Fixed income

A lot has been made of the recent recovery in equity markets, especially in the US, given the obvious underlying weaknesses in the economy. It is quite clear to us the economic fundamentals do not justify such high valuations in risk assets, but despite being a serious consideration in our assessment, there is often much more to valuations than just fundamentals.

One of the big support mechanisms for the UK economy during this pandemic has been the availability of grants and corporate loans via the banking system, aided by unlimited liquidity from the central bank.

After six weeks of no supply, the market somewhat surprisingly reopened with three new issue CLOs being priced last week and a new one already on the way. We are aware of many loan warehouses that need to be cleared, and bankers (or rather their risk managers) are no doubt keen for CLO managers to refinance leveraged loans into a CLO.

The list of policy actions from the major central banks keeps getting longer, and today the Bank of Japan has added the purchase of “as many Japanese government bonds (JGBs) as necessary” so as to keep the 10-year rate at around zero percent.

We engage with Santander as a debt issuer across many jurisdictions and various fixed income products, and we have had mixed views on the bank’s behaviour in recent years following a controversial approach to a 2018 AT1 refinancing and the exercise of an early call in a Spanish ABS deal in 2019. On both these occasions, we felt bondholders were treated poorly and this was reflected in our ESG analysis of the issuer.

Although we are very much still in the grip of COVID-19’s impact, it has now been a month since the equity market’s trough and now would seem an opportune time to dissect some of the price action that preceded the unparalleled market turmoil in March.