FICC | Bonds

Our latest views on the recent increase in Treasury yields and some key things to watch at next week’s FOMC meeting.

Special Report

The UK labor market remains far too tight to expect wage growth to slow to levels consistent with the Bank of England inflation target. A true recession with rising unemployment is needed to finally slay the UK inflation beast. 2024 rate cuts are off the table, with the central bank having to keep monetary policy tighter for longer than markets expect and the UK economy now rebounding. We recommend downgrading UK gilts to underweight in global bond portfolios, while also looking for opportunities to buy the British pound on pullbacks versus the euro, Canadian dollar and Swedish krona.

Special Report

This Special Report introduces a framework for assessing the relative importance of slope change and initial yield in curve trade performance. The yield penalty for curve steepeners has fallen significantly since the beginning of the year, and we recommend shifting out of Treasury curve flatteners and into Treasury curve steepeners in US bond portfolios.

In this report, we present our quarterly review of our Model Bond Portfolio. The anti-growth bias of the portfolio allocations hurt the portfolio performance in Q1/2024 as global growth surprised to the upside. However, we anticipate some recovery of the underperformance in our base case scenario for the next six months.

At today’s monetary policy meeting, the ECB gave strong hints that rate cuts will begin as soon as the next meeting in June. In this Insight, we share our thoughts on today’s meeting and discuss the implications for European bond yields and the euro.

In this insight, we calibrate our investment views based on the latest Bank of Canada decision.

Our reaction to this morning’s CPI report and bond market moves.

Our reaction to this morning’s employment report and bond market moves.

Our Portfolio Allocation Summary for April 2024.

We expand our risk/reward analysis of US investment grade corporate bonds to focus on the 44 industry groups included in the Bloomberg index.