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?
Interest rate derivatives
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’