For one, liquidity remains strong in the corporate bond market, as spreads in both high yield and high grade corporates have remained relatively tight.
According to International Financing Review, U.S. and international companies continued to take advantage of a stronger tone in the corporate bond market on Monday, with a number of deals expected to price later in the session.
The apocalyptic tax consequence of being a passive investor in small business loans stops virtually all foreign investors from participating directly in the U.S. small business loan market while driving their investment dollars into the corporate bond market.
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For all those reasons, the market for municipal funds is roughly 0.2 percent of the corporate bond market, and less developed than those in emerging economies like South Africa and the Philippines, claimed Nagarajan Narasimhan, senior director of CRISIL Ratings.
Despite the rather dour comments from Lockhart, the tide appears to be shifting in the corporate bond market as liquidity has begun to return and both investment-grade and high-yield premiums over Treasury yields have begun to narrow in recent sessions.
Most of these bonds are denominated in dollars, as despite the introduction of the single currency the US corporate bond market is far bigger than the market in Europe.
But it should create opportunities in the high grade corporate bond market in the meantime.
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With all this money flooding out of investment trusts, the corporate-bond market nearly collapsed.
The corporate-bond market was open but illiquid, with most bonds weakening against Treasurys.
Michael Hartnett, an economist at Merrill Lynch, thinks that the effects on the corporate-bond market would be particularly severe.
The corporate-bond market has become less active partly because of the government's massive extension of credit to troubled borrowers.
Regulation is only one reason why the corporate-bond market has remained so small.
The corporate-bond market has virtually ceased to function since July 1999, when Daewoo collapsed under the weight of huge debts.
Volatility is likely to increase when the Fed raises interest rates again, or if the stockmarket plunges as the corporate-bond market has.
Overall, then, it does appear that a corner has been turned, and that the turning point came soon after spreads in the corporate-bond market peaked.
Some bondholders believe China won't let any borrower in the corporate-bond market default, even borrowers that aren't government-owned, because officials want to ensure the market continues to operate smoothly.
Since the cut, according to Martin Fridson of Merrill Lynch, the corporate-bond market has reopened for better-quality borrowers, though it is not yet clear whether money is available for those who most need it.
American Electric Power (AEP) chose to delay its plans to build a wind farm in Indiana when the heavily indebted utility found its cost of capital had soared because of turmoil in the corporate-bond market.
That means he is looking for opportunities in the corporate-bond market, especially as many companies have strengthened their balance-sheets in recent years, and also at bonds issued by emerging-market governments, many of which have lower debt-to-GDP ratios than their counterparts in the developed world.
In the corporate-bond market, where upside is far less, downside almost as nasty and scepticism should be the order of the day, no yield is too low, it seems, even though little more than 12 months have passed since no yield was too high.
These include the stockmarket, the bond market (government and corporate) and the money market for short-term securities, such as commercial paper.
Indeed, the lack of an Asian corporate bond market is so troublesome that the advantages of a better benchmark may outweigh the Miyazawa subsidies.
In the United States, the technology revolution has been largely funded by corporate borrowing on the bond market.
My coverage ranges from the municipal and corporate bond markets to options trading in the stock market.
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He and the firm created almost out of whole cloth the high yield bond market that financed so many cutting-edge corporate entities in the 1970s and 1980s.
For one thing, given how low government-bond yields and corporate credit spreads have fallen, the time of plenty in the bond market may have passed.
Carol Levenson of Gimme Credit, a research service, says she has never seen such a large divergence between the view of riskiness that is outlined by bond-rating agencies and that suggested by the market price of corporate debt.
Nor has a thriving corporate-bond market emerged to take over from the banks.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts , LittleJohn and HSBC (nyse: HBC - news - people ) are just three of the latest to jump into the market with new distressed-debt funds, lining up for what is expected to be a pickup in corporate bond defaults even as other veterans of the distressed-debt market complain about a lack of opportunities.
Problems occur with corporate bond ETFs in a fast-moving market because the arbitrage mechanism starts breaking down.
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