U.S. Treasuries Volume Surge on Volatility

When markets are buckling and volatility is signaling a crisis, you sell what you can, not what you want.  That’s what happened last week on Wall Street, where slowing economic growth in Europe, Ebola anxiety and escalating conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine tore through the calm with a force not seen in three years. Loath to find out what their record holdings of corporate bonds and leveraged loans were worth as liquidity thinned and markets slid, professional traders turned to stocks and Treasuries to defuse risk.

The result was a frenzy. U.S. government debt volume surged to an all-time high of $946 billion at ICAP Plc, the world’s largest interdealer broker, more than 40 percent above the prior record. About 11.9 billion shares changed hands on U.S. equity exchanges on Oct. 15, the most since the European debt crisis of 2011.

“Whenever people can’t sell their illiquid assets, they turn to the U.S. stock market because everyone is involved in it and that’s what they can sell,” said Matt Maley, an equity strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. in Newton, Massachusetts, who has worked in the securities industry for 32 years. “That’s why the market selloff was so sharp. You sell what you can, and the deepest, most liquid asset in the world is U.S. stocks.”

Bloomberg

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