US

In this short video, TwentyFour CEO Mark Holman outlines what he expects to see from bond markets in the next few weeks, and explains why he thinks fiscal stimulus in the US can be the catalyst for the rally to resume in the medium term.

With September set to be the first negative month for most risk asset markets since March, it is worth analysing what has been driving the reversal.

The tweak that we will read so much about with respect to the inflation goal is that the new policy can be viewed as a “flexible form of inflation targeting”, meaning that following periods when inflation has been running below 2pc, appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2pc for some time.

Earlier this week, Moody’s published its default study for June, which showed that as expected, default rates globally have started to pick up as a result of COVID-19. The trailing 12-month global high yield default rate reached 5.4% at the end of June, up from 4.8% in May, as the gap to the long term average of 4.1% continues to grow.

As we enter Q2 earnings season, we will be most interested to learn how Corporate America has fared over the past three months.

After the most incredible first quarter of 2020, we have seen an almost equally incredible second quarter. It is clear to us that the market overreacted in March, but it has also overreacted in its interpretation of the recovery.

The European high yield market has shown remarkable resilience in the face of what will likely go down as one of the sharpest and most severe recessions in history. The benchmark iTraxx Xover index (a widely used proxy for Euro HY credit risk) has tightened from an intraday high of 730bp in March to 342bp earlier this week, a retracement of almost 75% from the January lows of approximately 200bp.

Today’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in some way represents a big step towards normality for investors, as they await what the Fed will do next having returned to its scheduled programme of meetings. So what can we expect from the Fed today?

There have been two topics concerning the yield curve in the press over the last few days, which we think merit closer attention. As regular readers will know, the US yield curve in particular is closely followed by market participants and can dictate a lot of what happens in fixed income markets globally.

Although we are very much still in the grip of COVID-19’s impact, it has now been a month since the equity market’s trough and now would seem an opportune time to dissect some of the price action that preceded the unparalleled market turmoil in March.

When the Fed announced last month that it would be buying investment grade corporate bonds, it was said to have thrown the kitchen sink at the coronavirus problem. After this latest move, there are holes where the kitchen cabinets used to be.

At any other time, record issuance and record outflows in US investment grade would each be worthy of attention. Given the havoc COVID-19 has wreaked in recent weeks, it would be tempting to write off these milestones occurring in parallel last week as merely the latest quirk of an unprecedented period for bond markets, but the reasons behind this apparent sentiment split are worth keeping an eye on.