In a dramatic about-turn, the Bank of England is now intervening in the gilts market to try and calm the reaction to Friday’s fiscal event. It will buy long-dated government gilts for the next two weeks, which will lower the cost of government borrowing. It is also postponing quantitative tightening (i.e. selling the securities it bought during QE).
My understanding is that the Bank’s intervention was to prevent the pension market from imploding. The rise in gilt rates meant that traditional pension funds were becoming forced sellers to meet collateral demands from banks. This risked a doom loop. The Bank’s actions have stopped the bleeding but there will likely be damage to the pensions sector, with some funds having lost huge amounts of capital. In the coming days, the scale of this damage and the knock-on effects will become clear.
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