Bank Of England Suffers Stunning Failure On Second Day Of QE: "Goodness Knows What Happens Next Week"

It started off well enough.

On the first day of the Bank of England's resumption of Gilt QE after the central bank had put its monetization of bonds on hiatus in 2012, bondholders were perfectly happy to offload to Mark Carney bonds that matured in 3 to 7 years. In fact, in the first "POMO" in four years, there were 3.63 offers for every bid of the £1.17 billion in bonds the BOE wanted to buy.

However, earlier today, when the BOE tried to purchase another £1.17 billion in bonds, this time with a maturity monger than 15 years, something stunning happened: it suffered an unexpected failure which has rarely if ever happened in central bank history: only £1.118 billion worth of sellers showed up, meaning that the BOE's second open market operation was uncovered by a ratio of 0.96.  Simply stated, the Bank of England encountered an offerless market.

What makes this particular failure especially notable - and troubling - is that while technically uncovered sales of government securities happen frequently, and Germany is quite prominent in that regard as numerous Bund auctions have failed to find enough demand in the open market in recent years forcing the "retention" of the offered surplus, when it comes to a central bank's buying of securities, there should be, at least in practice, full coverage of the operation as the central bank is willing and able to pay any price to sellers to satisfy its quota.

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