Earlier today, the ECB updated the list of corporate bonds it bought in the latest week. While no individual bond purchase amounts were given, the ECB has bought into 980 issuances with a total of €683bn in amount outstanding (from 245 issuing entities). For the week ending 21st Jul, bond purchases stood at €0.7bn across sectors, bringing total Corporate Sector Purchase Program holdings to €101.1 Billion, an increase of €720MM in the past week. The complete list of ISINs can be found here courtesy of UBS. According to Dealogic, for the week ending 21st Jul, €8.8bn was issued in EUR IG space, of which €3.2bn was CSPP eligible. In the month of Jun, the central bank purchased €7bn of corporate bonds, versus €7.6bn in May. 85.6% of the €96.6bn total CSPP holdings were purchased on the secondary market.
Looking only at the CSPP, As Bloomberg adds, the ECB purchased at least 1 new corporate bond under its CSPP program during the week ended July 21. The number of securities currently held is 978; the ECB holds EU101.06BN of EU682.55bBN outstanding. Utilities remain the largest industry group with 258 securities. Additionally, the ECB bought a bond issued by Lietuvos Energija, its first Lithuanian bond. Of note, 144 (~14.7%) of the 978 securities are negative yielding.
All of the above is the same dry, weekly update we disclose weekly. However, for the simplest visual summary of just how the ECB’s corporate bond purchases – now that the central bank owns 14.8% of all eligible European corporate bonds – have “impacted” the market since the corporate bond buying program was announced in March of 2016, here is just one chart from JPM:
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