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.