Bonds are also called gilts in the UK and treasuries in the US, it is a financial security which is considered less volatile and safer than stocks for instance, and they are thought to offer a more reliable income stream. They are when an investor loans money, normally to a government, for its safe keeping and return when it ‘matures’. During its stay it can earn the lender a rate of return in interest, fixed or variable, which is known as a coupon. The coupon is for a fixed time, long, medium, or short term, with different benefits attached. After the term, the original loan returns to the lender. The government can use the loan for various social projects.
Bonds produce what is
called a yield, the total return on capital. The yield is the coupon rate plus
the secondary market rate for the bond. When bond prices go up the yields go
down in financial value, they have an inverse relationship. If the interest
rates in the market go up, any new bonds that are issued have correspondingly higher
coupon rates. So, to attract buyers of bonds, existing bonds with the lower
coupon rates need to drop their price, which pushes up their yield to the
market level. Thus, the reverse is also true. If bond prices increase on the
market, the yields go down relatively. A buyer of a bond on the market can pay
less for a bond than it originally was bought for, meaning they obtain a higher
current yield given they get the same income flow. Investors can therefore buy
bonds at a premium or at a discount, and whichever they buy will determine the
yield they receive in income.
What determines the overall
performances of the bonds is the wider market and the way it treats the risks
of lending to the institutions and governments. Bond ratings are a way that credit
rating agencies can assess the credit quality and risk level of bonds.
At the moment there is
a global government bond sell-off on the capitalist market, probably due to
inflation, the huge government deficits, and the war between the US/Israel and
Iran, although the inflation as such is a legacy not of this war specifically,
but of the past giant global financial crises which led to bail outs and vast money
printing (so called quantitative easing), and which devalued the existing
circulating currency, created ‘cheap money’ surplus, and later causing this ‘correction’
as inflation, and this inflation was indeed itself a factor that led to wars,
such as also the Ukraine Russia war.
The current global sell
off increases the borrowing costs for governments (yields rise) who have to
offer higher coupon rates to investor buyers of their bonds. Countries that
would like to spend to combat recessions caused partly by inflation are
therefore being restricted in their financial movements because of the bond
markets, which are also themselves reacting to the inflation and fears of
further rises in the inflation rate and other crises. The standard response of
governments is tax increases and spending cuts, but of course with already high
inflation and following on from previous years of austerity this would be very painful
for people.
The US administration
also recently, July 31, 2026, intervened in global financial markets (a fairly rare
move) to help Japan prop up the value of their currency, which was at a forty-year
low, by selling dollars and euros to buy yen. Japan is the largest foreign
holder of US government debt. This intervention was at least partly designed to
protect the functioning of the US bond market: the US was concerned that Japan’s
efforts to raise the value of its currency would affect the US economy by
making US government borrowing more expensive in the bond market, because to
free up money to buy yen, the Japanese government had been selling US government
treasuries, or bonds. As we now know, selling the US bonds in large quantities
raises the yield the US government must pay to the bondholders. So, the US
thought to remove this necessity of Japan by buying yen.
Trump sees a weak yen
as an unfair trade advantage making its goods more attractive on the global
market. Interest rates in Japan are below US rates and have not kept pace with
inflation, a fact which the US leaders do not like, and the intervention is
seen by analysts as a move to force the Japanese to raise its interest rates. However,
Japan relies on energy imports from the Middle East, the war raised the prices
of this oil and so added to inflation. Japan tried to sweeten this for its
consumers by spending billions subsidising fuel costs, but also the Japanese
cost of living is high, and the government had to subsidise food. It has an
aging population. Japan’s total public debt now stands at more than 200% of its
GDP.
Did this intervention
work? In the short term it may have worked, but in the longer term it has been
less obviously beneficial, and the effect was short lived. The selling of euros
by the US for yen was for the Europeans an unwelcome surprise, while other US
policies tend to strengthen the dollar making the intervention redundant and
contradictory.
