The expense ratio for leading NTF bond funds at these shops averages 0.66%, while the average cost of bond funds on the Forbes Best Buy list is 0.37%.
At the very least, fewer competitors in the business--and bond insurers would need to maintain the highest rating to stay in the game--would raise the cost of bond issuance for many smaller cities and make some projects too expensive to finance.
Cost of carry on my bond portfolio of high yield paper is also minimal, but shows a net positive variance of over 500 basis points.
One study found that the cost of issuing a bond in Mexico was about half as much as in Brazil or Chile, owing to expensive disclosure requirements in Brazil and a stamp tax in Chile, which makes issuing bonds dearer at home than abroad.
One advantage of this is that it would eliminate the cost of re-establishing a government-bond market in a couple of decades' time, when the rising costs of ageing populations will surely force governments to start borrowing again.
Mr Draghi said flatly that the ECB had "never" discussed capping the cost of borrowing - the sovereign bond yield - at a certain level, in Italy and anywhere else.
Joe saves this same amount annually until age 70 and earns an average compound annual return over that time of 6% by investing in a balanced mix of low-cost stock and bond mutual funds.
The challenge for the architect of a bond ETF is to ensure that it closely tracks its respective index in a cost-effective manner, despite the lack of liquidity in the bond market.
Banks, flush with hundreds of billions of euros of low-cost funds, appear to have been reinvesting some of them in troubled sovereign bond markets, bringing borrowing costs down for the likes of Spain and Italy.
They will bear around 95% of the cost of reducing Greece's current debts, reckons Gabriel Sterne of Exotix, a bond broker.
But if you look at the bond market, or the cost of insuring against sovereign defaults, the gap with Spain and Italy is much larger than it was.
When thinking about the cost of this kind of arrangement, many people would focus on the interest rate on the bond the government is issuing (just as they focus now on the interest rate on the promissory notes).
FORBES: How Much Would Ireland Benefit from Replacing the Promissory Notes with a Long-Term Bond?
The same policies that have forced down government-bond yields have forced up the cost of providing pensions.
It sent Spain's cost of borrowing (for the sovereign 10-year bond) toward 7% -- a level which is regarded as unsustainable and has precipitated bailouts of other euro countries.
Those who herald QE as a success say it has kept bond yields down and thus reduced the cost of borrowing for everyone.
Given the constraints on state budgets, the unpopularity of increased taxation and the politics of tobacco, it is more tempting to raise money through a tobacco-settlement bond, in spite of the higher cost.
On the bond markets, Italy's cost of borrowing ended Monday fractionally higher at 4.49% per year, from 4.33% at the end of Friday, as the perceived riskiness of lending to the government rose.
The cost of borrowing for Italy's government has reached a new eurozone record of 6.29% in its latest bond auction.
He suggests working out a deal with your broker in which the net cost of the trade to you is an agreed-upon markup, adjusted up or down by the movement of wholesale bond prices for the brief period when you are on the sidelines.
American Electric Power (AEP) chose to delay its plans to build a wind farm in Indiana when the heavily indebted utility found its cost of capital had soared because of turmoil in the corporate-bond market.
On the bond markets, the Spanish government's long-term cost of borrowing fell slightly, to an implied interest rate of just under 6% for 10-year debt.
The cost of driving could soon be beyond the reach of 19-year-old Hazel Bond.
Of course another way to hedge your stock holdings is to invest in a low-cost bond fund.
Similar to low-cost index mutual funds, ETFs track segments of the market and try to match a benchmark stock or bond index rather than beat it.
The four iShares index funds (see table below), issued by the Global Investors unit of Barclays (nyse: BCS - news - people ), sport a rock-bottom expense ratio of 0.15 versus open-end bond fund averages of around 1.00 and the 0.20 charged by low-cost leader Vanguard.
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