Fixed income

We expect September to be relatively busy with new ABS deals, but there’s a very strong technical developing in favour of ABS and CLOs, which should help performance in the coming months.

There are a number of countries in Europe where the banking sector remains very fragmented, and while a lot of work has been done in Spain with the mergers of multiple ‘cajas’ in the last few years, there is still scope for further consolidation.

If floating vs. fixed is no longer the most pressing question, then investors should be more focused on where they get the best credit spread.

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.

Given most countries are going through the same issues and their fiscal expansions are justified, the relative value has not changed that much.

Yesterday we showed that for European investors, what we speculated on back in March has come true; that the bond market did recover its losses far more quickly than equities, as shown below.