Sovereign debt: Credit specialists dive in as SSA investors take fright

The summer of turmoil in the eurozone has cemented the transition of the region’s sovereign debt sector into one large and volatile credit market. Traditional passive fixed-income fund managers barely know how to cope, while credit specialists are jumping in and expecting to make big returns. Louise Bowman reports.

“OUR STANCE FROM a year ago has been to underweight peripheral countries altogether – and in that I include France.” This comment from Xavier Baraton, global CIO fixed income, CIO North America, at HSBC, may be far from revolutionary, but it sums up the extraordinary position that the SSA market now finds itself in. Sovereigns used to be the supertanker of the fixed-income markets – the risk-free trade that accounted for large proportions of asset allocation but generated slow, reliable, unspectacular beta returns.

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