Ioana Neamțu, Umang Khetan, Jian Li and Ishita Sen What do the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse and the 2022 UK pension fund crisis have in common? Interest rate risk. Several sectors in the economy run significant asset-liability mismatch that makes them vulnerable to rapid interest rate changes: pension funds and insurers have short-term cash … Continue reading Sharing interest rate risk: who is trading and what affects the costs?
Financial Markets
Joanna McLafferty, Kirstine McMillan and Joseph Smart On 7 May 2024 the SONIA rate, the UK’s risk-free reference rate, printed at exactly 5.2000% and has remained there to the end of July 2024 (the time of writing). Flatlining of SONIA is not a phenomenon we see often. Prior to this, over the past six years … Continue reading SONIA: steady as she goes
David Glanville and Arif Merali Short term interest rate (STIR) futures are the bedrock of interest rate markets, used to price expectations of central bank policy rates and other UK rate derivative markets such as swaps and options (see Figure 1). They are key for the transmission of monetary policy and provide an avenue for … Continue reading Caring for the ‘future’
Gabor Pinter, Emil Siriwardane and Danny Walker In September 2022 the interest rate on UK gilts rose by over 100 basis points in four days. These unprecedent market movements are generally attributed to two key factors: the 23 September announcement of expansionary fiscal policy – the so-called ‘mini-budget’ – which was then amplified by forced … Continue reading What caused the LDI crisis?
Joel Mundy and Matt Roberts-Sklar When markets are volatile, liquidity tends to worsen. This makes it harder to intermediate buyers and sellers. We saw this during the 2022 liability-driven investment (LDI) stress, when the UK government bond (gilt) market exhibited extreme volatility. This illiquidity was also evident in gilt futures, derivatives that support functioning in … Continue reading Futures under stress: how did gilt futures behave in the LDI crisis?
Miruna-Daniela Ivan, Joshua Lillis, Eduardo Maqui and Carlos Cañon Salazar Funding markets are crucial for healthy and active financial institutions, and consequently for everyone in the economy. The repurchase agreement (repo) market plays a key role in bank and non-bank financial institutions’ (NBFIs’) daily activities by facilitating short-term financing and risk hedging. In this post, we … Continue reading ‘No one length fits all’ – haircuts in the repo market
Adam Brinley Codd, Daniel Krause, Pierre Ortlieb and Alex Briers We both drive cars, but the US drives on the right while the UK drives on the left. We both walk, but we do so on sidewalks in the US and pavements in the UK. We both have asset managers, who want to take leveraged … Continue reading Leverage finds a way: a comparison of US Treasury basis trading and the LDI event
Natalie Burr, Julian Reynolds and Mike Joyce Monetary policymakers have a number of tools they can use to influence monetary conditions, in order to maintain price stability. While central banks typically favour short-term policy rates as their primary instrument, when policy rates remained constrained at near-zero levels following the global financial crisis (GFC), many central … Continue reading To the lower bound and back: measuring UK monetary conditions
Alex Kontoghiorghes Do lower taxes lead to higher stock prices? Do companies consider tax rates when deciding on their dividend pay-outs and whether to issue new capital? If you’re thinking ‘yes’, you might be surprised to know that there was little real-world evidence (let alone UK-based evidence) which finds a strong link between personal investment … Continue reading Another reason to care about investment taxes
Ed Hill Once the stuff of science fiction, quantum technologies are advancing fast. Individual quantum computers are finding a range of applications, primarily driven by the immense speed-ups they offer over normal computers. And soon the nascent quantum internet should connect those isolated computers together. This blog post starts to think about what this new … Continue reading Schrodinger’s market: what the quantum internet could mean for the financial system