We explore the impact of media content on sovereign credit risk. Our measure of media tone is extracted from the Thomson Reuters News Analytics database. As a proxy for sovereign credit risk we consider credit default swap (CDS) spreads, which are decomposed into their risk premium and default risk components. We find that media tone explains and predicts CDS returns and is a mixture of noise and information. Its effect on risk premium induces a temporary change in investors’ appetite for credit risk exposure, whereas its impact on the default component leads to reassessments of the fundamentals of sovereign economies.

No abstract

The tonality of news reporting has been shown to have explanatory and predictive power for equity prices. Using a novel approach and data set, the authors demonstrate that the news sentiment effect also holds for US government bond duration. They construct a successful trading strategy for the US 10-year government bond yield based on news sentiment.

No abstract