While much of the stress early last year affected funds with exposure to energy and commodity financial contracts known as derivatives, a crisis in the UK pensions market last September and last week’s failure of Silicon Valley Bank underscored how rising interest rates can give rise to shocks.
While plain-vanilla LDI strategies use bonds – which generate predictable interest income – to match their payout liabilities, a raft of UK pension funds had used high levels of leveraged financial derivatives to increase their exposure to bonds they didn’t actually hold, resulting in margin calls as bond values dropped.
The Central Bank said that there had been a net outflow of investor money in Irish-domiciled bonds – particularly so-called high-yield funds invested in risky companies – last year as investors weighed the effects of rising borrowing costs globally.