“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. ”

Calm and complacency have returned to financial markets, with credit spreads reflecting growing confidence in the ‘soft landing’ narrative and European CLO primary back in action after a protracted absence. But a shift in thinking about US and European Central Bank policy introduces a new set of challenges, not least of which is a less predictable Bank of Japan. Meanwhile, European CLO price discovery brought its own challenges for me, as I’ll get onto in this column…