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This month marks 300 years since Robert Walpole (1676–1745) became Britain’s first ‘Prime Minister’. The title was not a formal one; it still exists only through political convention. However, with the positions he attained in April 1721 – First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer – Walpole was able to amass power to a degree previously unprecedented, as the right-hand man of Britain’s newly imported Hanoverian monarchs. The period of his ascendency, popularly dubbed the ‘Robinocracy’, lasted for nearly 21 years and, for sheer duration, remains unbeaten. Under Walpole, the Whig government’s priorities were an obsessive and often unpopular avoidance of foreign wars, dramatic reductions in the land tax and, above all, the consolidation of Hanoverian rule under George I and his son George II.
NEW YORK: Bond traders have been saying for years that liquidity is there in the world’s biggest bond market, except when you really need it.
Last week’s startling gyrations in US Treasury yields may offer fresh backing for that mantra, and prompt another bout of soul-searching in a US$21 trillion market that forms the bedrock of global finance.
While stocks are prone to sudden swings, such episodes are supposed to be few and far between in a government-debt market that sets the benchmark risk-free rate for much of the world.
Yet jarring moves keep occurring periodically in Treasuries, with some market participants pointing to heightened bank regulations in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.