Lessons from 1953: Economic Echoes

There are a bunch of historical analogies that people like to reach for in order to describe some of the economic trends we're seeing today. There's obviously the period of high inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s, or the disruptions caused by the Spanish Flu pandemic around 1918. But there's also a single year -- 1953 -- which not only contains some eerie similarities to today's economic environment, but also ended up having far-reaching consequences that reverberate all the way to 2022. On this episode, Josh Younger, JPMorgan's global head of asset and liability management research and strategy, tells the origin story of the decisions made in 1953 that helped create the vast repurchase or repo market. At a time when there are plenty of concerns over the stability of the market for US bonds, we go back in time to explore the reasons why repo exist at all.

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