The TwentyFour Blog

Market attention in the government bond market has rapidly turned from central banks holding rates “higher for longer” to the potential for “lower and sooner".

Headlines have painted a nervous picture of the health of consumers across Europe. Simultaneously, rating agencies have upgraded their outlook on the same consumer assets to neutral. The short story is that, although there has been a mild weakening in performance metrics, the consumer has held up well and is ahead of our base case expectations in almost all areas.

Julius Baer announced a call of its $300m Additional Tier 1 (AT1) instrument. The bond had a coupon of 4.75%, and if not called it would switch to a new coupon of five-year Treasury yield plus 284 basis points (bps), so about 6.7% at the moment.

We are coming towards the end of the reporting cycle for European banks for the first half of 2024. Unlike other quarterly reports, mid-year results are particularly useful in our view. They confirm the trends that we have already seen in the first half of the year, and thus validate or indeed put into question, the outlook that the management teams laid out for the full fiscal year.

With US economic data driving very large moves in the last few days, we think it is worth highlighting two data releases that were published yesterday. The Institute of Supply Management (ISM) Services and the Senior Loan Officer Survey spoke of an economy that is stronger than some of the recent price action might suggest.

If you were on vacation last week, your holiday blues wouldn’t have been helped when you looked at your screens this morning, given how quickly sentiment has changed, mainly on the back of one data point.

Second quarter growth data for the Eurozone on Tuesday reaffirmed the gradual uptick in the region’s trajectory relative to the pace seen across 2023, with quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) growth slightly higher than expectations at 0.3%.

Last week, the Bank of England (BoE) published a speech by its Executive Director for Markets, Victoria Saporta, in which she laid out the central bank’s evolving role as a lender to the UK banking system. More specifically, the speech highlighted how the BoE expects to see UK banks having a greater reliance on its funding facilities going forward.

Excess savings have been at the centre of heated debates among economists and market participants ever since the pandemic.

The Australian ABS market has continued its red-hot start to the year with record issuance in the last two months – the 17 new deals priced in May for a total of A$12.3bn were followed by 13 deals in June adding a further A$8.5bn. For context, before May the post-2008 record for deals printed in a single month stood at 10 and the largest monthly volume at A$9.3bn.

A consumer loan ABS issued last week by Consors Finanz, a fully-owned subsidiary of BNP Personal Finance, highlights the remarkable appetite investors are currently showing for mezzanine ABS bonds.

The last few weeks have seen former President Donald Trump establish a lead over current President Joe Biden across polls in the run-up to November’s US election. Even though it is early days and a lot can change before November (including the Democrat candidate), it is worth considering what a second Trump term might mean for the world economy and for fixed income markets.