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 […]
The Blind Spot Podcast: NFTs Take on Beanie Babies with Artist Simon Denny
In episode six of The Blind Spot podcast, Junseth and Izzy chat NFTs, apocalypse bunkers and beanie babies with the amazing Simon Denny. For those who don’t know, Denny is a contemporary artist based in Berlin, who makes sculptures and installations based around technological themes. Denny’s subject matter has included the redesign of the New […]
Voice Notes: Reflections on CBDCs
(On the beat in London…OTRB) FIRST DRAFT Voice Note: Settlement Costs Factoid: The Riksbank apparently decided to plug into the European T2S settlement system rather than develop its own system as it was more cost-efficient to do so. This is despite the Swedish krona obviously not being in the eurozone. I did not know that. […]
Introducing Blind Spot “Voice Notes”
They say necessity is the mother of invention. Well, here at the Blind Spot we are beginning to understand exactly what “they” mean when they say that. As a media start-up with a high trust score with sources but insufficient resources to maximise output, we find ourselves in a unique situation where we have more […]