For Battered Bonds, Threats of Further Losses Linger

The year 2022 marked a truly historic bust for the U.S. bond market. The question now is whether 2023 will produce any kind of meaningful rebound.

Normally a safe investment, U.S. bonds delivered losses over the past 12 months that far exceeded anything investors have seen in their careers. The Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate bond index dropped 13%, easily outdoing its previous worst year in data going back to the 1970s, when it declined 2.9% in 1994.