Buying and selling in the world’s biggest bond market is supposed to be easy. However, for most of this year, says Gregory Whiteley, a bond portfolio manager at DoubleLine Capital, it has been anything but straightforward.

Whiteley says a trader used to be able to get hold of $400mn of US Treasury bonds — not an outsize quantity in this $24tn market — as a routine matter. But now that typically involves breaking up the order into smaller chunks; perhaps doing $100mn of the trade electronically, he explains, and then picking up the phone to see if they can prise the rest of the debt from the hands of Wall Street’s trading desks over the course of a day.

The US Treasury bond market suffered a huge scare at the start of the coronavirus pandemic when fears about a collapse in the global economy led to a sudden slump in prices and liquidity.