These new programs rely on pre-2008 assumptions about market structure. The biggest financial players have a much smaller footprint in the markets than they once did, and the 24 Primary Dealers with whom the Fed currently trades make up a much smaller share of the trading market. The pulse of the financial markets now extends beyond the old Wall Street stalwarts

Carney compared what was happening in the corporate-debt markets to the subprime-mortgage boom that culminated in the great financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Citing the rise of “covenant lite” loans that placed very few restrictions on corporate borrowers, Carney said, “The subprime analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s on the road to ‘no doc’ underwriting, which happened eleven years ago.”

In this note, we calculate several measures of liquidity to shed light on trading conditions in one large and important market: the market for corporate bonds. As uncertainty surrounding downgrades and potential defaults grew during the first weeks of March, and withdrawals from corporate bond funds mounted, we find that dealers became increasingly unwilling to absorb inventory onto their balance sheets.

List of corporate bond market makers that are eligible to trade with the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility. 

What would be interesting to see is the execution of this Fed action be a catalyst to finally drag corporate bond trading out of the “relationship age” and into the “information age.” 

Three main questions around execution have been raised by market participants to The DESK: Who will manage the broker list? How will execution quality be judged? How will conflicts of interest be avoided by BlackRock’s Financial Markets Advisory team, when it might buy assets including BlackRock ETFs, or assets it has a view on for investment purposes?

Ten of the world’s largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, have been sued for allegedly conspiring over nearly 14 years to rig prices in the $9.6 trillion U.S. corporate bond market, costing ordinary investors billions of dollars.

Trading froze when transaction costs rocketed. In some cases, humans had to step in. The bread and butter of their algorithms — corporate data — turned stale in the fastest economic shock in living memory.

The handful of markets in which the Fed has directly intervened by purchasing assets or lending against them have recouped some of their losses since then, a reassuring sign for investors who were taken aback by the indiscriminate selling that occurred throughout much of March.

But in riskier markets that fall outside of the Fed’s purview—including junk bonds, leveraged loans and nongovernment-backed mortgage bonds—the pain has been slower to abate. Some markets remain essentially closed for business, setting off a race against the clock for borrowers to stay afloat.

Disclosed dealers provide the vast majority of liquidity in global corporate bond markets. Under difficult market conditions, though, a Request-for-Quote (RFQ) might receive few or perhaps no responses from disclosed dealers. There are any number of reasons for this including risk limits, shift to manual trading and/or potentially reduced efficiency as employees and traders are working remotely.