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Within hours of the UK’s Brexit referendum result in 2016, Jason Waight and colleagues at electronic trading platform MarketAxess met in their London offices to discuss opening a new operation in continental Europe. The decision was inevitable, he says, given the need to ensure EU27 clients do not suffer interrupted service as a result of the UK’s decision to quit the bloc. In 2018 the company, which traders use to buy and sell corporate bonds, opened a small office in a traditional townhouse overlooking a picturesque canal in Amsterdam. Yet as the clock ticks down to the UK’s departure from the single market at the end of December, Mr Waight says the pull exerted by London remains undeniable — something that will keep the EU’s own ambitions to boost its domestic financial services sector in check. “It would be an enormous undertaking to try to replicate the sheer scale and complexity of what happens in London,” says Mr Waight, the group’s head of regulatory affairs in Europe. “It ...

This year, equity investors have been shouting “three cheers” for central banks. When Jay Powell, Federal Reserve chairman, dramatically loosened monetary policy in March, he halted a market rout.  Since then, US stock markets have hit new highs — fuelled most recently by a new Fed inflation policy that was reinforced by the central bank’s comments on Wednesday.  However, if the boffins at the Bank for International Settlements are correct, the precise quantity of cheers that Mr Powell and his ilk actually deserve is closer to one and a half out of a possible three, for American assets, and a half cheer out of three for Europe. As part of its latest quarterly assessment on the financial system, the BIS attempted to quantify how much of this year’s equity rally since March has been driven by low rates; the calculation suggests that loose monetary policy accounts for “close to a half and a fifth of the rebound in the US and euro area equity prices, respectively”. This number-crunchi...

What probability do you give that there might be a new financial crisis? This month, the number crunchers at Oxford Economics, a research group, asked 162 global businesses this question. Their average answer was 20 per cent over the next two years. That is twice as high as the perceived risk of a second global wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and also, sadly, the probability of an early effective vaccine arriving.  These fears already have tangible consequences: they pushed down business sentiment more in this month’s Oxford survey than hard data justified. “Our analysis suggests that financial crisis fears account for much of the gloom,” said Jamie Thompson, the poll’s lead economist. This should concern investors, although not because a financial crisis is likely to explode right now — at least not in the headline-grabbing style of 2008. At least two factors mitigate that risk.  First, the US Federal Reserve and other central banks have made it clear that they will do “whatever it...

The Post-Objectivity Era Summary of "Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another" Matt Taibbi Sep 19 446 488 From a speech given this week to the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Penn State University: We live in a time of incredible political division. Many of us have had the experience of talking to someone whose idea of reality seems to be completely alien to our own. It’s become difficult to have an argument in the traditional sense. People with differing opinions no longer seem to be working from commonly-accepted sets of facts. It’s a problem that has a lot to do with changes in how we receive and digest information, especially through the news media. I’ve worked in the press for thirty years. In my lifetime the core commercial strategy of the news business has changed radically. At the national level, companies have moved from trying to attract one big audience to trying to capture and retain multiple small audiences. Fundamentally, this means t...

Stop Calling Them "Bombshells" The Internet in the Trump era has become a pile of unexploded ordnance, with the Atlantic's "suckers" story being the latest example Matt Taibbi Sep 9 496 601 On September 3, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic published an article asserting that Donald Trump insulted veterans while on a trip to France in 2018. Goldberg cited anonymous sources who claimed Trump called off a trip to the Aisne-Marne cemetery outside Paris. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump reportedly said. The Atlantic noted Trump’s official reason for bailing on the trip: [Trump] blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Everyone in news agreed the story was a “bombshell,” even conservatives challenging its accuracy. “Anonymous sources in the Atlantic’s Donald Trump bombshell urged to go on the record,” was the early Fox take. NBC descri...