The Pathway to a “Right to Sell” Housing Intervention
What goes up must come down. But must everything that gets privatised eventually be renationalised? In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher undertook the great privatisation of Britain by selling off everything from British Gas to British Telecom and even British Airways. The move was accompanied by some simply inspired public promotion. Most memorable was the FOMO […]
Crypto Super Yachts Are a Thing
Earlier this summer I was commissioned by Boat International to write a feature about what’s going on in the world of super yachts and crypto. That piece is now up for Boat International subscribers. As I noted on Twitter earlier today the TLDR is: Some people are selling superyachts for crypto, but mostly as a […]
Defcon 1 Financial Contagion Fire-drill
Rumours are swirling about financial contagion, and certain institutions being up against it. I don’t have any insider information. All I can tell you is that I was on a prep call for an LBMA panel I am on later this month with Peter Zoellner, Head of the Banking Department at the Bank for International […]
It’s Not QE, it’s a Very Naughty OMO
Just reposting my Twitter thread from earlier on Friday for the benefit of those who don’t necessarily check in on social media too regularly: THREAD: I really think the market's got the whole Gilt panic thing wrong. If you actually read the BoE market notice for this week's gilt purchases you will see this is […]
Changes to Intraday Funding Plumbing are Coming Sooner Than You Think
Subscribers of my weekly newsletter will know that I’ve been working on a multi-part series about the nature of our intraday funding systems for weeks now. And yes, I’ve been over promising and under-delivering on its publication for a while. One of the reasons for the delay is that the piece has massively grown in […]
This Week’s Gilt Moves are Probably Linked to Intraday Funding Failings
When it became apparent this week that LDI entities, such as insurers and pension funds, would need a large chunk of cash very quickly so as to not default on hedges… how do you think the story went down in money markets? Because, yes, defaulting on counterparts is bad. But in a cleared system, the […]
It’s not Gilts you should be worrying about… #standwithGBP
Here’s an uncomfortable truth for a Thursday morning. The Great British Krona and the gilt market are going to be just fine. If you’re British and your immediate reaction to this assertion is rage and a compulsion to tell the author they’re an idiot… we have to break it to you. You may be suffering […]
Spot Markets Live Transcript: 26/09/22
Today’s Spot Markets live session is with Anjuli Davies, formerly of the Telegraph and Reuters, Davies’ last posting was as Senior City Editor for the Telegraph, moving there from her role as Acting Chief UK Financial Correspondent for Reuters. Commenter identities have been pseudonymised. Izabella Kaminska10:58 Hello and welcome to Spot Markets Live… We’re off […]
EQE and the Conditionality Risk in the Energy Markets Financing Scheme
There were many ways to commemorate the 30-year anniversary of Black Wednesday this week, the day the UK crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and sparked a sterling crisis. Neil Collins and Jonathan Ford, hosts of the A Long Time in Finance podcast, chose to do it in a three-part series that ran […]
Blind Spot Training Day
The Blind Spot is getting into the journalistic training business. Woo hoo. Why? Because as we scale up and deal with ever more freelancers and contributors, we want to ensure they share our core journalistic values and apply the same quality controls to their work as we do. Also, we have 20 years of accumulated […]