Its trick is finding a way to leverage the collective wisdom contained in equity prices into corporate debt markets, where liquidity is lower and prices are less meaningful.
European corporate-debt markets have seen a rare flurry of issues in the past few days by opportunistic, highly rated firms.
All this has coincided with an exceptionally favourable period for corporate-debt markets.
Watch for that once today's scramble for dollars to repay corporate debt in emerging markets subsides.
Investors continue to prefer government and quasi-sovereign corporate debt in these markets.
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But Marcus Hiseman, the head of European corporate-debt capital markets at Morgan Stanley, says there is increasing demand from other companies, which need somewhere to put their cash piles.
However, the possibility of a reduction in the US Treasury credit rating would affect the bond markets, and corporate debt as well, which would be forced to pay a higher insurance premium for its debt going forward in the case of a US downgrade.
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The rate cut may have been intended to help reduce the cost of this borrowing, and to ensure that less-healthy firms already squeezed out of markets for longer-term corporate debt were not shut out of short-term paper and, crucially, forced to turn to the banking sector.
Stephen Pope is the chief global equity strategist of Cantor Fitzgerald in London, covering debt and equity markets as well as economics, politics and corporate strategy.
Some investors perceive that emerging markets debt is inexpensive because they are comparing it with high yield corporate debt.
They priced portfolios of mortgage-backed bonds, corporate loans and securities backed by commercial real estate, and provided more liquidity to debt markets.
But the low yield achieved by Unilever and IBM is part of two further trends: the increased use of the bond markets by European companies and a new-found enthusiasm of investors for corporate debt.
While investors have been consumed with the fiscal cliff, they have ignored other issues that could have an adverse effect on the economy and markets like the European Debt crisis, the sluggish world economy, poor corporate profits , the accelerating national deficit and the escalating crisis in the Middle East.
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Outside of the precious metals, high-yield corporate and local currency emerging market debt are another trade favorite that has legs even if the equity markets turn positive.
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Faint though it is, there is a glimmer of hope in financial markets: interest rates on short-term loans between banks and on longer-term corporate debt have fallen notably since the autumn, and there has been a flood of new bond issues.
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