About $1 trillion of bonds have seen their yields turn negative this week, meaning 27% of the world’s investment-grade debt is now sub-zero. Bond bulls got a boost on Thursday when the European Central Bank boosted its asset purchase program by an additional 500 billion euros in a bid to support the region’s economic recovery.

Collapsing trading volumes are a worrying sign for the market’s future. European Central Bank has taken its purchases of debt to unprecedented levels. By the end of 2021, investors will be even more squeezed out. The ECB is set to own around 43% of Germany’s notes. Trading volumes in bund futures have collapsed 62%.

National Grid is struggling to keep the system balanced as demand rises with colder weather and wind generation is forecast to be low. Britain gets about 8% of its power supply from huge cables connected to Europe. The low electricity supply situation could be compounded by a planned strike by Electricite de France SA workers.

Funds that buy US Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities recorded $1.8bn of inflows in the week ending Wednesday, the largest amount since June and the ninth consecutive week the funds have been allotted new money from clients. The inflows have been dominated by large institutions like endowments and pension funds.

Britain more than halved the carbon intensity of its electricity over a decade to 2017. Racing to “net zero” risks losing political support if expensive. Tackling climate change will require massive amounts of clean electricity to electrify transport and heating. UK electricity demand will double by 2050, predicts Aurora Energy Research.

In the case of governments, the link between green issuance and any additional green spending is tenuous at best. Germany, for example, identified €12.7 billion of eligible spending from last year’s budget – hardly an indication that the green Bund programme will be financing anything that was not already happening anyway.

Biden’s bet on small-scale nuclear. As part of his decarbonisation drive, the president-elect wants to spur development of small modular reactors (SMRs), so that they can help balance the grid alongside surging renewable output. Small-scale nuclear’s biggest rival natural gas can already be ordered off the shelf and constructed quickly and cheaply.

Since 2016 the European Central Bank has adhered to the “market neutrality” principle, which aims to avoid distorting relative pricing of securities by only purchasing them in proportion to the overall eligible market. Mr Weidmann defended the principle and said: “It is not the task of the Eurosystem to penalise or promote certain industries.”

In March financial markets were subjected to their biggest stress test in more than a decade. Funds struggled to meet customer redemptions as buyers for credit products proved hard to find. Finland’s Ilmarinen Mutual Pension Insurance has classified corporate credit as illiquid. This is why regulators need to revisit rules covering daily redemptions.

110 billion euros will need to be invested in Germany’s electricity network by 2050 in order to meet the demands of the energy transition, according to a new study. Without these investments, “follow-up costs” of 4.2 billion euros a year could be incurred because of overloaded networks that are not able to absorb renewable-generated electricity.

The rapid growth of the green bond industry is fanning suspicions that some debt is environmentally friendly in name only, encouraging investors to ignore the (green) label and focus on the credentials of the issuer instead. “We don’t buy a bond because it’s green, but because the company is,” said Tom Chinery of Aviva Investors.

Banks are putting pressure on giant oil-and-gas companies to accelerate their renewable strategies. Credit Suisse has partnered with the Climate Bonds Initiative to accelerate the energy transition. The duo has established a pathway for companies to issue “transition bonds” as a bridge between their current business and greener offerings in the future.