Russia will be excluded from all JPMorgan bond indices

A sign outside the offices of JP Morgan Chase & Co. is seen in New York, U.S., March 29, 2021. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

NEW YORK, March 7 (Reuters) – Russia will be excluded from all JPMorgan bond indices on March 31, the bank said in a statement on Monday, joining rival index providers who had excluded Russian securities from their indexes after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. .

JPMorgan (JPM.N) placed Russia under scrutiny on March 1 after imposing sanctions on the country.

The Wall Street bank runs the widely followed family of hard currency sovereign EMBI indices, as well as a corporate debt counterpart CEMBI. It also has the GBI-EM benchmark index for local debt in emerging currencies and the JESG index governed by environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors.

Russia will be excluded from EMBI indices, including investment grade sub-indices and other credit sub-indices, the bank announced on Monday.

Russian bonds denominated in local currency will be excluded from the GBI-EM indices and accrued interest for these bonds will be set to zero and suspended from March 7, he said.

Russia and Belarus will be excluded from the JESG EMBI, JESG GBI-EM and JESG CEMBI indices, he added.

Global assets worth $842 billion are benchmarked against JPMorgan indices, according to the bank. Russia has a weighting of 0.89% in the EMBIG Diversified index and a weighting of 1.03% in the ESG version of the index.

Russia’s weighting in major emerging market indices was hit hard after sanctions were imposed following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Weightings then regained ground, only to plunge again this year as tensions over Ukraine have escalated sharply in recent weeks.

Index providers FTSE Russell and MSCI said last week they were taking similar action as deepening sanctions and public pressure isolate Russia’s economy from Western investment and trading partners. Read more

Reporting by Davide Barbuscia; Editing by Richard Pullin

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