Norway and the tail risk of bonds

I have long been an admirer of the transparent and sound investment policies of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (Government Pension Fund Global). However, I was perplexed by their recent proposals regarding the bond portfolio of this fund.

In the long term, the gains from broad international diversification are considerable for equities but moderate for bonds. For an investor with 70 percent of his investments in an internationally diversified equity portfolio, there is little reduction in risk to be obtained by also diversifying his bond investments across a large number of currencies.

The benchmark index for bonds currently consists of 23 currencies. Our recommendation is that the number of currencies in the bond index is reduced. This will have little impact on risk in the overall benchmark index.

An index consisting of bonds issued in dollars, euros and pounds alone will be sufficiently liquid and investable for the fund.

I tend to think of the risk of the high grade bonds (of the kind that Norway invests in) as consisting predominantly of tail risk. This is well described by Adam Fergusson’s When Money Dies about the German hyperinflation of the 1920s. A long term investor like the Norway sovereign fund needs to worry about this tail risk. A policy of concentrating the bond portfolio in just three currencies does not appear prudent to me.

The other possibility is that the Norway fund is ceasing to be the long term investor it used to be. As the accumulation phase comes to an end, and the fund enters its draw down phase, it may be prioritizing liquidity over everything else. (In 2016, Norway drew down from the sovereign fund for the first time in its history.) The management of the bond portfolio of the fund then begins to resemble normal foreign exchange reserve management which tends to concentrate holdings in a handful of highly liquid reserve currencies.

Posted at 3:12 pm IST on Sat, 23 Sep 2017         permanent link

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