We document extreme disruption in debt markets during the COVID-19 crisis: a severe price crash accompanied by significant dislocations at the safer end of the credit spectrum. Investment-grade corporate bonds traded at a discount to credit default swaps; exchange-traded funds traded at a discount to net asset value, more so for safer bonds. The Federal Reserve’s announcement of corporate bond purchases caused these dislocations to disappear and prices to recover. These facts inform potential theories of the disruption. The best explanation is an acute liquidity need for specific bond investors, such as mutual funds, leading them to liquidate large positions.

The optimal factor timing portfolio is equivalent to the stochastic discount factor. We propose and implement a method to characterize both empirically. Our approach imposes restrictions on the dynamics of expected returns, leading to an economically plausible SDF. Market-neutral equity factors are strongly and robustly predictable. Exploiting this predictability leads to substantial improvement in portfolio performance relative to static factor investing. The variance of the corresponding SDF is larger, is more variable over time, and exhibits different cyclical behavior than estimates ignoring this fact. These results pose new challenges for theories that aim to match the cross-section of stock returns. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Banks' exposure to fluctuations in interest rates strongly forecasts excess Treasury bond returns. This result is consistent with a bank-centric view of the market for interest rate risk. Banks' activities -accepting deposits and making loansnaturally exposes their balance sheets to changes in interest rates. In equilibrium, the bond risk premium compensates banks for bearing these fluctuations: for instance, when consumers demand for fixed rate mortgages increases, banks have to scale up their exposure to interest rate risk and are compensated by an increase in bond risk premium. A key insight is that the net exposure of banks, rather than quantities of particular types of loans or deposits, reveals the risk premium.

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