Tag Archives: corporate bonds
Bond Beginnings and Beyond
American political consultant James Carville once commented that he’d like to be resurrected as the bond market because, “you can intimidate everyone.” As of July 2023, the global bond market comprises about USD 135 trillion of securities, of which rated corporate debt represents USD 23 trillion.1 U.S. corporate debt makes up roughly half of the…
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What Fixed Income Index Liquidity Means for Insurers
How are index-based strategies helping insurers measure and address liquidity in their portfolios? Take a closer look at the why index liquidity matters with S&P DJI’s Nick Godec, Morgan Stanley’s Meredith Shaw, and BlackRock’s James Winslow.
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The Fed’s Corporate Bond Purchases and Their Impact on Corporate Bond Issuance
In response to COVID-19 and its disruptive impact on the credit market, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced the creation of the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF) and the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF) on March 23, 2020, to support the functioning of the credit market. The PMCCF provides a funding backstop for corporate…
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Why Reach for Yield When You Can Use a Ladder?
The current low interest rate environment is forcing many investors to reassess their risk tolerances. Typically, fixed income investors have three main options when trying to “reach” for yield: 1. Move down in credit quality (i.e., take on more credit risk); 2. Increase duration (i.e., take on more interest rate risk); or 3. Move to…
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Active Managers’ Outperformance in Brazilian Bond Funds – Skill or Price Distortion?
There were impressive results for active managers in the Brazil Corporate Bond Funds category, with 93.6% of them beating the benchmark in March 2020 and 88.2% Q1 2020. However, were these performance results due to true skill? This outperformance may be related to a market distortion. On the one hand, Brazil’s corporate bond funds experienced…
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BBB Bond Downgrades Added USD 88 Billion to the High-Yield Bond Market YTD
In recent years, one noticeable development in the corporate bond market has been the rapid growth of the BBB bond market in terms of its absolute amount and relative share of investment-grade corporate bonds. We wrote a blog on this topic in May 2019 detailing the growth of the BBB bond market and its impact…
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Municipal Bonds Are Being Left Behind
Corporate bonds have garnered a lot of attention lately, as the Federal Reserve continues to stabilize markets by establishing multiple facilities that support both the primary and secondary corporate bond markets. As a result, credit spreads have tightened significantly from where they were in March. Since March 23, 2020, the option-adjusted spread on the S&P…
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Delivering Low Volatility Exposure to High Yield Bonds
The last few weeks have been challenging for business the world over. People working from home and aggressive social distancing have led to business contraction and the expectation of rising default. On March 19, 2020, an S&P report expected that the U.S. trailing 12-month speculative-grade corporate default rate would rise to 10% within the next…
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Distressed in Distressing Times
Jeff Gundlach has been recently quoted as asking, “the Fed can buy up corporate bond ETFs and thereby prop up prices of corporate bonds, but what happens when there are defaults and the artificial Fed price is replaced by the recovery value?” We have already seen how the S&P U.S. Corporate Investment Grade Corporate Bond…
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Federal Reserve Becomes Buyer of Last Resort
In a previous blog, we discussed the U.S. Federal Reserve’s initial responses to the current market volatility and resultant dislocations. In short, dropping rates to 0% and adding over USD 1 trillion to the funding markets did little to abate the severity of the situation. In an effort to prevent a liquidity crisis from turning…
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