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While it seems like the COVID pandemic has taken over every waking moment of our lives, the impending end of LIBOR marches ever onward.  All signs point to a termination date for the troubled benchmarks at the end of 2021, pandemic be damned.

The purpose of this post is not to discuss the road to transition so far, though if you’d like to take a trip down memory lane, here is what we have seen. Instead, we wanted to bring your attention to the fact that, whilst the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) momentum continues, COVID has created some bumps in the road, even on the journey to the end of LIBOR.Continue Reading LIBOR – The UK Beat Goes On

As is our tradition here at Crunched Credit, each year, about this time, we award our Golden Turkey Awards.  Once again, I must say that we are utterly blessed with so many worthy candidates. The truly deserving have once again wrangled with vision and astounding persistence to earn a spot on our acclaimed list.  To…

It’s that time again for Dechert’s CrunchedCredit Annual Golden Turkey Awards. In a year made most remarkable by the extraordinary performance of the US economy, idiocy, silliness, pigheadedness and stupidity have tended to be somewhat obscured by the economic good news machine. At the other end of the spectrum, the continued high volume of outrage over almost everything from both the left and right (and I’m sure the middle would do their fair share here if there was anyone at home) makes it harder to suss out the truly memorable and award-winning, but it’s our job to try. As we have said in the past, this would be really hard if the world actually behaved in a predictable, rational, Newtonian universe sort of way, but blessedly it does not.Continue Reading 2018 Golden Turkey Awards

We haven’t written much about Brexit…largely because, for the life of me, I have been unable to embrace, with any conviction, a view as to whether the Europeans will dodge this bullet, as they have dodged so many in the past, or whether chaos will finally ensue.  Then, if chaos ensues, I’m equally clueless about what the contours of the chaos will be; what a hard Brexit will look like.  I am baffled.  And while it is demonstrably true that cluelessness and bloviation are not mutually exclusive, I, perhaps more thin-skinned than most of the chattering class, have been waiting for some sort of an epiphany before I wrote on the topic.

But birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim and us members in good standing of the commentariat gotta prattle on.  Since I’m not convinced I’m going to get any smarter and since this is likely to be one of the seminal economic events of 2019.  I’m diving in.  Might be ugly.  Hide the children.Continue Reading Do I Have to Talk About Brexit?

iStock / gremlin

LIBOR is going away, but that’s sort of old news at this point.  However, it has been received wisdom that only after the Bank of England stops imposing an obligation upon member banks to publish LIBOR quotes as at the beginning of 2021, would LIBOR go away…

And now to return to our commentary a few weeks back about the stultifying impact of ill-thought through rules and regulations (at best) (Brexit has intervened).  This is our Regulatory State which broadly attempted to pick winners and losers and modify market behavior, to get an engineered outcome by using the blunderbuss of proscriptive rules and regulation.
Continue Reading A Trip Through the Labyrinth – The Regulatory Man in Full

big benI was in New York with colleagues recently, answering clients’ questions about investing in UK real estate. As in the US, we in the UK have ridden a sustained period of strong capital growth in real estate, which continued into 2015. However, growth has slowed recently in certain areas and former hot-spots can now only be described as lukewarm.
Continue Reading “Find Out Where the People Are Going and Buy the Land Before They Get There”*