Why everybody is concerned about corporate-bond liquidity

IN SEPTEMBER 2007 Britain suffered its first bank run in a century. Television pictures showed a long queue of depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock. Alistair Darling watched in dismay from Portugal, where he and his fellow European Union finance ministers were gathered. “They’re behaving perfectly rationally, you know,” Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, said in the smarty-pants manner that economists are cherished for. Mr Darling was uncharmed. “It was not what I wanted to hear,” he recalled.

What Lord King probably had in mind was a well-thumbed textbook model. Banks have a liquidity mismatch. One side of the balance-sheet is hard-to-sell loans; the other side is deposits that can be withdrawn in a trice. If depositors believe that a bank is sound, there will be no runs on it. But if enough start to demand their deposits back, it makes sense for everybody to join the rush.

This model can also be applied in other areas. Take the corporate-bond market. Every policy body of stature, from the IMF to the European Central Bank (ECB), has worried about a growing mismatch between investors’ expectations that they can sell out at any moment and an underlying shortage of liquidity in the market. More investors are using corporate-bond funds as an alternative to cash. But fewer dealers are willing to trade...

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