The Federal Reserve committed Wednesday to do more to help the US economic recovery, promising more asset purchases and lower interest rates for even longer than it previously expected.

MarketAxess is well positioned for this role in view of the rapid growth in Open Trading, its global, all-to-all market that has proved an essential source of liquidity during the recent period of credit market stress. With its Eligible Seller designation, MarketAxess provides end investors and broker-dealers the opportunity to use Open Trading to respond directly and anonymously to the Fed’s requests to purchase bonds.

“In general, we note that the overall sentiment is that MiFID II has not yet delivered on its goals in the fixed income markets and can still be considered a work in progress,” the AFM’s report stated. “The main finding is that MiFID II’s focus on transparency based on liquidity has proven to be counterproductive given the lack of liquidity in the fixed income markets where most instruments are tailor-made and not designed to be traded on a secondary market in the first place.”

The COVID-19 crisis has impacted nearly all asset classes, and USD corporate bonds have not been spared. As the mid-March 2020 market volatility affected USD corporate bond prices, it also compromised their liquidity. While these spikes in liquidity costs occurred across the USD corporate bond asset class, we found the level of impact-and the path to returning to pre-crisis levels-varied across credit rating and sectors.

So then why have these seemingly common-sense, pro-transparency adjustments remained elusive for so long? Those who follow the battles within corporate-bond market structure might recall that BlackRock Inc. and Pacific Investment Management Co., neither of whom are part of the Credit Roundtable, were on the same side recently in advocating for a pilot program that would reduce secondary-market transparency in exchange for potentially better liquidity. 

TPG also bought into the round, which was led by growth equity firm Dragoneer Investment Group LLC, Trumid said in a statement Tuesday. It plans to use the money to expand its products to include emerging markets and reach into new geographies like Asia.

Liquidnet’s system will allow investors to receive deal announcements and updates as well as place orders and receive allocation and pricing details. The company already runs a platform for trading existing bonds in the secondary market used by more than 1,300 investors who it aims to attract to the new product giving access to the new-issues market.

Any potential conflicts that may arise from having investment giant BlackRock Inc buy corporate bonds and commercial mortgages on behalf of the Federal Reserve are being managed “extremely carefully,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday.

Even though legitimate criticisms of exchange-traded funds persist, data shows that investors used ETFs to help them get through the worst of the dysfunction in this year’s credit markets.

“The secondary market for corporate bonds is growing and is ripe for an evolution, but existing platforms are not fit for purpose. Data is monetised by platforms and it is leaked across fragmented, opaque markets, decreasing execution quality. Working with the industry, we will build a platform that solves the challenges of locating and promoting liquidity and data ownership once and for all.”