U.S. Treasury debt prices fell on Friday, pushing yields to two-week highs, after strong jobs data dashed some of the remaining expectations that the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates this year.

Unexpectedly robust job growth in June and upward revisions to figures for April and May added to recent downward pressure on bonds. Based on the rise in benchmark yields, the market was on track for its biggest week of losses in just over a year.

The employment report was the latest in a series of data releases to indicate the economy rebounded strongly in the second quarter after a dismal start to the year, suggesting there was no need for a growth-boosting interest rate cut.

Prices on benchmark 10-year notes fell 10/32, pushing yields up to 5.19% from 5.14% late on Thursday. Benchmark yields reached a peak of 5.21 %, their highest since June 22.

Two-year Treasury notes slid 1/32 for a yield of 5.00%. Two-year yields briefly rose to 5.02%, their highest since June 19.

Two-year notes were on pace for their biggest weekly rise in yields since April this year.

Five-year notes dropped 6/32, lifting yields to 5.10% from 5.05%. The 30-year long bond slid 21/32, pushing yields up to 5.27% from 5.23%.

The jobs report, one of the biggest monthly releases on the data calendar, added fuel to global bond market fears of a prolonged fight by the world’s central banks to keep inflation under control.

Euro zone and British debt prices also fell on the news.

In the United States, investors have eliminated most of the last remaining bets on the Fed cutting benchmark rates from their current 5.25%, where they have been for a year.

In addition to the jobs figures, surveys this week showing that manufacturing and service sector growth hit their fastest pace in over a year last month helped to flesh out a robust picture of the U.S. economy.

“The bond market has backed up on the growth data and we expect that to continue throughout the year,” said Michael Pond, Treasury and inflation-linked strategist at Barclays Capital in New York.

“We expect the bond market will factor in rate hikes in the coming months but it will take time to get there,” he added.

The next cannon shot is about to boom in the financial industry civil war.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has until May 14 to appeal a March 30 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The battle pits tens of thousands of financial planners against 660,000 brokers. At stake: the almost 1 million fee-based brokerage accounts with almost $277.4 billion in assets.

The court ruled that the SEC overstepped its authority by allowing brokers to hold themselves out as investment advisers without requiring them to act as fiduciaries.

The SEC’s stance prior to the court decision had allowed brokers to compete with financial advisers who were held to the standards and liabilities of financial fiduciaries.

Incensed at what it saw as an uneven playing field, the Financial Planning Association sued the SEC in ‘04.

The SEC declined to comment as of Thursday on its next step, according to spokesman John Heine. The agency could ask the full circuit court for a rehearing.

The SEC also could appeal to the Supreme Court.

Another option is for the agency to amend its rules.

The National Association of Securities Dealers, through a spokesman, said it would be premature to comment on the litigation until the SEC decides how it will proceed.

Last month, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association urged the SEC to seek a rehearing. SIFMA is an industry group representing securities firms, banks and asset managers.

The battle focuses around broker-dealers who offer fee-based accounts. They ran almost 1 million accounts for investors, with $277.4 billion in assets as of Dec. 31, according to Cerulli Associates.

“A key issue is how much brokers must disclose to their clients,” said FPA Chairman Dan Moisand.

It affects the extent to which advisers must put client interests before their own. The FPA says advisers are held to a higher standard than most brokers. Because of that, they face greater liability if they fail to meet that higher standard.

Determining Disclosure

That inequality bars them from some potentially profitable practices in which they say that brokers can engage. Those practices potentially can be profitable to brokers at the expense of clients, the FPA says.

“A key difference is that brokers can execute trades from inventory,” Moisand said. “They can keep the spread on what they buy from one customer and sell to another. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But they don’t have to get their customer’s permission and disclose the spreads. And they don’t face a best-execution requirement. Our advisers do.”

Advisers with fiduciary duty must disclose qualifications, pay structure, disciplinary history and any conflicts of interest, Moisand says. Most brokers don’t have to, he says.

Investors’ flexibility will be cut if the current ruling stands, according to a new poll for SIFMA.

“…Consumers prefer to have a range of investment choices instead of being forced into cookie-cutter accounts with a single type of investment professional,” SIFMA President Marc Lackritz said in a release.

But the only reason choices would decline, Moisand says, is that brokerages would refuse to offer accounts that bar their salespeople from conducting business as they do now.

The fiduciary duty held by non-brokerage advisers stems from the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. That requires advisers to register with the SEC or state regulators.

But in 1999 the SEC adopted a rule that exempted broker-dealers that offer fee-based brokerage accounts from registering as advisers.

Such accounts make up about 20% of all retail brokerage accounts, SIFMA says.

In 2005, the SEC began requiring tougher disclosure. Brokers running fee-based accounts had to alert investors to the fact that the accounts technically are not for advice. They also had to point out that they may be subject to conflicts of interest.

About 31% of the U.S.’s 660,000 brokers are registered as investment advisers. They generally have the same fiduciary duty of nonbrokerage advisers. Their 327,000 accounts have $90.8 billion in assets.

“A problem is that brokerages market themselves as offering investment advice,” Moisand said. “Yet clients may not realize they’re signing up for a brokerage account. So the broker even if he’s a registered adviser isn’t held to the higher fiduciary duty.”

Investors often don’t understand the difference. An April 26 poll of investors found that only 30% understand that the “primary service” by brokers is to sell securities, not to give investment advice. About 91% of investors said brokers and planners offering advice should be subject to the same disclosure rules.

The poll was done for the Consumer Federation of America and the Zero Alpha Group, made up of independent investment advisory firms.

Investment advice is lucrative. Big-firm brokers earn $240,000 a year on average, says Tiburon Strategic Advisors. Fee-only planners who also are registered advisers average $262,000. Other planners make an average of $168,000.

With so many ETFs consisting of similar holdings and exposure, many times judging one against another becomes a case of each one’s idea of building a better mousetrap.

Recently, my colleague Jen Ryan reported that Vanguard is coming out with an ETF that will be similar to iShares MSCI EAFE (EFA) , but it will include Canada.

A short time ago, StateStreet very quietly beat them to the punch with the SPDR MSCI ACWI (All Country World Index) ex-U.S. ETF (CWI) , which also owns Canada but has more emerging-market exposure than EFA, close to 13% for CWI vs. less than 3% for EFA.

The country weights for the largest countries between the two funds are similar, as are some of the top holdings and sector weights. For example, each fund has a 29% weight in the financial sector. The two also have very similar weightings in the consumer discretionary and industrial sectors. Japan and the U.K. are the two largest countries, but in CWI, the two comprise 18%, compared with 23% in EFA. The two funds also share nine out of their respective top 10s in common at similar weightings.

Considering this, the question then becomes, what are the differences? One would be the several structural differences that could affect performance over longer periods of time. The first is mentioned above. CWI has much more emerging-market exposure, but it does tilt heavily to Asia. Brazil weighs in at 1.36% and Russia at 1.44%.

Another big difference is the average market cap. CWI has a much smaller bias, with an average cap of $6.82 billion (per the prospectus) vs. $37 billion for EFA. Given how the top-10 holdings are so similar, I am not sure whether this conceit can actually stand up, but such a big divergence in cap size could matter.

CWI has a 0.35% expense ratio and should yield 2.5%. The expense is the same as EFA (which I doubt is a coincidence), and the yield compares favorably with that of EFA, which yields 2.1%.

In the literature, StateStreet tells us that for one year ended Sept. 30, 2006, CWI’s index returned 19.36%, which compares favorably, but not dramatically so, with EFA’s return for the same time, which was 18.77%. I am surprised the extra emerging-market exposure was not more of a differentiator in performance.

On the whole, I doubt the fund will be much different from EFA, but it could be. It might be a better way for people who want all of their foreign exposure in one fund to get it, but maybe by only a slim margin. I would expect that over longer periods of time, the larger emerging-market exposure would add a little more return and volatility to the mix, but to be clear, the fund will never trade like the Turkish Investment Fund (TKF) or any other hot potato.

The theme to this discussion is finding a better way to get foreign exposure on a broad scale. This would not be complete without a mention of the WisdomTree DIEFA High-Yielding Equity Index Fund (DTH) .

WisdomTree drew a lot of attention for claims that dividend weighting was better than cap weighting, and while it has only been out since June, DTH is up 25% while EFA is up 18%.

If you own EFA and plan to study CWI, you also need to study DTH. I think it behooves investors to be ETF-provider agnostic. Save for trusting that the provider is a viable going concern, who the provider is should not matter to you. You should own whatever you think is the best choice to capture, in this case broad foreign, and while DTH does not have as much emerging-market exposure as CWI, I think there is a good chance it will turn out to be better than CWI.