Europe

Last week, risky assets continued to experience a somewhat volatile period. The tone was generally a risk off one, with correlations between risk free and risky assets back to negative.

European banks‘ full year 2024 reporting season has now largely come to an end, with only a handful of issuers still to report over the next few weeks.

The recent rally in European fixed income has partly been driven by improved economic sentiment, falling inflation expectations, and a more accommodative monetary policy outlook from the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE).

Manufacturing data has been a relentless purveyor of bad news for the best part of the last 24 months, as abnormal growth rates post-Covid turned into a swampy contractionary trend from which the sector has struggled to emerge.

As we approach the end of the Q4 2024 earnings reporting season for banks, most are now out of their “blackout” periods which means bond issuance has resumed. Wednesday was an active day in primary markets with a couple of deals that are worth commenting on.

Federal Reserve (Fed) chair Jerome Powell had the honour of kicking off the 2025 season for the major central banks this week, swiftly followed by the chore of having to plead the fifth every time he was asked about a President Trump policy.

It has been two weeks since the primary market for collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) re-opened and 2025 has already proven to be quite a year from multiple angles.

The Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) has been the flagship climate initiative for banks to advertise their commitment to aligning their investment and lending portfolios with net-zero targets by 2050 or sooner. However, in recent weeks the NZBA has been hit with the withdrawal of all its major Wall Street banks.

It has been a busy start to 2025 in fixed income markets. After the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) hawkish December dot plot, which added fuel to a sell-off in rates last month, you might have thought primary market activity would be more cautious than both issuers and investors would have anticipated a month ago.

Primary market and trading activity may be declining as is typical in late December, but macro data doesn’t sleep, and central banks haven’t got the memo on the wind-down into year-end either with policy meetings at the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the Bank of England (BoE) scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday respectively.

With analysts steadily publishing their projections for 2025 (ours are here), the macro variables that tend to get the spotlight are naturally growth and inflation.

With a macro backdrop of falling rates and solid global growth, TwentyFour Asset Management's Eoin Walsh says fixed income investors can expect healthy total returns in 2025.