World Says Goodbye to Negative-Yielding Debt as BOJ Shift Bites
- Bloomberg bond gauge loses last negative yielding member
- Short-dated Japanese bond yields have climbed above zero
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The world’s pile of negative-yielding debt has vanished, as Japanese bonds finally joined global peers in offering zero or positive income.
The global stock of bonds where investors received sub-zero yields peaked at $18.4 trillion in late 2020, according to Bloomberg’s Global Aggregate Index of the debt, when central banks worldwide were keeping rates at or below zero and buying bonds to ensure yields were repressed. Japan’s yields were the last to leave the sub-zero club because policy makers there had stuck so long with ultra-loose settings brought in even before the pandemic.