This note analyzes the stress experienced (and caused) by open-end mutual funds during the March COVID-19 stress episode, with a focus on global fixed-income funds. In light of increased valuation uncertainty, funds experienced a short period of intense withdrawals while the market liquidity of their holdings deteriorated substantially. To cover redemptions, afflicted funds predominantly shed liquid assets first—for example, cash, cash equivalents, and US Treasury securities. But forced asset sales amplified price pressures in markets and contributed to liquidity falling across fixed-income markets. This drop in market liquidity, as well as the general stress in financial markets, may have led to fund investors becoming even more sensitive to challenging portfolio performance and encouraged further withdrawals. Only after central banks intervened, directly and indirectly supporting asset managers, did liquidity and redemption stress subside. Overall, the March episode validated the financial-stability concerns about liquidity vulnerabilities in the fund industry and calls for further action to address them.

We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While multi-strategy hedge funds who were not capital constrained increased their positions, a large fraction of these funds actually acted as net sellers consistent with the view that information barriers within a firm (not just relative to outside investors) can lead to capital constraints for trading desks with mark-to-market losses. Our findings suggest that real world frictions impede arbitrage capital.

An interesting disconnect has taken shape between local currency- and hard currency-denominated bonds in emerging markets with respect to their portfolio flows and prices since the start of the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerging market assets have recovered sharply from the COVID-19 sell-off in 2020, but the post-pandemic recovery in 2021 has been highly uneven. This note seeks to answer why. Yields of local currency-denominated bonds have risen faster and are approaching their pandemic highs, while hard currency bond yields are still near their post-pandemic lows. Portfolio flows to local currency debt have similarly lagged flows to hard currency bonds. This disconnect is closely linked to the external environment and fiscal and inflationary pressures. Its evolution remains a key consideration for policymakers and investors, since local markets are the main source of funding for emerging markets. This note draws from the methodology developed in earlier Global Financial Stability Reports on fundamentals-based asset valuation models for funding costs and forecasting models for capital flows (using the at-risk framework). The results are consistent across models, indicating that local currency assets are significantly more sensitive to domestic fundamentals while hard currency assets are dependent on the external risk sentiment to a greater extent. This suggests that the post-pandemic, stressed domestic fundamentals have weighed on local currency bonds, partially offsetting the boost from supportive global risk sentiment. The analysis also highlights the risks emerging markets face from an asynchronous recovery and weak domestic fundamentals.

The COVID-19 global health pandemic, which started in late December 2019, forced many countries to adopt unusual measures such as social distancing and strict lockdowns. It changed many of our certainties and practices, including the foundations of the market-led version of capitalism, by bringing social and health considerations back to the forefront of firms' considerations, investors' strategies and governments' priorities. Under the effects of this unprecedented crisis, all sectors of finance and real economy have been seriously affected.Health uncertainties and their increasing consequences for human life and activities require stronger and faster actions to shape pathways towards sustainability and better resilience. The COVID-19 health crisis is a visible part of a greater iceberg: the World Health Organization has tracked, over recent years, a large number of epidemic events around the world, suggesting that many other similar diseases could appear and evolve in the future from epidemic to pandemic in a globalized world.Financial Transformations Beyond the COVID-19 Health Crisis was specifically designed to provide the readers with new results, recent findings and future outlook on the impacts of COVID-19 on financial markets, firm behaviors, and finance and investment strategies. It favors multidimensional perspectives and brings together conceptual, empirical and policy-oriented chapters, using quantitative and qualitative methods alike. This is a timely and comprehensive collection of theoretical, empirical and policy contributions from renowned scholars around the world, and provides the thoughts and insights required to rethink the financial sector in the event of new shocks of the same nature.

Local currency government bonds (OFZ bonds) are an important fixed-income instrument in Russia’s financial markets. In this paper, based on granular data, we explore the development of the OFZ bond market with a focus on foreign investors. As this fixed-income market has experienced a liberalization of the domestic trading and settlement infrastructure, and weathered several episodes of market stresses since the 2008–09 global financial crisis, the role of foreign investors can be observed along with these events. What we have found is that foreign investors had influenced the market before they became an important player and since then they have contributed to the development of the market while not necessarily destabilizing it in episodes of shocks.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.

This paper examines the drivers of liquidity shortages in the Mexican government bond market. We use unique transaction- and quote level data with information on end-investors to construct an index of bond market liquidity. We find that liquidity remained stable in recent years, although temporary shortages arose amid domestic and global market stress. The analysis suggests that the largest liquidity squeezes have tended to be driven by foreign investors, whose sell-offs were especially pronounced in less liquid market segments. While domestic banks often absorbed part of the shock, other domestic investors--with the notable inclusion of domestic pension and mutual funds--appeared to take a more opportunistic stance depending on the nature of the shock.