It's a big day for China's financial markets. Bloomberg has begun including Chinese government bonds and policy bank securities in its Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate index.
While index inclusion is a step in the right direction to further integrate Chinese financial assets into the global ecosystem, it is by no means a silver bullet. Indeed, there remain many roadblocks to creating an open, transparent market that's attractive to foreign investors.
For Hayden Briscoe, UBS Asset Management's head of fixed income in Asia Pacific, index inclusion of Chinese onshore bonds is “the biggest change in global capital markets in anyone's lifetime . . . there has never been a bond market this large in the history of the world that is not including in an index.”