The 30-Year Treasury Yield Just Touched 5.33%, a 19-Year High. Here's What History Says About the Last Time Long Rates Sat Above 5%.

The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield topped 5.33% on Tuesday, Aug. 18, a level last seen in June 2007. It has eased a bit since, sitting near 5.3% as of this writing. But the long bond has now paid at least 5% since early July, pushed there by a swelling federal deficit and inflation that has stayed stubbornly above 2%.

For stock investors, a number like that carries an implied threat. When what is arguably the safest long-term asset in the world pays 5%, the earnings a stock will deliver years from now are -- in a way -- worth less today since every valuation built on those uncertain, faraway earnings has to compete with the bond.

So it's worth knowing what U.S. stocks did during the long stretches when the 30-year paid more than 5%. The record covers almost three decades. And it isn't the one that threat implies.

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Two decades above 5%

Treasury's daily record of the 30-year yield begins in February 1977. From that first reading until late September 1998, the yield never closed below 5% (about 5,400 consecutive trading days, spanning almost 22 years).

Stocks did not merely survive those years. Over the 22 calendar years that stretch spans, 1977 through 1998, the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) returned about 15.8% a year with dividends reinvested -- enough to turn $10,000 into about a quarter of a million dollars.

Nineteen of those 22 calendar years were positive.

And for much of that time, the long bond paid far more than 5%. The 30-year yield spent most of 1980 through 1985 above 10%, and it still averaged more than 8% as late as 1990.

Indeed, the greatest bull market in modern history happened largely inside this high-rate era. From 1982 through the late 1990s, the index compounded at about 18% a year while the long bond never paid less than 5%.

Same level, opposite outcome

The second stretch above 5% tells the other side. From late 1998 through most of 2004, the 30-year yield again lived above the line most days (Treasury stopped issuing the bond in 2002, so the later years of that stretch come from its extrapolated long-term series).

This time, stocks returned about 1% a year over those six years.

That period includes the dot-com bust, when the S&P 500 lost about 37% of its value across 2000, 2001, and 2002. Those were three straight down years, the market's worst run since the 1970s. And the long bond paid more than 5% for most of the decline.

The visits that followed were briefer. The 30-year crossed 5% from April to August of 2006, a year the index returned about 16%.

It crossed again from May to July of 2007, peaking at 5.35% that June, slightly above where this past week's climb stopped. The 2008 crash followed, of course. But by then, yields had already collapsed below 5% and kept falling -- the crisis arrived with the bond in retreat, not on the attack. After 2007, the yield poked above 5% only in short bursts (October 2023, twice in 2025, this past May) before the current run took hold in July.

The bond wasn't the signal

Put those periods together, and one thing stands out. The level of long rates, by itself, decided almost nothing. Yields above 5% presided over the best two decades U.S. stocks have ever strung together, and also over the worst three-year stretch in a generation.

What separated the outcomes was the starting point for stocks, not the bond. In August 1982, the S&P 500 traded at about 8 times earnings. That price made the whole index look like a value stock. But in January 2000, it traded at 29 times earnings. The same bond yield can be weak competition for one market and stiff competition for another, depending on what investors are paying for the earnings on the other side.

That cuts against simply shrugging off today's market. Today's index is priced closer to the 2000 end of that range than the 1982 end, at about 29 times earnings by the same measure.

However, it also runs counter to treating the yield itself as a sell signal; caution on that basis alone would have kept an investor out of the market for two extraordinary decades.

For an investor holding the State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEMKT:SPY), the index fund launched in January 1993 when the 30-year paid 7.3%, I think the record points the worry somewhere specific. Stocks have compounded through long bonds at 5%, 8%, and 12% before. What they have never done is compound from an expensive start without a rough stretch along the way.

So the yield's 19-year high is worth knowing about, and the level may well keep pressuring the market's richest growth stocks. On history's evidence, though, a 5% long bond has not been a reason to sell stocks by itself. The price being paid for the stocks is the part that has mattered.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.