Bond Rally Sparks Little Joy as Bears See ‘Painful’ Capitulation

From the Americas to Asia, and from Europe to the Middle East, the $100 trillion bond market this year is turning into one for the record books.

Returns on fixed-income securities of all types, from government to corporate and asset-backed debt, averaged 3.97 percent through the first five months of 2014 as of May 29, matching the record set in 2003 based on the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Broad Market Index. As bond prices rallied, yields as measured by the gauge fell to the lowest in a year.