic data could lead the central bank to scale back the program in the next few meetings.
Additionally, the minutes of the latest Fed meeting said a number of participants expressed willingness to adjust the flow of purchases downward as early as the June meeting.
While the Fed indicated that any tapering of the asset purchase program will depend on evidence of sufficiently strong and sustained growth, traders largely shrugged off a pair of upbeat economic reports.
The Labor Department released a report early in the day showing a bigger than expected drop in weekly jobless claims in the week ended May 18th.
The report showed that initial jobless claims fell to 340,000, a decrease of 23,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 363,000. Economists had expected jobless claims to drop to about 345,000 from the 360,000 originally reported for the previous week.
Separately, the Commerce Department released a report showing that new home sales came in well above economist estimates in the month of April.
The Commerce Department said new home sales climbed 2.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 454,000 in April from the revised March rate of 444,000.
Economists had expected new home sales to rise to an annual rate of 425,000 compared to the 417,000 originally reported for the previous month, reflecting a 1.9 percent increase.
On Friday, trading could be impacted by the release of the Commerce Department's report on durable goods orders in the month of April. Economists expect orders to increase by 1.1 percent.
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