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The University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance released new data showing AI tools are rapidly entering the municipal bond market, giving well‑capitalized banks, advisors and law firms a distinct edge. Regulators, led by the MSRB, are scrutinizing whether AI use complies with fair‑dealing (Rule G‑17) and fiduciary (Rule G‑42) duties. Adoption is uneven, with large buyside firms building proprietary large‑language models to boost analyst productivity, while smaller players risk being left behind. The shift also raises labor concerns as AI automates tasks traditionally performed by entry‑level staff.
S&P Global downgraded Service Properties Trust (SVC) to B‑ from B, citing $2 billion of debt maturing over the next two years. Roughly 40% of the REIT's capital structure faces imminent repayment, raising liquidity and covenant concerns. The company sold 112...
Onslow Bay Financial is preparing a $452.7 million asset‑backed securities offering backed by a pool of 1,952 home‑equity lines of credit. The ABS will be issued in eight tranches under the OBX 2026‑HE1 Trust, benchmarked to SOFR and maturing in February 2056. The...
Centrifuge and Resolv are deploying up to $100 million of JAAA, a tokenized AAA‑rated credit fund, as leveraged collateral on Aave Horizon, creating the largest real‑world asset loop in DeFi to date. Resolv will lock JAAA to generate yield for its...
Fitch Ratings released an exposure draft for a climate‑vulnerability screening tool (climate.VS) aimed at U.S. public finance issuers. The 0‑100 score, derived from physical and transition risk analyses, flags issuers scoring 50 or above for deeper credit evaluation. Municipal Market...
Hong Kong's finance chief Paul Chan signaled openness to allowing local universities to issue tertiary education bonds to fund the Northern Metropolis University Town project. The plan expands the campus area to 100 hectares and includes a third medical school,...
S&P Global Ratings warns that collateral values backing Hong Kong banks' commercial property loans will keep declining through 2026, reflecting a market that has yet to find a bottom. The Bank of East Asia disclosed a HK$723 million valuation loss in...
Investor demand for U.S. corporate bonds has surged to historic levels, making new issuances harder to access and allocations tighter. Barclays’ analysis of TRACE data shows competition in investment‑grade debt is up 15% and high‑yield debt up 30% compared with...
Indian banks are accelerating purchases of government bonds as their sovereign‑debt holdings edge toward the RBI’s 18% regulatory minimum. In February, state‑owned lenders bought a net ₹225.8 billion ($2.5 billion), the largest monthly purchase recorded since Bloomberg began tracking in 2006. Their...
The February 2026 bulletin outlines three post‑pandemic credit‑market shifts that have eased financial conditions: bank‑funding cost spreads fell about 70 basis points, variable mortgage‑rate spreads narrowed roughly 65 basis points, and business‑credit supply expanded with non‑bank lenders gaining market share. These...
International Seaways reported Q3 2025 net income of $71 million ($1.42 per share) and adjusted EBITDA of $108 million, while generating roughly $63 million of free cash flow. The company ended the quarter with $985 million of total liquidity, a cash balance of $413 million...
Chicago’s general‑obligation bonds were downgraded by both KBRA and Fitch to BBB‑plus from A‑minus, with a negative outlook maintained. The agencies cited a shrinking fund balance, tightening liquidity, rising pension costs and consecutive operating deficits. The downgrade precedes the city’s...
Morningstar DBRS assigned a BBB rating with a Stable trend to ARC Resources Ltd.'s senior unsecured notes offering, comprising C$400 million at 3.349% due 2029 and C$550 million at 4.104% due 2033. The company plans to use net proceeds to refinance existing...
A&D Mortgage issued $602.7 million of non‑prime residential mortgage‑backed securities (RMBS) through its 2026‑NQM2 transaction, backed by 1,793 loans with four months of seasoning. The pool is dominated by single‑family homes (68.4 %) and condos (20.5 %), with 48.1 % of borrowers self‑employed and...
Tokenized US Treasury market grew to $10.8 billion, up $1.9 billion since the start of 2026. The sector has expanded 50× since 2024, propelled by BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), now worth over $1.2 billion. Growth persisted despite a broad crypto...
JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America are urging clients to buy Venezuelan global bonds that carry large amounts of unpaid interest, known as accrued coupons. The banks argue that these distressed securities could deliver outsized returns if Venezuela...
Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther unveiled a $500 million affordable‑housing bond framework dividing funds into four buckets: $150 million for new construction and preservation, $125 million for transitional shelters, homeowner upgrades and supportive housing, $175 million for land acquisition linked to transit‑oriented and mixed‑use development,...
Meta is planning to introduce stablecoin‑based payments in the second half of 2026 by partnering with a third‑party provider, avoiding the need to issue its own token. The initiative leverages the 2025 GENIUS Act’s regulatory framework, positioning digital dollars as...
Fixed income specialist Cohen & Company announced that its European subsidiary raised €481.5 million for the PriDe IV subordinated insurance debt fund, the firm’s largest European vintage to date. The fund continues the company’s strategy of providing Tier II capital to small and...
XAI Octagon Floating Rate & Alternative Income Trust (XFLT) has been downgraded to a sell as earnings continue to decline and growth remains limited. The fund now trades at a roughly 20.21 % discount to NAV, reflecting persistent portfolio challenges rather...
Oppenheimer has added former Stern Brothers managing director Vien Le to its public finance investment‑banking group in Los Angeles. Le brings more than two decades of municipal finance experience, having advised the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the state...
Allstate has priced and closed two catastrophe‑bond series, Sanders Re IV Ltd. (2026‑1A) and Sanders Re III Ltd. (2026‑1B), delivering a record $1.2 billion of multi‑peril, multi‑year reinsurance in a single market visit. The issuance comprises four tranches—two four‑year and two...
Hiscox Capital Partners lifted its insurance‑linked securities (ILS) assets under management to $1.5 billion as of 1 January 2026, driven by $330 million of new inflows over the past year. The inflows offset planned capital returns and boosted deployable capital for the January reinsurance...
Sustainable debt issuance slipped 12% year‑on‑year to about $1.4 trillion in 2025, marking the slowest growth in five years, even as clean‑energy investment hit a record $2.3 trillion. Research from ING expects a modest rebound to roughly $1.62 trillion in 2026, with Europe...
CME Group reported a record 36,328,151 open interest contracts in U.S. Treasury futures and options on February 19, surpassing its previous high from November 2025. The milestone spans the entire yield curve, with new peaks in 2‑year, 5‑year, 10‑year, and...
Sponsor‑backed merger and acquisition activity surged to $165 billion in December 2025, marking the second‑largest monthly volume in the past decade, just shy of the $168 billion peak recorded in April 2021. Data from Mergermarket shows that leveraged buyouts and other sponsor‑driven deals now...
Crescent Capital BDC reported Q4 2025 net investment income of $0.46 per share, delivering 110% coverage of its $0.42 regular dividend. Net asset value slipped to $19.28 per share, driven by $0.15 per share of unrealized losses from tariff‑impacted borrowers....
The Bank of Thailand’s Monetary Policy Committee is expected to leave its policy rate unchanged at 1.25% during Wednesday’s meeting, buoyed by a stronger‑than‑expected 2.5% year‑on‑year GDP growth in Q4 2025 and a clearer political environment after the election. Economists...
Panoro Energy ASA announced a series of fixed‑income investor meetings, appointing Arctic Securities and DNB Carnegie as joint bookrunners and SB1 Markets as co‑manager. The company is considering a $150 million tap issuance of its senior secured bond, pending market conditions...
Loomis Sayles sees the expanding private‑credit market as a source of higher yields and structural protections for fixed‑income investors. To exploit this, the firm created a dedicated Private Credit Team that works alongside its public‑markets portfolio managers, credit researchers, and legal...
Western Asset High Yield Opportunity Fund (HYI) converted from a term‑structured to a perpetual fund last year, prompting the discount to widen to roughly its historical average. The fund’s non‑leveraged, high‑yield strategy delivers a 10.23% distribution yield, but semi‑annual and...
BAM Mutual announced the hiring of Philip Moos, a 30‑year municipal sales veteran from Wells Fargo, to bolster its municipal capital markets team. Moos will report to Bryan Baebler and focus on expanding BAM’s secondary‑market insurance business with institutional investors. The insurer currently...
At its Galveston meeting, the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association (TWIA) Board voted to purchase reinsurance and catastrophe bonds only up to the statutory 1‑in‑50 year probable maximum loss (PML) level for 2026. The revised funding target of $4.3051 billion translates to...
Investors are showing strong appetite for GSE‑eligible loans embedded in non‑agency mortgage‑backed securities, tightening spreads and lifting prices across the segment. The surge reflects limited agency supply and the premium investors assign to loans that meet Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eligibility...
In January 2026, fixed‑income ETFs attracted $56 billion of net inflows, pushing total inflows to over $105 billion across ETFs and mutual funds. Nearly half of the bond‑ETF money went into actively managed funds such as PIMCO’s PYLD and iShares BINC, while...
Home prices edged higher in the latest quarter, while Chase announced a modest rate discount to spur loan demand. Retail giant Bed Bath & Beyond entered the mortgage origination space, signaling non‑traditional players’ interest in housing finance. Bayview Capital began stocking GSE‑eligible loans...
The Oklahoma Supreme Court is set to rule on $1.45 billion of winter‑storm bonds issued by Oklahoma Gas & Electric and Public Service Company of Oklahoma. Republican lawmakers allege the Oklahoma Corporation Commission violated state audit and ethics rules when authorizing...
A consortium of leading financial institutions executed the first cross‑border, intraday repurchase agreement using tokenized U.K. government bonds on the Canton Network. The trade featured the inaugural cross‑currency swap of tokenized gilts for tokenized deposits, with smart contracts encoding interest...
Zurich‑based Plenum Investments announced that its assets under management have topped US$2 billion, roughly doubling the figure achieved in July 2023. The growth stems from four UCITS catastrophe‑bond and insurance‑linked securities funds, which now enjoy institutional‑scale assets. The firm’s organic expansion reflects...
The California FAIR Plan secured a $400 million wildfire reinsurance cat bond from Golden Bear Re Ltd. (Series 2026‑2), priced at a 9.5 % spread and an expected loss of 2.65 %. The single‑tranche issuance runs three years to February 2029 and brings the plan’s...
Business development companies (BDCs) are experiencing a resurgence, highlighted by a 30‑day SEC yield of 9.21% for VanEck’s BIZD ETF and an industry‑wide yield of roughly 11.3%. Credit metrics show non‑accrual rates at 1.2% and loan prices near par, indicating...
State and local governments issued a record $498 billion in municipal bonds in 2024 and topped $580 billion in 2025, driven primarily by infrastructure, education, and transportation projects. The surge reflects a shift from waning federal pandemic aid to local financing for...
Japan's Ministry of Finance is weighing changes to its liquidity‑enhancement auction framework for government bonds, aiming to ease supply pressure on the super‑long end of the curve. From April, the mid‑term bucket could be narrowed from a 5‑15.5‑year range to...
FPA Short Duration Government ETF posted a 1.05% return in Q4 2025 and a 6.84% gain for the full year. The performance was driven by Treasury interest income and price appreciation as yields fell across the curve. The fund kept its...
The Structured Finance Association (SFA) and Bloomberg Index Services are co‑creating a new credit securities index that spans multiple asset classes. Designed to deliver consistent, transparent performance and risk metrics, the index will be embedded directly into Bloomberg Terminal workflows...
The Strategy Shares Gold Enhanced Yield ETF (GOLY) combines gold, commodity, and fixed‑income exposure using leverage to deliver a trailing‑twelve‑month distribution yield near 7%. Unlike many gold‑focused ETFs, GOLY does not write options, instead relying on bond income and capital...
A federal judge in Connecticut dismissed a lawsuit filed by former COFINA bondholders against insurers Ambac, MBIA and related subsidiaries, citing a lack of personal jurisdiction. The ruling allows plaintiffs to refile a second‑amended complaint against MBIA Inc. by March 6,...
iShares has moved four of its short‑term fixed‑income ETFs—SGOV, SHV, PMMF and GMMF—from the electronic NYSE Arca platform to the NYSE’s hybrid floor model. The funds total roughly $96 billion in assets, with SGOV alone managing $75 billion and attracting about $6 billion of...
Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that FHFA Director Bill Pulte met with a broad array of industry participants during the first seven months of his tenure. The schedule shows more than 150 engagements with banks,...
Redwood introduced an expanded‑credit mortgage‑backed security, widening the pool of agency‑eligible assets as banks see their residential MBS holdings dip in Q4. Mortgage servicing rights (MSRs) are now being offered directly, reflecting heightened M&A activity that is reshaping the conventional...
