Daire MacFadden

I mean, it's basically anarchic.

I think my imagination of how a newsroom function would have been

An editor stood atop a command structure asking for this by 5 o'clock, this for tomorrow.

And instead, it all just comes together with everyone just doing their work.

Yeah, weirdly.

I mean, from the outside, it looks like a beautiful building, but there are all sorts of downsides to working in a, you know, 100-year-old building now that's single glazed windows.

It's very drafty.

You have to walk 10 minutes to get to any meeting room.

So it is a relief to work in a more modern office building.

Well, to start with, yeah, like you said, Katie, the size of the UK gilt market is a lot smaller than the Treasury market.

So there's a lot more of a risk that investors in gilts would lose interest in being invested in gilts.

At the moment, the UK is in this very tricky situation of being at the center of both global dynamics that are pushing up yields internationally and a sort of political crisis taking place in the UK now, which is adding to the yield on the longer dated gilts.

Can I provide some context here as the crass American?

The European Central Bank is willing to kind of step in in the event that the spreads between all of the European bonds start diverging too much.

That's critical to maintaining a single currency area.

We have a central bank that is willing to backstop the market when there's a sort of systemic risk to financial stability, as happened in September 2022.

But that was to do with the business models and the balance sheets of particular sectors in the economy, like pension funds and insurance companies.

I'd say one other thing to bring into this, or a couple of other things.

One is that the UK does have a very high level of debt as a percentage of GDP.

And so, yes, it's a piddly bond market, but it is large by European standards.