Bonds | featured news

Why would a company with $145 billion in cash even bother to issue debt? The answer has a lot to do with the frenzied state of the bond markets.

A few Federal Reserve policymakers expected to taper the pace of asset purchases by midyear and end them later this year, while several others expected to slow the pace a bit later and halt the quantitative easing program by year-end, according to minutes of the Fed's March meeting.

The Federal Reserve, hoping to give another shot in the arm to the pallid recovery, announced it would launch a new round of a controversial bond-buying stimulus program. The central bank also further extended its pledge to keep short-term interest rates near zero, now through the middle of 2015.

Jeffrey A. Michael, a finance professor in Stockton, Calif., took a hard look at his city’s bankruptcy this summer and thought he saw a smoking gun: a dubious bond deal that bankers had pushed on Stockton just as the local economy was starting to tank in the spring of 2007, he said.

Google is planning to sell its first-ever bond offering, seizing on near-record-low rates and insatiable appetite for corporate debt.

Morgan Stanley's first-quarter profit dropped nearly 50 percent, hurt by a steep decline in bond trading revenue.