Bill Gross, manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, said the Federal Reserve is unlikely to reduce its asset purchases after the unemployment rate climbed from a four-year low in May.
“Today’s report doesn’t say anything about tapering at all,” Pacific Investment Management Co.’s founder Gross said in a radio interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene.
Payrolls rose 175,000 last month after a revised 149,000 increase in April that was smaller than first estimated, Labor Department figures showed in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 163,000 gain. The unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent from 7.5 percent.
Global bonds had their worst month in nine years in May, led by Treasurys, as investors sold debt in anticipation central banks will eventually scale back their unprecedented asset purchases.
The selloff left Gross’s Pimco Total Return Fund, the world’s biggest mutual fund with $293 billion in assets and one of the best performing, trailing 89 percent of peers in the past month as it declined 2.1 percent.
Gross, who has predicted that the three-decade bull market in bonds probably ended at the end of April, has raised holdings of U.S. government debt in his Pimco Total Return to 39 percent as of April 30, the highest level since July 2010.
Gross’s fund suffered the first client withdrawals since 2011 in May, with clients pulling $1.3 billion from the fund, according to estimates from Morningstar Inc. in Chicago. The fund declined 0.6 percent this year, trailing 53 percent of peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Over the past five years, Gross’s fund has advanced 7.6 percent, ahead of 94 percent of rivals.
Pimco is a unit of Munich insurer Allianz SE and manages $2.04 trillion in assets.
© Copyright 2024 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.