TwentyFour

For any fixed income investors that follow the England football team, the plan for H2 2024 may feel somewhat familiar – no substitutions in the second half.

In this Back to Basics webinar, Gordon Shannon (Partner, Co-Head of Investment Grade) and Johnathan Owen (Portfolio Management) from our Investment grade team provided a comprehensive understanding of the key aspects of corporate hybrids.

The global financial crisis was a seismic shock to banking systems globally, and triggered a regulatory marathon with banks having to adapt to a far stricter set of rules (known as Basel III) set out by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS).

The latest UK inflation figures will bring some relief for consumers, but beneath the headline figure the Bank of England’s (BoE) policymakers face a more complex picture that suggests interest rate cuts may still be some way off.

Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation as an entrée was well received by the diners, prompting a 15 basis points (bps) rally in the 10-year Treasury. The main course though, was met with some adverse critiques as the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) delivered a slightly more hawkish dot plot than expected.

In the first week of June, the European asset-backed securities (ABS) market participants flocked to sunny Barcelona for the 28th Global ABS conference.

For the fixed income fanatics amongst us, June was always going to be one for the books with all three of the major central banks meeting, elections, and continued data.

From a US high yield (HY) perspective, the month of May turned out to be one of note – for the first time since December 2022, no US HY defaults were recorded, with not one instance of a bankruptcy filing or a missed interest/principal payment.

Phoenix Group (Phoenix), a UK-based insurer mostly in the savings and pensions business, announced a tender offer at par for up to $500m of its $750m 5.625% RT1 callable in January 2025, and $350m Tier 2 callable in June 2026.

We do not usually comment on press articles, but we were all quite surprised to read a piece on Bloomberg titled “A fragile banking system won’t make Europe stronger”.

When market participants were asked at the end of last year to enumerate the main risks investors would face in 2024, the vast majority of those surveyed counted politics and elections amongst the top factors to consider for the unrewarding task of forecasting total returns for major asset classes over the following twelve months.

In spite of what looks like a quiet week ahead, there are a couple of data releases in the coming days that require close attention, these releases could potentially disturb the fragile calm that we are enjoying in the first trading hours of the week.