The long-running saga of the peril of the French public purse took a new twist this week as the country's government collapsed over budget wrangling.
That turned the traditional order of relative value between French bond issuers on its head — corporates, including luxury good firm LVMH, now trade tighter than the sovereign.
We look into what comes next for French issuers from the sovereign and public sector agencies, to the country's banks and investment grade companies. Do investors really believe they are more likely to be paid back by LVMH than by the state?
We also revisit the recently concluded ECB Trials of distributed ledger technology in the bond market to see what progress was made and whether capital markets are any closer to going digital.
Subscribe to GlobalCapital's Podcast
You can listen and subscribe for free on your favourite podcast platform including: