CREDIT : Bond Prices Slightly Lower; Trading Quiet

Bond prices drifted lower Wednesday amid a lack of economic news to affect trading.

The price of the Treasury’s 30-year bond fell 3/16 point, or about $1.87 per $1,000 in face value, while its yield rose to 9.02% from 9% late Tuesday. Corporate and municipal issues were little changed.

Analysts said there was no news to influence traders.

“It was a non-event,” said Marshall Front, chief economist with the investment and mutual fund management firm Stein Roe & Farnham in Chicago.

“There’s such a degree of confusion and lack of conviction on the part of many investors, both individual and institutional, that there just doesn’t seem to be any impetus to go in either direction,” he said.

In the secondary market for Treasury bonds, prices of short-term governments were unchanged to 1/32 point lower, intermediate maturities were down between 3/32 point and 1/8 point and 20-year issues were off 1/16 point, according to the financial information service Telerate Inc.

Index Falls

The movement of a point is equivalent to a change of $10 in the price of a bond with a $1,000 face value.

The Merrill Lynch daily Treasury index, which measures price movements on all outstanding Treasury issues with maturities of a year or longer, fell 0.07 to 110.54.

In corporate bond trading, industrials and utilities were unchanged in light trading, according to the investment firm Salomon Bros.

Tax-exempt municipal bonds were up 1/32 point.

Yields on three-month Treasury bills fell 5 basis points to 5.86%. A basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point. Six-month bills slipped 3 basis points to 6.22% and one-year bills rose 2 basis points to 6.57%.

The federal funds rate, the interest on overnight loans between banks, rose to 7% from 6.813% late Tuesday.

Tables, Page 14