It’s a matter of when not if for interest rate rises, with the Fed, Bank of England and European Central Bank actively tightening or signalling that they will soon hike bank rates. Yet longer-term yields in dollar, sterling and euro remain close to record lows. For corporate borrowers, the response has a been a ‘fill your boots’ mentality as companies snap up rivals or try to lock in today’s low bond yields.

Risky Finance now provides a tool to track new issuance in our database of Markit iBoxx corporate bonds. This database contains $10 trillion of debt and below we have created a table that shows the biggest issuers this year, along with average yields and spreads on their bonds. The default view shows the top 10 non-bank issuers but you can use the filter controls above the table to display rankings for individual sectors and rating categories.

Understanding the chart

This table shows the largest non-financial corporate bond issuers of 2017, drawn from 11,000 bonds and 1,800 issuers in the Risky Finance iBoxx database. Use the controls at the top of the table to look at individual sectors or rating categories.

There are some immediate takeaways which show the value of this tool. The chart confirms how some of the biggest bond issues are merger & acquisition driven, witnessed by the presence of AT&T, Verizon, BAT, Amazon and other corporate acquirers. Short-term debt is being refinanced, with new issues having a higher remaining maturity than existing debt – almost a year more on average. The presence of high-yield M&A-related issuers like Swedish debt collection agency Intrum Justicia – which borrowed almost three times its market capitalisation this year – show how benign the central bank environment has been.

The low rate environment is also a factor in the presence of tech giants such as Apple or Microsoft. These two have consistently increased their borrowing by about $20 billion annually in the last three years. Both companies are under pressure to support their lofty market caps with shareholder buybacks and dividends, and using cheap financing is one way to do it. In the case of Apple, the borrowing amounts to an effective basis trade as the cash is invested in a $150 billion portfolio of other companies’ bonds.

The question remains whether this new borrowing – $140 billion in total in the first nine months of this year – amounts to additional risk. The iBoxx indices only incorporate liquid bonds, and exchange-traded funds which track them have readily absorbed the new supply. For example, Intrum Justicia came from nowhere to become one of the biggest holdings in Blackrock’s $6.5bn IHYG euro high-yield bond ETF.

If there is additional risk, investors are getting compensated less for it, with spreads declining about 10bps this year on average. The benign growth and earnings environment may justify their confidence, but a combination of bond illiquidity and stock market declines might provide an interesting test.