Financial markets don't like the U.K. stimulus plan because they fear inflation above all else now
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Well, this is rich. Fiscal stimulus is not greeted with open arms. The U.K. has unveiled a large stimulus program, the biggest tax cut in half a century and will pay for it by substantially raising the debt level. The result? Bond yields have surged, while the FTSE 250 stock index is down 2.3% and sitting near a 2-year low. Wait, don't markets love stimulus programs? They certainly seemed to during the Great Financial Crisis, and for some time after. But those were low interest rate, low inflation environments. Stimulus programs might even be welcomed for stoking some inflation in those circumstances. Not in this environment. The stimulus program and the attendant need to borrow was immediately seen as inflationary, hardly what the market wants to hear. This leaves governments in a pickle. If stimulus programs are no longer greeted as a positive, what can they do to help out weak economies? TINA is yesterday Corporate bonds are starting to get attractive. For years, the mantra was TINA: There Is No Alternative to stocks. That's not the case anymore. With prices for large corporate bond ETFs hitting their lowest levels since 2010 (check out LQD), investors are starting to take notice of the steadily rising yields of large-cap corporations, particularly in the 2- to 5-year maturity range. Yesterday, for example, Apple 5-year bonds had a 4.31% yield, General Motors 5.78%, Home Depot 4.3%. High-yield are even more attractive: Ford 6.7%, Macy's 7.4% for its 5-year bonds. "We have seen a big pickup in retail interest, investors are saying, 'These are yields I haven't seen since pre-2008, and this might be interesting to put in my investment portfolio,'" Izzy Conlin, managing director and head of U.S. cash credit for Tradeweb, an electronic trading platform with a strong presence across fixed income, told me. One other note: while Treasury yields have also increased notably (you can get 3.9% yield on a 5-year Treasury note), the corporate yield curve is not inverted, as Treasuries are. "The corporate credit curve is a little more normal and upward sloping, so you can still get a little more yield the further out you go," Conlin told me. But not too much. The 10-year Apple bond yields only 4.40%, not much more than the 4.31% 5-year, which may cause a lot of investors to wonder why they should buy a 10-year when they can get roughly the same yield for a 5-year. That's not too surprising. The curve for the higher-quality stuff is flatter. Macy's, which is in junk territory, has a yield of 8.98% on its 10-year, well above the 7.41% on its 5-year.