Tag: government bonds

2022 was an extremely tough year for global fixed income assets, with long bond yields rising sharply in developed markets resulting in one of the worst years for bond markets in almost a century. Emerging market bonds suffered both from a correlated move higher in yields in line with developed market bonds, but also from heightened volatility.

Central banks around the world are hiking interest rates to battle rising inflation. Recessions are now expected in the US, UK and Europe in the next year. Interest rates around the world are rising at an alarming pace, as central banks admit that inflation is becoming more ingrained, rather than just a series of transient shocks.

June was a brutal month for global equities, capping the worst first half of a year since the launch of the MSCI All Country World Index in 1987. For indices with longer track records, the story is worse. In the case of the US S&P500, the first half performance has not been this bad since 1962.

A record sell-off coupled with a shifting economic backdrop mean opportunities in global fixed income markets have appeared. It has been an extraordinary time for bond markets. As an asset class, fixed income is often seen as equities’ boring cousin, particularly over the past decade of low yields. Recent months, however, have been anything but boring, albeit for the wrong reasons.

The bigger the military operation, the more sophisticated the financial machinery required to fund it. The Bank of England, today still the UK’s central bank, was created in 1694 as the government’s bank, largely to finance its ongoing wars with France.

Budget 2022 was a ‘read between the lines’ event and should be interpreted with cautious optimism, we argue. Much weaker GDP inflation assumptions allowed the National Treasury to downplay future revenue collections, yet still bring the primary budget back into surplus a year earlier than originally planned, in line with our view.

For a country always in need of cheering up, recent news of better-than-expected economic growth was most welcome. StatsSA data showed that the economy grew by 4.6% after inflation in the first quarter on a seasonally adjusted and annualised basis.

Since 2018, sustainable fixed income indexing assets across the industry have more than doubled every year, with investors increasingly looking at sustainability as an important driver of returns. The pandemic has also accelerated reallocation within fixed income as traditional role of government bonds within portfolios has become increasingly challenged by a lower for-longer interest rate environment.

A year ago, reality started sinking in that the new coronavirus from Wuhan would not be contained to China. No fewer than 25 countries had confirmed cases, and the first deaths outside China were being reported. On 11 February 2020, the disease caused by the new coronavirus was named COVID-19.

It’s a new year but the global inflation debate continues to rage. Few things are as important for longer-term market behaviour as inflation; so this is important stuff, but also difficult since the big inflation shifts of the past 60 years (first up, then down, then way down) were largely unexpected.