Indirect bidders, a class of investors that includes foreign central banks, purchased 56.1 percent of the seven-year auction. The bidders purchased 63.1 percent at the five-year sale.

“This idea of a rate differential between our securities and theirs is becoming enticing,” said Charles Comiskey, head of Treasury trading at Bank of Nova Scotia in New York, one of 22 primary dealers that are obligated to bid at U.S. government debt offerings. “There’s more room in the U.S. for yields to go lower.”

A sale two-year notes, often seen as most sensitive to changes in borrowing rates, drew a yield of 0.540 percent. A month earlier, the auction yield was 0.703 percent.

The Federal Open Market Committee said the U.S. expansion as “solid,” an improvement over the “moderate” performance it saw in December. The FOMC met Jan. 27-28.

The yield difference between two- and 30-year U.S. securities on Friday touched 1.75 percentage points, the least since 2008. Shorter-term yields are more sensitive to the outlook for Fed interest-rate targets, while longer-term debt tends to reflect projections for inflation.

Bullard View

Fed Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said Friday investors are wrong to expect the Fed to postpone an interest- rate increase beyond midyear, with the U.S. economy leading global growth and unemployment dropping.

“The market has a more dovish view of what the Fed is going to do than the Fed itself,” Bullard said in an interview in New York. “Markets should take it at face value” from the Fed’s rate projections, and it’s “reasonable” to expect an increase in June or July.

U.S. employers added 235,000 jobs in January, according to the median estimate in Bloomberg News survey of economists, compared with an average month gain of 246,000 last year.

Gross domestic product grew at a 2.6 percent annualized rate after a 5 percent gain in the third quarter that was the fastest since 2003, Commerce Department figures showed Friday. Although U.S. growth trailed projections, it continues to outpace much of the developed world, which is threatened by recession and deflation.