Beyond pushing out debt maturities last year, high yield borrowers in 2012 saw a decline in their interest rates as demand for their bonds rose.
As some confidence surrounding the economy and prospects of individual firms as begun to build, companies have found it easier to issue debt at low interest rates as demand for their bonds has been strong.
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Doing so delivers a level of predictable income, rather than relying on what the market does, for investors that typically have about two-thirds of their portfolio in bonds and are looking for cash flow from their equity slice, Genter says.
The banks themselves will be compensated for their losses with government bonds.
They can monitor a multitude of companies less easily than they can a government, hence their preference for sovereign bonds over public equity.
Michael O'Toole, a senior director of government relations at the American Payroll Association, a San Antonio-based trade group, says small payroll firms couldn't afford to post bonds for their clients.
Insurance companies' response to the crisis has been depressing: as well as demanding, reasonably, compensation for their losses on state bonds, they also want laxer capital requirements and an extension of the ban on foreign-controlled insurers.
"It's much more expensive now to refinance debt than it was a couple of months ago, " said Alberto Gallo, head of European macro credit research at Royal Bank of Scotland, pointing out that the LTRO helped banks meet much of their funding requirements for 2012, limiting their need to sell bonds.
This would especially be true for long term bonds, which many retirees bought for their higher interest rates.
Some market makers, called authorized participants (APs), are allowed to interchange ETF shares for their underlying securities, corporate bonds in this case.
"From a financial point of view, it makes sense for banks to buy back their bonds, " said Andre Rodrigues, an analyst at Portugal's Caixa Banco de Investimento.
There has been an official recognition of that in the case of Greece, with the decision to encourage its creditors to swap their Greek loans for bonds worth 21% less.
The credit rating agency referenced the December 3 offer by the Greek government to private investors to participate in a Dutch auction to exchange their sovereign bonds for short-term paper issued by the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF).
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In part, that's because the ETFs started the year at a healthy premium to the value of the bonds in their portfolio, which means investors overpaid for those bonds.
Almost all of their issues are of dual-currency bonds: in return for the privilege of redeeming their debt in, say, dollars, borrowers pay higher-than-usual yen interest rates.
His comments come as Greece is asking private investors to swap their current Greek bonds for others that pay less interest over a longer term.
Might the same thing happen with the relatively recent discovery of the supposed 20-year rule, leaving investors to wait for even longer before their shares beat bonds?
For their part, investors in convertible bonds got a small safety-net in the form of an interest payment, but also much of the upside of the shares.
The answer to that is a lot, since to finance its public-works programme the government is postponing reform of its state-owned banks and is forcing those banks to hand over a chunk of their deposits in return for government bonds.
It would be better for the global economy if savers piled their cash into equities and corporate bonds now, rather than waiting for better news.
Moreover, all those depositors who opt to keep their money in Cypriot banks for at least two years would receive government bonds with a value equal to their losses.
The August results show allocations for stocks and bonds reversing back towards their long-term averages.
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These heavy redemptions combined with rising interest rates spelled disaster for 30-year bonds which suffered their worst 12-month return in 60 years!
Bond investors think bonds are their friends because for 3 decades they have been.
The trial balloons unleashed by Congress have a lot of investors scratching their heads as to the ramifications for municipal bonds and Master Limited Partnerships.
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Peeters, who is the president of Belgium's football federation, also explained that senior Libyan financial officials have expressed their readiness to submit guaranteed bonds for the allocated money.
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One way to encourage them along the road to the financial guillotine would be through debt exchanges whereby their devalued bonds would be swapped for claims on debt guaranteed by the EFSF.
This created a demand for Treasury bonds that was in excess of their economic merits, possibly leading the U.S. government to run larger deficits and thus issue more bonds than it would have otherwise.
Valuations here remain attractive relative to other quality buckets: spreads for BB and B bonds are still above their long-term historical levels (according to JP Morgan data) and issuers have plenty of cash and little debt maturing in the short term.
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