Bond ETF assets under management globally crossed the $2 trillion mark last week, according to BlackRock, and it believes such industry-wide assets will hit $6 trillion by 2030.
The forecast for $6 trillion in bond ETF assets globally by 2030 marks a $1 trillion increase from a projection contained in BlackRock's "All Systems Go" paper released in May 2022. The paper said BlackRock expected global bond ETF AUM to reach $5 trillion by 2030.
BlackRock's iShares launched the first bond ETFs in the U.S. in 2002.
In a LinkedIn post July 13, Salim Ramji, global head of iShares and index investments at BlackRock, said that global bond ETFs had crossed the $2 trillion AUM threshold as of July 12.
"In the two decades since iShares launched the first fixed income ETFs, it took 17 years for the category to reach $1 trillion in assets; the next trillion came just four years later, in some of the most challenging bond markets in decades," Mr. Ramji said in the post.
What makes the $2 trillion milestone remarkable "is not just the pace of growth but the way in which ETFs are being used as a technology to transform the bond market from analog to digital — making access to markets more transparent, more efficient and more liquid," the post said.
"It's also flipping the narrative from the dated notions of active vs. index," Mr. Ramji said, adding that, today, CIOs at wealth managers, asset managers and insurance companies are using fixed income ETFs to actively reposition portfolios because ETFs "can provide better access to more parts of the bond markets than ever before."
BlackRock's fixed-income ETF assets totaled $837.8 billion as of June 30. BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, had $9.43 trillion in total AUM at end of the second quarter.
