Bank of America; “This Could Get Ugly, We Think”

Tuesday, August 29, 2017
By Paul Martin

by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Aug 29, 2017

Instead of finding new and creative ways of BTFD, overnight the BofA credit team did something so few finance professionals bother with these days: they looked at fundamental data to reach a conclusion that is independent of how much AAPL stock the SNB will have to buy to send the Dow Jones green. Specifically, the bank looked at the liquidity situation in the bond market (specifically the IG space), and found that while for the time being there is little to worry about, once the central bank put melts away, that’s when the real test will take place. And, as BofA puts it bluntly, “this could get ugly, we think.”

As the bank’s credit strategist Hans Mikkelsen explains, high grade corporate bond trading has doubled over the post-crisis years (Figure 1). However, as the size of the market tripled that means the overall market has become less liquid due to a number of post-crisis changes, including financial regulation and most prominently the Volcker Rule, but also less leverage in the system. For example, while annual trading volumes in the HG corporate bond market were 135% of the size of the market back in 2006, that same tracking statistic is only 86% for 2017 (figure 2).

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