PCF News and Press, High Income Securities Fund From 03/12/21

The Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U) released Wednesday puts the year-over-year inflation rate at 1.68%. It is below the 3.76% average since the end of the Second World War and below its 10-year moving average, now at 1.73%. Our long-term inflation charts reach bac...

For US Treasury investors, the starting place for inflation today is tough-there's not enough inflation-adjusted yield to cushion the pain. Treasury inflation-protected securities and similar inflation-linked bonds globally will outperform comparable-maturity Treasury bonds if inflati...

One of the interesting things during the period when Treasury yields were rising was that all of the risk assets were compressing against Treasuries. There is virtually no spread in any of the credit indexes that pays the buyer for the credit risk. The spreads are just off historic lo...

For credit markets, the returns just kept coming in 2020 once the Fed stepped in with its strong policy support in late March. With strong returns in the fourth quarter, both investment grade and high yield corporate markets in the U.S. ended the year with positive returns over equiva...

Rising rates are such a problem for gold bullion that gold bullion and major gold stocks are where they were before the COVID pandemic crashed the U.S. stock market at this time last year. In other words, they have wiped out all the pandemic gains. The bid in the dollar is significant...

For investors seeking income, appreciation, or diversification benefits, fixed income strategies are core components of a well-rounded asset allocation. In particular, we are optimistic about the high yield market-and believe that the opportunities can be maximized with active, risk-c...

Why the run-up in rates has troubled equity markets more than credit, and why we think that is poised to continue. Since the start of the fourth quarter of 2020, the U.S. 10-year yield has risen by more than 80 basis points while the spread of the ICE Bank of America U.S. Corporate BB...

The recent rise in Treasury yields has spooked the equity markets. This is obvious from the recent performance of the bond markets as compared to the stock markets. Inflation is not the cause of this rise, but rather a combination of the stimulus measures, a rebounding economy, our CO...

Global recovery optimism, especially in the US, is leading to speculation over when the Fed might take its foot off the accelerator and buy fewer Treasuries and Agencies. Increasingly, parallels are being drawn to similar events in 2013. In this Q&A, we look at when such a sha...

Economic growth is returning to almost every country in the world, and almost all commodity prices are rising. The thing to worry about is the direction of fiscal policy, which will almost certainly bring us higher taxes, increased regulatory burdens, and more expensive energy. Fo...