Interestingly enough, the only larger issuance was a $16.0 billion debt sale by another pharma, Roche, to pay for its purchase of biotech firm Genentech.
Also on Thursday, U.S. residential mortgage provider FannieMae said it sold $9.0 million in fresh five-year benchmark notes, making it the largest issuance of that maturity.
The $17 billion debt sale by Apple is the largest corporate issuance on record, surpassing a $16.5 billion deal from the drug maker Roche Holding in 2009, according to Dealogic.
"The deals are going to be more difficult to do, and there simply will not be the large-scale issuance we've seen in the past".
The People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, has been trying to restrain lending by raising repeatedly the percentage of bank assets that must be kept on deposit with it, but this has been offset by the large-scale issuance of renminbi to pay for currency market intervention, holding down the currency's value against the dollar.
Citigroup played a considerably larger role in the issuance of securities than did Bank of America".
King runs through various options for how this could be done — larger capital requirements, the issuance of debt that converts to equity in a crisis, and so on — but expresses skepticism about whether they will work.
But one of the reasons that might be the case is the relatively large levels of issuance, not just in the United States but globally, in these industries.
"As the euro zone jointly plans a large-scale bond issuance, I think it is appropriate for Japan, a major country, to make its own contribution by purchasing a certain amount of funds," said Yoshihiko Noda, the finance minister, adding that Japan planned to buy about 20 percent of the bonds issued.
In fact, governments should probably try to accommodate pension funds as they adjust their portfolios by running larger deficits and increasing their bond issuance.Individuals may also be under-invested in government fixed income.
