South African government bonds were steady shortly before midday on Friday, amid global risk-off sentiment, and ahead of ratings agency Moody’s latest credit-rating announcement.Most analysts believe recent political developments, and government promises of fiscal consolidation, should be sufficient to prevent Moody’s from rating SA’s local currency debt as sub-investment grade.Moody’s is the only major ratings agency that has the country’s debt rating at investment grade, after S&P Global ratings and Fitch dropped it to junk in 2017. Should Moody’s downgrade SA, the rand and local bonds are expected to weaken significantly, due to automatic selling of bonds by institutional investors.With consensus that Moody’s would not downgrade, and a signs of economic recovery in SA, local bonds continued to find some support, said Sasfin Securities bond analysts.At 11.30am, the R186 was bid at 8.01% from 8.0% and the R207 at 6.71% from 6.69%. The rand was at R11.8081 from R11.8493. The yield o...
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