On March 23 – the day the S&P dropped to its cycle low of 2,237 –  the Fed stunned capital markets when it announced it would purchase investment-grade corporate bonds, traversing a Rubicon into a secondary market intervention that not even  Ben Bernanke had dared to cross. A few weeks later, on April 9, the Fed doubled down by announcing it would purchase not only junk bonds from “fallen angel” issuers (an announcement which came just days after a quarter in which a record $150BN in investment-grade bonds were downgraded to junk, starting the long-awaited tsunami of “fallen angels”), but would also buy junk bond ETFs such as HYG and JNK.