The tide turned in covered bonds, especially when looking at the split between public issuance of EUR benchmark covered bonds and retained covered bonds. While retained covered bonds outpaced publicly placed EUR benchmark covered bonds in 2020-2021, this was no longer the case in 2022.Indeed, issuers publicly sold more than EUR200bn of covered bonds in 2022, a new all-time high. This high volume was driven by EUR137bn of redemptions, strong growth in mortgage lending, as well as the crisis-proof nature of covered bonds. The latter was reflected by the fact that covered bond spreads widened much less than spreads of riskier bank debt.