By the time this hits your inboxes, thoughts will doubtless have turned to IMN/Afme’s Global ABS conference, running next week in its traditional Barcelona location. 

Meeting schedules will be packed out, panel slides prepared, buyside firms will have complex party protocols to ensure all counterparties are appropriately honoured. Last year’s conference was both triumph and tragedy; the post-Covid return to Barcelona and a full scale event, but held under the cloud of a brutal market puke, as the softer post-invasion market finally capitulated. I bested a hangover of exceptional savagery to produce last year’s writeup, Fear and Loathing on Las Ramblas, on the Thursday afternoon; this year I’m hoping for both a clearer head and a better conference mood.