Fixed income

August has been a very challenging month so far for risk markets, while in traditional risk off, UST treasuries have seen sharp declines in yield back to the lows last seen in October 2016. We can’t help but think that this sharp adjustment will become more ingrained in August, following 6 months of relatively benign markets.

It was a dramatic night last night as the Fed cut interest rates by 25bps, the first cut since December 2008, along with the premature ending to the balance sheet run off – however markets hardly moved!

Over the past few weeks there has been a noticeable increase in high yield new issuance, bringing a welcome flurry of activity to what has so far been a relatively benign year.

The euro area bank lending survey for the second quarter of 2019, released yesterday, suggests European banks are becoming more cautious and beginning to tighten lending criteria to various parts of the economy.

The UK’s political situation, and in particular the harder Brexit stance of the frontrunner for next prime minister, Boris Johnson, has provided the market with a steady stream of headlines over the past few weeks. As a direct consequence sterling is close to 6% off recent highs and domestic credit spreads have also underperformed their European and US peers.

One of the market’s chief obsessions in 2019 has understandably been the shifting stance of the US Federal Reserve in relation to the path for interest rates, with investors now pricing in a 100% chance of a rate cut at the end of this month. Now that the June FOMC minutes, Nonfarm payrolls, Jerome Powell’s testimony to Congress, the June CPI and PPI numbers and the Trump-Xi meeting at the G20 in Osaka are behind us, what is the next set of data that may shed some light on the Fed’s next policy move?