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With the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) set to publish its updated economic and fiscal outlook on March 26, we are starting to see headlines concerning potential changes the Labour government could make to its budgeting plans in response to shifting forecasts.

The incoming German government’s removal of the country’s infamous “debt brake” is a serious pivot for the typically fiscally conservative country, and one that we think highlights the value on offer in European assets.

European government bonds have sold off sharply this week in the wake of Germany’s market-moving fiscal measures, while European equities, especially those of banks, have moved in the other direction.

Overnight, the CDU/CSU (the winner of the latest German election) and the SPD (the leader of the current parliament set to end on March 25) announced Germany’s largest fiscal policy shift in decades.

Last week, risky assets continued to experience a somewhat volatile period. The tone was generally a risk off one, with correlations between risk free and risky assets back to negative.

The Additional Tier 1 (AT1) primary market has begun 2025 with a bang, with a sterling perpetual non-call seven transaction from NatWest that hit the screens on Wednesday morning set to take issuance over €16bn equivalent year-to-date, more than double the volume we have seen over the same period in each of the last five years.

European banks‘ full year 2024 reporting season has now largely come to an end, with only a handful of issuers still to report over the next few weeks.

Since the Federal Reserve first cut interest rates in September, we have seen the most aggressive rise in US Treasury yields of any cutting cycle over the past 40 years.

The recent rally in European fixed income has partly been driven by improved economic sentiment, falling inflation expectations, and a more accommodative monetary policy outlook from the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE).

In a week when US core consumer price inflation unexpectedly rose to 0.4% month-on-month and Federal Reserve (Fed) chair Jerome Powell told Congress the central bank was in “no hurry” to cut interest rates, many market participants have been surprised by the relatively muted reaction in US Treasuries (USTs).

Manufacturing data has been a relentless purveyor of bad news for the best part of the last 24 months, as abnormal growth rates post-Covid turned into a swampy contractionary trend from which the sector has struggled to emerge.

As we approach the end of the Q4 2024 earnings reporting season for banks, most are now out of their “blackout” periods which means bond issuance has resumed. Wednesday was an active day in primary markets with a couple of deals that are worth commenting on.