MTN Leak

It’s a new year, and Leak is full of ideas for resolutions. Polling the market this week, one early contender has emerged — the seasonal favourite — eating weird food.

Seemingly every economist on Earth has been forecasting a cloudy economic year for 2012. We at Leak speculate that this outlook has been prejudiced by the poor weather that has enveloped the entire planet — or at least the places where the MTN crowd spent their festive holidays.

Leak is disappointed. Not only is this our last edition for 2011, but it seems that the austerity mood has already hit the MTN world. There have been hardly any Christmas parties to attend, Vincenzo Botta at UBS tells us sadly.

The MTN world is gearing up for festive cheer and some of its best-known faces have already begun partying.

With eurozone sovereign bond yields falling at last, it looks like the technocrats may finally have got their noggins together and saved the world in time for Christmas.

Cheesy decorations may have started appearing in shops and television programming may have morphed into one long advert for the latest toy your kids will never play with, but you only really know Santa’s close to visiting when Kommunalbanken’s Christmas reception at the Norwegian Embassy is underway.

Leak is shocked and a little upset. During a delightful lunch with Lloyds’ Julie Pertuiset we discovered that pregnant people can eat nothing, literally nothing. How has the human race managed to reproduce for so long?

Leak likes to consider itself not only a facilitator of scurrilous rumour and purveyor of questionable comedy but an educator too.

Leak had been looking forward to Guy Fawkes Night this year — something about fireworks, razzmatazz and a healthy disrespect for authority always appeals — but sadly we feel we shall not indulge on Saturday. The number of Guy Fawkes lookalikes outside St Paul’s has made us tired of all things related to November 5.

There is nowhere left to hide and the world will never be the same again — future generations will see this week as a watershed moment in history.

With the market in stasis while we all await the decree from the summit of Mount Olympus that will save the eurozone, recapitalise the banks and ensure that from now on everyone will be nice to one another (details correct at time of going to press), several of the MTN and CP crowd have wisely headed off on holiday.

It’s time to crack out the tissues. No, we haven’t all come down with appalling colds. We are waving off one of the commercial paper market’s finest.