Rounding off a difficult year

Risk: It has been a difficult market for inflation in the UK. On the supply side, there has been a massive shortage – corporates have been pulled back from issuing due to the credit crisis, private finance initiative (PFI) deals have been put on hold. We have also seen a massive de-leveraging of hedge funds over the past few months. Can you describe the dynamics of the market in the past few months and talk about the relationship between break-evens, cash and swaps in the UK?

Dariush Mirfendereski (DM): About a year ago, the credit crunch was well under way. We were seeing a couple of hedge funds that were involved in this market suffer and being made to unwind trades. It was very small scale, although we were getting indications that perhaps using the monoline insurers was going to be hard. There were indications that the supply side may be constrained but it wasn't dangerous as such.

- Rounding off a difficult year (PDF, 3.07MB)

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