By far the largest issues are central governments There is no uniform system for classifying the global
bond markets. Quite a number of financiers consider it
appropriate to use the following classification. From the
perspective of a given country, the global bond market can be
classified into two markets: an internal bond market and an
external bond market. The internal bond market is also called
the national bond market. It can be decomposed into two parts:
the domestic bond market and the foreign bond market.
The domestic bond market is where issuers domiciled in
the country issue bonds and where those bonds are
subsequently traded. The foreign bond market of a country is
where bonds of issuers not domicilied in the country are issued
and traded.
Bonds traded in the US foreign bond market are
nicknamed Yankee bonds. In Japan, foreign bonds issued by
non-Japanese entities are nicknamed Samurai bonds. Foreign
bonds in the United Kingdom are nicknamed bulldog bonds, in
the Netherlands-Rembrandt bonds and in Spain – matador
bonds.
The external bond market, also called the international
bond market, includes bonds with several distinguishing
features: 1)they are underwritten by an international syndicate,
2)at issue they are offered simultaneously to investors in a
number of countries, 3)they are issued outside the jurisdiction
of any single country, and 4)they are in unregistered form. The
external bond market is commonly referred to as the offshore
bond market, or more popularly, the Eurobond Market. The
Eurobond Market is divided into different submarkets
depending on the currency in which the issue is denominated.
Computerization in bond markets has reduced costs of
trading bonds and made them more convenient to hold and
transfer: they are not issued in certificate form – they are only
computer entries.