Markets have been doing their best to digest all of this uncertainty over the looming government shutdown, labor market, and, you know, everything else.

Bond markets have been reacting to the news — the yield on the 10-year T-note has been falling over the last couple days.

The big signal that bond markets are sending us this week is that they’re a little nervous about what’s going on in Washington.

“You know, if we do get the shutdown, how long is that shutdown going to be?” said Chuck Tomes with Manulife Investment Management.

He said markets are concerned, in large part, because this potential shutdown could have a real impact on the broader economy.

“There’s different numbers that people have thrown out there, anywhere from, you know, 0.1 to 0.2 drag on quarterly GDP growth every week that the shutdown lasts,” he said.

Then there’s the likelihood that a shutdown will cause the government to withhold upcoming economic data releases, including Friday’s jobs report.

“And any time you have some uncertainty, people get a little more nervous, and move towards more flight-to-quality type investments, and you’re seeing that happen in the Treasury market overall,” Tomes said.

More demand for those safe Treasurys pushes down their yields.

The thing is, government bond yields have been trending lower for months now. That has more to do with the labor market than a federal shutdown, said Randy Vogel, head of fixed income with Wilmington Trust.

“The market’s grown a bit concerned, as has the Fed, about the weakening of the labor market. And that’s kept the Fed engaged with rate cuts,” he said.

Vogel said many investors are deciding to buy bonds now, before rates fall further.

“It could be pension funds looking to lock in yields at those rates, because they think in the future rates are coming down, it could be a retail investor who’s looking at a Treasury or a corporate [bond] and thinking the same thing,” he said.

But demand for government bonds hasn’t been uniform. 

John Canavan, lead market analyst at Oxford Economics, said investors are still nervous about inflation. Partly because of tariffs, and also because consumer and business spending has held up.

“We’ve seen better-than-expected durable goods orders recently, better-than-expected consumer spending figures recently,” he said.

As a result, Canavan said investors are more leery about piling money into longer-term bonds. Since inflation looks like it’ll be sticking around.

“Which means that long-term yields, because of the inflation concerns, will not fall as quickly as short-term yields will, as investors demand greater yield for the inflation risks over a longer period of time,” he said.

In other words: The bond market is sending us signals that it’s concerned. But it’s also telling us that the economy is still humming along.