Skip to main content

Richard Comotto featured in the Financial Times and the FT Alphaville blog

Richard Comotto, Senior Visiting Fellow at the ICMA Centre was featured recently in the Financial Times and on the FT Alphaville blog in articles regarding the shrinking of the Europe repo market over the second half of 2013.

The article on the FT Alphaville blog on January 23rd 2014 was by Izabella Kaminska and is entitled 'European Repo is on the decline'. The FT article on the same day by Christopher Thompson is entitled 'Eurozone market shrinks in second half'.

Both articles look at the recently published ICMA European repo market survey number 26 (December 2013). This notes that 'the latest figure for repo market size is still substantially above the lowest survey figure of EUR 4,633 billion recorded in December 2008, although well short of the pre-crisis peak in European repo market size of EUR 6,775 billion in June 2007.'

Richard commented that the contraction of the market was likely to have been the result of the usual shrinkage of repo books at year-end plus the impact of the liquidity offered by the ECB in December in order to relieve any seasonal funding shortages. But it might also reflect anticipation by banks of regulatory measures to reduce short-term funding.

Richard is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the ICMA Centre, and delivers the MSc module on short-term financial markets (FX, money markets and securities financing). You can read more from Richard on the European Repo market on the ICBlog.

Published 24 January 2014

You might also like

Peer to Peer (P2P) Lending – ‘Bank on Dave’ and many others

4 March 2013
If you live in the UK, you may have seen the Channel 4 television programme on 28th February this year (2013) entitled ‘Bank on Dave’. Burnley Savings and Loans to give it its other name, is a company (not a bank) which offers 5% ‘deposit’ rates to lenders and offers loans to those who cannot obtain funding from the high street banks. So how does Dave do this when the high street banks offer no interest at all or perhaps only ½ or 1%? In fact ‘Dave’ is one of a new breed of ‘brokers’ who simply introduce lenders and borrowers to each other. The key difference from banks is that banks have a balance sheet with a depositor contract on one side and a separate contract with its borrowers on the other whereas a peer to peer company has no such contracts and indeed is not even involved at all in borrowing or lending! This is because in P2P, lending contracts are directly between borrower and lenders and the P2P company does not take ‘deposits’ on to its own balance sheet or keep the loans its customers make on its balance sheet.

To Grexit or not to Grexit?

7 February 2017
There has been some discussion in the news lately in respect to the possibility of Greece exiting the Euro (Grexit).

Industry Insights: Janine Lewis, InvestSure - Startups, Fintech and Property Investment

12 March 2019
This week’s Industry Insights event was presented by Janine Lewis and organised by the ICMA Centre in partnership with the University of Reading Finance Society. Emmanuel De Labauve DArifat, President of the University of Reading Investment Society, provides the review below:
Industry Insights reviews