{"id":12769,"date":"2009-11-03T08:06:52","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T12:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hedgeco.net\/news\/?p=12769"},"modified":"2009-11-03T08:06:52","modified_gmt":"2009-11-03T12:06:52","slug":"the-treasury-hedge-fund","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/11\/2009\/the-treasury-hedge-fund.html","title":{"rendered":"The Treasury hedge fund"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>BBC &#8211; HM Treasury today becomes perhaps the biggest hedge fund in the UK: it is investing \u00a325.5bn in Royal Bank of Scotland shares and \u00a35.7bn in Lloyds shares, financed almost exclusively by borrowing.<\/p>\n<p>If we&#8217;re past the nadir for the economy and for bank shares &#8211; and that&#8217;s a fair bet &#8211; it&#8217;s not a bad punt to borrow at an average interest rate of around 3% (by selling new gilt-edged stock with maturities of five years or ten years) to invest in assets with substantial potential upside.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure that I&#8217;d recommend that the government speculate its way out of its debt problem by taking further stock-market punts, but there is a delicious irony that economic and financial woes caused by banks gearing up their balance sheets in the boom years are being solved by HM Treasury now gearing up the public-sector balance sheet.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Read Complete Article\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/blogs\/thereporters\/robertpeston\/2009\/11\/the_treasury_hedge_fund.html\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Read Complete Article<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BBC &#8211; HM Treasury today becomes perhaps the biggest hedge fund in the UK: it is investing \u00a325.5bn in Royal Bank of Scotland shares and \u00a35.7bn in Lloyds shares, financed almost exclusively by borrowing. If we&#8217;re past the nadir for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syndicated"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12769"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12771,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12769\/revisions\/12771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}