“I want to come back as the bond market” – the rise and role of debt finance

McMeel, G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2163-1445 (2025) “I want to come back as the bond market” – the rise and role of debt finance. Financial Law and Geopolitics. (Volume on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Institute for Financial Law, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)

Abstract/Summary

“I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president, or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” The last few turbulent years have witnessed a United Kingdom Prime Minister, Elizabeth Truss, forced from office in a matter of weeks, by the reaction of the bond market to her fiscal plans of tax cuts uncorrelated to spending cuts. Most recently, the sight of the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (minister of finance), Rachel Reeves weeping on the front benches of the House of Commons, provoked alarm on the same market. The bond market appears to have been the only constraint or corrective on the United States’s 47th President’s plans to up-end the international financial consensus favouring free trade. It seems only fitting to commence by quoting the wry tribute to the power of international financial markets by Jimmy Carville, the ‘Ragin’ Cajun’, who was President Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in the 1990s. As part of this book on Financial Law and Geopolitics to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Financial Law Centre of Radboud University I thought it might be appropriate both to revisit the origins of bonds or debt finance, in something of a whistle-stop tour, and then to consider some English legal authority illustrative of the problems thrown up by this pre-eminent species of financial instrument.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/128971
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Law
Publisher	Radboud University
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item