It is said that the Conservative Party only has two modes — triumph and panic. Under Liz Truss, the new prime minister, the party has gone from the first to the second in record-breaking time (with a strange interregnum for Queen Elizabeth’s funeral). Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget, or “fiscal event” as he termed it, was the worst-received ...

The credit-market bears may well be vindicated if the US enters a recession in the next year, but it’s too early to go full-scale Armageddon with predictions about corporate bond spreads. For all the economic headwinds, US corporations started the year from a position of extraordinary financial strength thanks to opportunistic refinancing in 2020 and 2021 and strong cash reserves ...

  The Bank of England recently announced that it would enter the market to buy government bonds (known as gilts) with a remaining maturity of 20 years or more. Although the central bank insists that its actions are “temporary,” to restore “orderly” markets, it’s not really clear what either of those words mean. 1 It was only on Sept. 21 ...