Yahoo Finance Federal Reserve to begin winding down corporate bond holdings
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday said it would begin the process of unwinding the $13.8 billion corporate bond portfolio that it amassed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The announcement marks the central bank’s exit from an unprecedented strategy to buoy the corporate bond market during the market volatility of spring 2020.
“Portfolio sales will be gradual and orderly, and will aim to minimize the potential for any adverse impact on market functioning by taking into account daily liquidity and trading conditions for exchange traded funds and corporate bonds,” said the Fed in a statement.
A Fed official says the central bank hopes to unload all of its corporate bond ETF and corporate bond holdings by the end of 2021.
As of April 30 this year, corporate bond ETFs made up about $8.6 billion of the portfolio with the remaining $5.2 billion in individual corporate bonds.
The New York Fed, which will operationally handle the unwinding process, is expected to offer more details on the process on Thursday.
The Fed stopped purchasing assets under the facility on December 31, 2020.
The unwind is unrelated to the Fed’s quantitative easing program, in which the central bank is currently purchasing about $120 billion a month in agency mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries. Fed officials added that the announcement Wednesday is unrelated to monetary policy matters.
Undoing a backstop
The Fed’s corporate bond market intervention was one of many tools unleashed by the Fed as markets spiraled out of control in March 2020.
The concern: that a dramatic tightening of financial conditions would leave America’s largest companies with nowhere to turn if they needed to issue debt to survive the crisis.
When Fed announced in May it would stand up some facility to support the corporate bond market, taking the first step of offering confidence to corporate issuers and bond market investors.
The central bank in April 2020 stood up two facilities committing up to $750 billion of purchases covering ETFs and “broad exposure” to U.S. investment-grade and some high-yield corporate bonds.
[Read: A primer on the Fed’s corporate bond-buying program]
The facilities were backed by $10 billion in money allocated to the Fed from the U.S. Treasury, which was placed into a special purpose vehicle that was the legal entity holding the assets.
The low uptake of the facility (when compared to the $750 billion ceiling) did not stop criticism of the programs. Former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Sheila Bair claimed the programs were helping large corporations “goose shareholder returns.”
The Fed, for its part, said the program was vital in preventing a financial collapse.
“The SMCCF proved vital in restoring market functioning last year, supporting the availability of credit for large employers, and bolstering employment through the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Fed said in a statement on Wednesday.
Brian Cheung is a reporter covering the Fed, economics, and banking for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter @bcheungz.
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