Looking East for salvation

Western borrowers should not rely on Asian investors to prop up demand for their issues.

I am penning this month’s letter from Hong Kong, a place where I spent three years at the start of the last decade covering the Asian bond markets. Certainly there was a perception back then that investors from the region, starved of new issues, would happily buy anything with a bit of yield, regardless of the relative risk involved.

It always seemed a fairly sweeping generalisation: after all, name me an investor who doesn’t like yield. Yet several years on, there are some in the European