All insights

It feels like we are currently spending at least 40% of our time talking about inflation, or more accurately, why the US Federal Reserve seems to have a different view of inflation to almost everybody else.

Doing the necessary work to understand the difference between companies merely exposed to COVID restrictions and those structurally damaged by them continues to be extremely important.

After a hawkish turn from the Fed at its June policy meeting, the response in US Treasury markets has confounded market participants and intensified the debate over ‘transitory’ inflation.

In this video, TwentyFour CEO Mark Holman joins Tom Porter to decipher the Fed’s latest messaging, and to remind bond managers that Jerome Powell is not one of them.

Douglas Charleston examines the health of labour markets across key developed economies and why ABS investors shouldn’t fear the gradual removal of COVID related job support schemes

It is hard to draw any immediate conclusion from this transaction other than Repsol's notable persistence to obtain sustainable financing.

In both instances, the good intentions of the regulator and the authorities are clear… But at the same time both changes have the potential to cause an increasingly undesired side effect.

Given the magnitude of the amounts involved we do think there is potential for some temporary volatility in the US Treasury market as the volumes change. We will be keeping a keen eye on both in the months ahead.

Fixed income investors are in "pole position to push for change" when it comes to ESG

Creating a truly sustainable bond fund is no mean feat. Unlike the listed equity universe, where ESG data is more readily available, it is often sorely lacking in the fixed income space. At the same time, the problem for fixed income managers is exacerbated by the complexity of a bond’s structure, consisting of multiple parts which must all be individually assessed.

The definitions of what ESG really means are still blurry and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to sustainability. If anything, the growing popularity of these funds has highlighted the differences in the expectations of both individual investors and institutions when it comes to ESG.

TwentyFour Asset Management’s purpose-built Observatory platform scans the global universe of bonds looking for ESG stars

Yesterday the US Federal Reserve released the results of its annual bank stress test, subjecting the 23 largest US lenders to a punitive set of scenarios. Some observers might think the events since March 2020 had been sufficient to test the resilience of the banks, but the Fed went beyond this recent real-life challenge and tested bank balance sheets against a range of hypothetical crises.