January started 2023 on the right foot across nearly all asset classes as investors shut the door on a poor 2022. Stocks and bonds had positive returns in the first month of the year, with the higher-volatility NASDAQ Composite generating the best return amongst U.S. equity indices. Bonds also performed well, as ongoing uncertainty around […]
Perhaps the best thing to say about 2022 is that it’s over. Most stocks, U.S. Treasuries, and corporate bonds experienced significant depreciation during the year, with cash, stocks in a handful of sectors, and select alternative asset classes being the only respite. The S&P 500 index was down 19.4% for the year, and the 20+ […]
November was a positive month for risk markets, the second in a row. Equities closed the month strong and remain on course for the first positive quarter this year. Equally encouraging for bond investors is the fact that yields on intermediate and longer-maturity U.S. Treasury yields declined this past month for the first time since […]
Inflation is here to stay for the time being. Central banks in economies ravished by inflation remain singularly focused on addressing this issue, and they are quite right to do so as inflation proves stubbornly hard to rein in. This is not only true for the U.S., but also in the U.K. and the Eurozone. […]
Read More… from The Current State of Inflation: Causes and Potential Impacts
October, traditionally considered a challenging month for equities, turned out in fact to be a positive month — one of the few this year — for U.S., European, and Japanese markets. Unfortunately, the news was not nearly as good for investors in government bonds, including U.S. Treasuries, although corporate credit was reasonably steady even as […]
The end of September saw yet another dismal month of losses for traditional asset classes. U.S. equities, bonds, and nearly every category of risk asset saw considerable losses. By the end of the month, the S&P 500 had notched seven consecutive weeks of declines. As of this writing, markets had pared back some of these […]
This article is the third and final part of a series on the history of private credit investing. For access to the first article in the series, click here. The decade of 2010-2020 was characterized by the use of unconventional monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, which resulted in interest rates remaining at record-low levels […]
This article is the second part of a series on the history of private credit investing. For access to the first article in the series, click here. As the private debt market broadened and deepened throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, alternatives to senior leveraged bank debt or high yield loans began evolving — mainly […]
Read More… from The History of Private Credit: CLOs and the Great Financial Crisis
This article is the first part of a series on the history of private credit investing. For access to the rest of the series, read part two and part three. Note: For the purposes of this article, “private debt” (and “private debt markets”) reference the overall private/non-bank lending industry, whereas “private credit” (and “private credit […]
Read More… from The History of Private Credit: The Foundation