Of mangled markets and the Chatham House Rule*

Some of you may remember how the ECB fecked up last week, when “an internal procedural error” meant an eventually market moving speech given by one Benoît Coeuré on Monday to, amongst others, a load of hedgies wasn’t made public until Tuesday morning.

The speech — apart from starting a debate about Chatham House rules, priviliged information and knee jerk responses by the ECB — was about ECB plans to front-load their bond purchases in May and June.

And as Citi’s credit specialist Matt King said: “If the ECB had wanted to test the extent to which traders were hanging on their every word, they could hardly have come up with a better experiment than to promise to boost the pace of QE purchases today, only to cut it back during the summer.”