The background to Wednesday’s announcement
In line with market consensus, on Wednesday the government announced that RPI would be made into CPIH, a lower number. This is not being done for political reasons by the Chancellor, but for statistical ones.
As I have written about previously the national statistician has made clear for years that it does not like RPI, and that it has been frus…
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Now that the Bank of England has commenced purchases of gilts and committed to a programme of corporate bond buybacks, alongside similar measures being presently undertaken by the ECB, it is worth taking a step back and thinking about valuations in sterling fixed income.
Let’s take a brief look at what has happened so far in 2016 in government bonds. The ultra-long conventional gilt has returne…
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On the 7th of September £38bn worth of UK gilts (4.75% 2015) will mature. The Bank of England (BoE) own just under half the issue, having purchased the bonds through its £375bn quantitative easing (QE) programme. At this point in time, the BoE have indicated that they are committed to keeping the size of the QE program at £375bn. As a result of the 2015 bonds maturing, the bank will therefore h…
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This time last year many thought that duration management was going to be the key to success in 2014. Yields were expected to rise as the Fed weaned the market off QE and began to normalise rates. As a result, only the very brave would have been positioned long duration heading into 2014. To be positioned as such would presumably have taken some explaining, particularly when set against what se…
Read the articleMillwall FC wasn’t the only team to trek up to Nottingham yesterday from London and to come back empty handed (at the hands of the mighty, mighty Forest). Team Carney from the Bank of England also had an unproductive time of it in the East Midlands as the new Governor gave his first speech in the role to the CBI, Chamber of Commerce and the Institute of Directors. Since the publication of the…
Read the articleBack in 2009 the Bank of England (the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street) began buying a portfolio of investment grade bonds to provide funding to UK corporates, to aid liquidity in the corporate bond market and to supplement their QE purchases of gilts. Last Friday this investor sold its last corporate bonds.
This has been a great success from a profit point of view. The attached chart shows the …
Read the articleIt’s been another massive year for the global economy. Europe saw LTROs, Greece got a haircut, sovereign downgrades and record high unemployment rates. The peripheral European nations attempted to implement austerity measures with limited success. The US re-elected President Obama and the focus quickly shifted to the upcoming fiscal cliff. In the UK, an Olympics induced bounce in growth was the…
Read the articleIt may not have felt like it, but 2012 has actually been a pretty good year for investors. Bond holders in particular have had a decent 12 months: the government bond bull run has continued and investment grade and high yield corporate debt appears on track to deliver some excellent returns. Major equity markets also look likely to end the year in the black.
These broad-based gains on global st…
Read the articleLast week the Bank of England announced a further round of quantitative easing of £50bn, bringing the total to £375bn. It is obvious that the MPC thinks that monetary policy is still not sufficiently loose to create the desired economic effect and hence further stimulus is needed.
We have written numerous times on QE. When we started scribing on this novel experiment we focused on why it needed…
Read the articleThere has at almost all times been a ‘wedge’ between RPI and CPI, given different calculation methodologies (arithmetic mean vs geometric mean, respectively), different items within each, and different weights of these different items. The long term difference has on average seen RPI at 0.5% to 0.8% more than CPI. Recent changes, though, saw the wedge widen in 2007 to more than 2%, and to almos…
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