TOKYO, March 24 (Reuters) - The yield on benchmark 10-year Japanese government bonds climbed on Thursday to the level that spurred the Bank of Japan last month to enter the market and temper the climb.
The 10-year JGB yield was 1 basis point higher at 0.230%, as of 0600 GMT, as elevated oil prices stoked expectations for a faster pace of global monetary tightening.
Yield scaled the same level reached on Feb. 10 for the first since January 2016, and which spurred the Bank of Japan to announce an unlimited bond purchase operation to bring it down from near the 0.25% tolerance ceiling under the central bank's yield curve control (YCC) policy.
"The speed of the rise in yield is not as fast as last time, so cautiousness about a BOJ operation maybe isn't as strong, but at the same time, with the 10-year yield nearing 0.25%, caution is increasing, and the pace of the yield's rise is gradually slowing down," said Makoto Suzuki, senior bond strategist at Okasan Securities.
The BOJ pegs the 10-year yield to zero, but allows it to flunctuate by up to 25 basis points either side of that. Last month the yield climbed sharply, pulled by a surge in Treasury yields amid increasingly hawkish trader expectations for Federal Reserve interest rate hikes.
Yields on either side of the 10-year also rose slightly, with the five-year and 20-year each up 0.5 basis point to 0.045% and 0.715%, respectively.
The two-year yield was flat at minus 0.030%, as was the 30-year at 0.935%.
Benchmark 10-year JGB futures fell 0.12 point to 149.64, with a trading volume of 18,011 lots.
(Reporting by Tokyo markets team)
