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Investors pay to lend money to UK
By James Kirkup, Deputy Political Editor
6:32AM GMT 11 Jan 2012

The Government has sold bonds at a negative interest rate as investors effectively paid to lend money to the UK.


For only the second time ever, the Treasury sold government bonds — known as gilts — that will pay returns below the level of inflation.

The Debt Management Office yesterday sold £700 million of inflation-linked bonds that will mature in 2047 on Tuesday. Adjusted to exclude inflation, these 35-year gilts sold with a rate of -0.116pc, mean investors were accepting a small real-terms loss in exchange for lending their cash to the UK.

Bond yields are partly a sign of markets’ confidence in a government’s ability to repay their debts in future. The greater the demand for bonds, the lower the interest rate a borrowing government has to pay buyers.

Amid continued fears for the weaker European economies, investors are increasingly attracted to the bonds of governments they believe will be stable enough to repay their loans. Germany also sold bonds at a negative yield for the first time yesterday.

Treasury sources highlighted the UK gilt sale as a sign of market confidence in the Coalition government.

But independent economists warned that extremely low bond yields also signal market pessimism about the world economy, the eurozone crisis and the likely return on other investments.

Very low yields on gilts are also bad news for people buying annuities to provide a pension income, as insurance companies base annuity rates on the returns they receive on gilts.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/econ ... to-UK.html