Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Bond Trading Gets Cheaper

Flow credit trading

One way to think about corporate finance is: There is a company that needs money. It goes to an investment bank to raise money. The bank is like “you can sell $1 billion of paper to investors, and then you will have money.” The company does this. It gets $1 billion of money, the investors get $1 billion of “paper” — that is, financial instruments, stocks or bonds or syndicated loans or hybrids or some other weirder thing — and the bank gets a fee. The company is happy because it has money; the investors are happy because ...