It seems like every asset bubble has a famous anecdote of someone claiming, right at the top, that a crash is impossible. In the stock-market bubble leading up to the Great Depression, it was economist Irving Fisher, who declared in the New York Times that stocks “have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” a few days before a ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank’s purchase of almost 180 billion euros ($204 billion) of corporate bonds has upended the region’s credit markets, even if some fast-moving indicators are back to pre-intervention levels. Metrics such as spreads and the number of negative-yielding bonds have largely returned to levels seen in early 2016, before the ECB announced plans to start buying corporate ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG and 16 other lenders recently tested moving interest-rate swap positions from London to Frankfurt, according to people familiar with the matter, a signal that financial firms are pushing ahead with preparations for no-deal Brexit. The banks made dummy trades on December 3 in the first known dry run of a service that could move trillions of ...