Andrew Sheets: Bond Markets Get Jumpy

Over the last decade, bonds have been a source of stability. But, with surprising moves this past month, they’ve now become a risk-management challenge that stands out amongst other asset classes.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bring you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about trends across the global investment landscape and how we put those ideas together. It's Friday, November 12th at 2:00 p.m. in London.

For much of the last decade, an important cross asset story has been how stable bond markets were relative to, well, everything else. A big part of this story was the action taken by central banks. They bought government bonds directly, but also set short-term interest rates at very low levels, which acted as a magnet, holding down other interest rates around the world.

There were some big moves, especially when the pandemic hit. But for the most part, bond markets have been a pretty stable place relative to stocks, commodities and other asset classes. This was a global trend, with interest rates unusually placid from Australia to Poland to the United States.

But recently, that's reversed. It's been the bond market that's been hit by a wide number of extreme moves, while other asset classes have been pretty calm. The overall market right now is a little like a duck: calm on the surface, but with some really furious churning below.

We track a wide variety of cross market relationships at Morgan Stanley research. These represent different ways an investor might express a different view on the market. For example, smaller versus larger capitalization stocks, the US dollar relative to the Japanese yen in currency markets, or 2-year yields relative to 30-year government bond yields in the United Kingdom. While investors are often exposed to the big picture direction of stocks, bonds and currencies in their portfolio, many also take views on these smaller, more 'micro' relationships as a key way to exploit mispricing and generate return.

In equities and commodities, these relationships are pretty well behaved. In government bonds, they're not. Excluding the depths of the pandemic, the last month has seen some of the most extreme moves in global bond markets in a decade.

There are a few things going on here, much of which ties back to those central banks. The Federal Reserve has signaled it's going to be rolling back its bond buying, reducing one support to the market. The Bank of England surprised markets by not raising interest rates as expected. While on the other hand, Poland's central bank surprised markets by increasing rates much, much more.

All of this is happening at a time when bond performance wasn't great to begin with. The U.S. Aggregate Bond Index, a good proxy for the high-quality bonds that most investors hold, is down 1.7% this year, underperforming cash. Rising bond yields in the UK and Australia have created a similar dilemma. And many investors who would normally take advantage of these large moves and potential dislocations have been caught up in them, making it harder for some of these relationships to normalize.

What does all that mean for markets? Investors focused on stocks, commodities or foreign exchange should be mindful that their friends over in the bond market are facing a very, very different risk management challenge as we move into the end of the year. And continued bond market volatility could challenge broader market liquidity. More broadly, less central bank support is consistent with our longer run expectations that interest rates are set to move higher. Stay tuned.

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