There may be a reason Ollie Kamm moved from being a hedgie to journalism:
Recent experience shows there is no shortage of demand for UK government debt even at historically low interest rates.
If that’s true then why does the Bank of England own 40% of all issuance, £800 billion’s worth, plus absolutely all new issuance?
Jeebus, we can’t be talking about market demand for something from a manipulated price now, can we?
It looks as if he has been reading Spudblog
Kamm has always been a fool. An intelligent fool,yes, but conceited, myopic and a stranger to wisdom and the human race.
@Tim It’s worse than that. (DB) Pension funds own a lot of the rest of the gilts because the regulator, TPR, is essentially forcing them to hold gilts (and bonds) by requiring them to “minimise risk”.
It’s an interesting way of defining risk there. At the moment, gilts are a one way bet – the price is only going to go up. But if interest rates ever do rise, there could be carnage if the pension funds try to liguidate their holdings. That is not what I would describe as risk-free.
Presumably they (pretend to?) believe that as QE is about displacing investors out along the yield curve, the central banks are buying bonds from their governments (via proxies in many cases) merely to effect this policy, rather than because there is insufficient demand from elsewhere at these low rates?
They imagine that were the central banks to suddenly no longer do this, private investors would step in, even at these rates.
That is, they believe that the State (via layers of proxies) is just crowding-out risk-free investment?
Like a billionaire convinced that if he lost all his wealth, his trophy wife would stick around.
@Diogenes Indeed. Despite (see Ivor’s comment) the avowed intent of QE being to make gilts unattractive and so encourage investment in equity (in the broadest sense).
Kamm is the pudding that has no theme. Another journo I can’t see the point of is the girl who writes for the FT: wotsername? Ah yes, Gillian Tett. People seem to rate her for reasons that pass me by. Mind you I could say the same of the FT.
Kamm strikes me as a smug mediocrity. Curiously, The Times employs a disproportionate number of jews…Kamm, Aaronovitch, Philips, Zeffman, Finkelstein…
dearieme; I once had the pleasure of speaking to Gillian Tett. I could not understand why she was so rated. It was a bit like holding a conversation with a tape recording.
So what would be a proportionate number?
I presume for the likes of you, Jonathan (a Hebrew name, by the way!) and Jeremy Corbyn that number would be zero.
“So what would be a proportionate number? I presume for the likes of you…that number would be zero.”
You presume wrong. I am a Zionist and not anti-semitic. But it is curious that The Times employs five senior journalists who are jewish, when jews in the UK total just c.300,000.
He was never a hedgie….