Radical plans to address bond investors’ liquidity fears

Frequent issuers on both sides of the Atlantic are exploring new ways to concentrate their high-quality liabilities into fewer more-liquid bonds to avoid paying a premium as markets sell off.

Amid rising bond-market volatility, frequent borrowers are finally considering how they can contribute to greater liquidity, ease investors’ long-standing fears of being trapped in losing positions as bond prices gap down and avoid paying an illiquidity premium for new issues.

Reasoning that investors will put a value on the ability to trade in and out of an asset in size at a tight spread and with minimal impact on the secondary market price, borrowers are taking the obvious step of concentrating previously dispersed liabilities into fewer outstandings.

Large institutional investors, such as BlackRock, have been urging this for years and must feel it is long overdue and even now only happening in baby steps.

German government-guaranteed KfW, for example, which sold €75.5

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