Health Warning: The UK Bond Market rigging issue is all behaviourally driven. We express a personal opinion in this post and do not endorse or condone breaking any jurisdiction’s sovereign laws.
We would like to contribute a very short thought piece on this issue. Our premise basically goes like this and is grounded in behavioural theory:
Take away any sensible incentive (by over regulating the market participants) and you create the disincentive for cheating behaviour to manifest. Simple.
It is a natural competitive behaviour to ‘cheat’ or try to cheat a system that becomes ‘badly’ designed, as in the case of the highly over regulated bond market and an environment of very low yields.
We find is amazing that the popular press only tend to focus on one side of the equation and distort the real issue and underlying drivers that lead tot cheating behaviour.
The rule of law should be the overriding guiding principle and helping to design markets and market participant behaviours based on properly incentivised interactions is part of any regulatory system. In the recent past, we have forgotten to bear this in mind…
…and then we act surprised when market actors (participants) misbehave?
theMarketSoul ©2013
Related articles
- BoE suspects traders of bond-rigging (bbc.co.uk)
- BoE suspects traders of bond-rigging (oddonion.com)
- Mike “Mish” Shedlock on …. almost everything (silveristhenew.com)
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