'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
1–10 of 123 posts
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#2> Along with its correction, the paper adds this note:
>> "The same edition of the paper also demonstrated a good understanding of the FT's readership, noting with 'interest' and 'encouragement' that champagne production had not been affected by the Great War effort."
Lol, fair enough.
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#3I wonder why they bothered going through with the fake bond purchase, rather than simply manipulate the published numbers of bonds sold? Unless the Bank was also keeping it a secret from central government?
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#4Another aspect of the british war debt, is that it was carried for hundreds of years. Rolling the specific consols into a unified public debt and then eradicating it wiped out the history of people sitting on long-tail bond payments from wreakage of the South Sea Bubble onwards.
Basically, until they rolled them up you could have a stable (if low rate of return) income denominated in Napoleonic war debt, if you wanted it, right up into the modern (1980s) era
[edit: actually consols == consolidated fund == prior consolidation of these historic debts. gilts were from time to time issued, like Churchills '27 issue for the WW1 debt ]
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#5I wonder why they bothered going through with the fake bond purchase, rather than simply manipulate the published numbers of bonds sold? Unless the Bank was also keeping it a secret from central government?
The government did actually need the money, it's just that saying "bond sales fell short so we got it from this bank" would look worse.
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#6I wonder why they bothered going through with the fake bond purchase, rather than simply manipulate the published numbers of bonds sold? Unless the Bank was also keeping it a secret from central government?
Were there maybe too many people who might find out that the bonds weren’t bought?
Having a couple straw buyers and actual money to use for the war would seem to be easier to hide and utilize.
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#7Another aspect of the british war debt, is that it was carried for hundreds of years. Rolling the specific consols into a unified public debt and then eradicating it wiped out the history of people sitting on long-tail bond payments from wreakage of the South Sea Bubble onwards. Basically, until they rolled them up you could have a stable (if low rate of return) income denominated in Napoleonic war debt, if you wante…
I find this history really interesting.
Apparently there was a weird set of loans the UK took from the US during WW1 where the US put a moratorium on repayments during the Great Depression, and then loan payments never restarted:
> These loans remain in limbo. The UK Government's position is this: "Neither the debt owed to the United States by the UK nor the larger debts owed by other countries to the UK have been serviced since 1934, nor have they been written off."
That and a bunch of other interesting things about the history of the UK debt are in http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4757181.stm
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#8(2017) should probably be added to the title. Really enjoyed this and noticed the published date after I read it.
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#9Another aspect of the british war debt, is that it was carried for hundreds of years. Rolling the specific consols into a unified public debt and then eradicating it wiped out the history of people sitting on long-tail bond payments from wreakage of the South Sea Bubble onwards. Basically, until they rolled them up you could have a stable (if low rate of return) income denominated in Napoleonic war debt, if you wante…
I thought it was only feely redeemed until 2015.
This does show how the 2010s had historically low interest rates as new bonds were always more expensive for the government until then
Re: 'Financial Times' Issues 103-Year-Old Correction (2017)
#10I wonder why they bothered going through with the fake bond purchase, rather than simply manipulate the published numbers of bonds sold? Unless the Bank was also keeping it a secret from central government?
It was a real bond purchase. The money just came from the Bank of England reserves, and the BoE was private at the time (although had very strong links to the Government).
Eg: The episode marked an important step on the Bank’s transformation from private institution to a central bank.. A decade after the Armistice, the altered role of the Bank prompted creation of a Parliamentary commission to examine its functions, ultimately setting it on a path to nationalisation
See https://bankunderground.co.uk/2017/08/08/your-country-needs-...