This Is One Junk-Bond Rout You Can’t Blame on Wall Street

Here’s the bright side for all the investors who’ve been so worried about banks using less money to facilitate trading in the $8 trillion corporate-bond market: at least Wall Street wasn’t a big seller in this latest rout.

While investors yanked cash from junk-bond mutual funds for five straight weeks, broker-dealers didn’t contribute as much to the exodus because they had already been holding relatively small amounts of the debt in part due to regulations enacted since the financial crisis.