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From the NYTimes, December 16, 2019Literally everyone The New Republic has approached on the vexing question of why Boeing keeps coughing up dividends throughout this fiasco has said the same thing, using almost the exact same words: Boeing has been extremely effective at pacifying Wall Street. Throughout this nightmarish year, Boeing’s stock has remained rock steady and may yet end the year with a modest gain. “Investors”—“people” even—“rely” on those dividends. If Boeing slashes or suspends its dividend, it will send “shock waves” throughout Wall Street.
At the very moment Boeing announced it was ceasing production of its most important product, the company took steps to meet Wall Street’s expectations. As it announced the shutdown on Monday, it sent a simultaneous news release announcing a regular quarterly dividend for shareholders.
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-28/fed-lifeline-shields-bond-funds-teetering-on-brink-of-etf-hellThe Federal Reserve’s unprecedented step into U.S. corporate bonds helped cure many of the massive dislocations in exchange-traded funds -- and may have saved mutual funds from a similar fate.
After prices for the biggest fixed-income funds held in a kind of dazed stillness during the worst of the sell-off -- presumably because the bonds they owned simply weren’t trading -- net-asset values on some of them dropped precipitously earlier in the week as their outflows forced sales on a frozen market.
The steep declines were beginning to mirror prices reached in fixed-income ETFs, which were already trading at deep discounts to their underlying securities. Faced with $149 billion of redemptions so far in March -- after not seeing a monthly outflow since January 2019 -- mutual funds were forced to sell their holdings into a market caught in a cash crunch.
However, the Fed’s pledge Monday to buy investment-grade credit and certain ETFs helped halt the slide in mutual fund net-asset values and sparked a rally in higher-rated debt. That’s largely due to the fact that fund managers now have a willing buyer on the other side of the trade, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
“Mutual funds dodged a big bullet by not having to unload bonds into a market with no buyers,” said Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst. “The Fed has now brought liquidity, and so they will get to avoid the ‘hell’ we saw ETFs in for the past month.”
The pain had just started to spread to mutual funds, which were initially able to satisfy redemptions by burning through cash and their more liquid securities, according to Kingsview Wealth Management’s Paul Nolte. The net-asset values began to drop as the fund managers were forced to try and liquidate harder-to-unload holdings into a market with few buyers -- but the Fed announcement broke the cycle, he said.
“They’ve stepped in, and we’re now finally starting to see a little bit more of a normal bidding process in the market,” said Nolte, a portfolio manager at Kingsview Wealth Management. “We’re probably a week away from a normally functioning market. It’s going to take some of these funds a while to work their way back to where they used to be.”
A long narrative about nothing. We are talking about US tot bond index. The following 3 different funds from 3 different companies are very close. For 5 years as of 3-27-2020...BND(VG)+FXNAX(Fidelity)+AGG(Blackrock) performance is 3.36-3.37%.Usually, but not always. Index funds, especially bond index funds, are also managed, though perhaps not in the way you are thinking.
The following provides a brief recap of the RiverNorth conference call held on March 19th.
Capital markets and economic volatility/uncertainty has led to unprecedented volatility in the CEF markets
RiverNorth estimates that 90%+ of the CEF market is owned by retail – and they are in full retreat
Co-portfolio manager Steve O’Neill described some of the CEF price action last week as a “9.5 out of 10 on the CEF panic scale”
Discounts hit (and in some cases exceeded) levels last seen during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008
To keep investors appraised of the opportunity set, RiverNorth started posting discount data here: rivernorth.com/cef-discount-info
The opportunity is broad based – nearly all CEF asset classes trading at historically wide discounts
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/infinite-qe-destroying-traditional-bond-174459945.htmlCore tenets such as what constitutes a safe asset, the value of bonds as a portfolio hedge, and expectations for returns over the next decade are all being reconsidered as governments and central banks strive to avert a global depression.
QE Kills Valuation Models -- Ordinarily, the prospect of a multi-trillion-dollar government spending surge globally ought to send borrowing costs soaring. But central bank purchases are now reshaping rates markets -- emulating the Bank of Japan’s yield-curve control policy starting in 2016 -- and quashing these latest volatility spikes.
Inflation Risk -- Many market veterans agree that faster inflation may return in a recovery awash with stimulus that central banks and governments may find tough to withdraw...“There’s tension in all of this,” said Hamish Pepper, fixed-income and currency strategist at Harbour Asset Management Ltd. in Wellington, New Zealand. “I don’t think it’s necessarily about waking up one morning realizing that bond yields should be 100 basis points higher from here -- but you have to think about inflation at some point.”
Haven or Not? -- “Will government bonds play the same role in your portfolio going forward as they have in the past?” he said. “To me the answer is no they don’t -- I’d rather own cash.”
“It’s very hard to look at this in a historical context and then apply an investment framework around it,” said BlackRock’s Thiel. “The most applicable period is right before America entered WW2, when you had gigantic stimulus to spur the war effort. I mean, Ford made bombers in WW2 and now they’re making ventilators in 2020.”
https://www08.wellsfargomedia.com/assets/pdf/commercial/insights/economics/policy-response-2020.pdfPotential Monetary Response
• Forward guidance to signal FFR will remain at 0.00% well beyond the
current crisis
• Purchase short-term municipal bonds (six months or less to maturity)
• Request authority from Congress to purchase a broader array of
corporate and/or municipal bonds
• Reinstate the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF)
• Adopt a negative fed funds rate, though we view this as unlikely
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