** The main stories out of the region**
We followed on from LATAM this morning. In their secondary market price action was generally muted and lagged the US Treasury rally, so spreads widened. In Asia hours, the theme continued with regards to Treasuries, higher again, with yields a couple bp lower. In contrast to LATAM however the main government/agency bonds in the region were as much as 3bp tighter, China being the main outlier (+2bp).
In terms of newsflow, we didn’t see any follow-up from the Korea Electric Power dollar mandate, no further update from them, or any new issues for that matter. In geopolitics, the US Postal Service (USPS) announced it would stop accepting packages from China, but we downplayed the impact on Alibaba in our comments given the small scale of USPS. Finally, Korean tech company Naver, has welcomed back its founder to the board, which in my opinion will help re-energise the company as it looks to expand in AI. Positive for spreads.
Best & Worst Performers (zprd, bp)
Source: Bloomberg