MATT LEVINE: Yield curves, market colour and McKinsey
'This belongs in a James Bond movie but probably wouldn’t work very well in practice'
Ben Walsh has an amazing story at the Intercept about "a plan for the United Arab Emirates to wage financial war against its Gulf rival Qatar" by manipulating the market for Qatar's bonds and credit-default swaps, though it is perhaps less a story about Middle Eastern states conducting economic warfare and more a story about, like, if you work at a bank and want to pretend you're a spy, you can cook up some pretty dumb fun stuff. The plan -- which was apparently never implemented, but which "was found in the task folder of an email account belonging to UAE Ambassador to the United States Yousef al-Otaiba" -- was devised "by Banque Havilland, a private Luxembourg-based bank owned by the family of controversial British financier David Rowland," and it is ... nuts? The plan the document presents is far-fetched and appeared to have been put together by someone with little or no experience trading in credit and currency markets, two industry veterans who reviewed the plan for the Interce...
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