The torrent of cash for anything related to cutting carbon emissions mean green bonds will remain a cheaper source of financing. The greenium will hover around 4 to 5 basis points for the rest of the year. Barclays also found no evidence of green-bond outperformance in the recent debt selloff. ESG bond indexes have underperformed broader gauges.

The proposed green bond rules were designed to help facilitate the financing of sustainable investments through the creation of a ‘gold standard’ for how companies and public authorities can use green bonds to raise funds on capital markets, while meeting rigorous sustainability requirements and protecting investors from greenwashing.

Britain will launch a publicly-owned system operator to take over some of the responsibilities of the National Grid. Britain is striving to reach net zero emissions by 2050, a goal that will require a huge increase in renewable electricity. Shares in National Grid were down around 0.7% early on Wednesday, slightly underperforming the wider index.

All but one of Britain's existing nuclear power stations will be decommissioned by 2030. Mr Johnson and Mr Kwarteng want to increase country's existing 7 GW of nuclear capacity to 24 GW by 2050 with a government-owned company, but they have been battling with Rishi Sunak for vast sums at a time when the Chancellor is resisting further public spending.

A benchmark for government and corporate debt total returns, has fallen 11% from a high in January 2021. Rising inflationary pressure around the world is fueling concerns. For investors, it means the allure of holding debt is diminishing given how sensitive valuations are to interest rates. Corporate bonds are particularly vulnerable to mounting stagflation.

This investment follows the Euroclear-led CBDC experiment to settle French government bonds on DLT. Market participants have demonstrated a wider acceptance of DLT and its potential for transforming global capital markets. Regulators are starting to create the conditions to allow for its use in securities markets, such as the EU DLT pilot regime.

The good news is it possible, the bad news is that it will be very expensive and highly disruptive. There is probably about 300TWh in storage in Europe right now meaning we need to find 1,300TWh over the next 12 months. We are seeing unprecedented volatility in oil, coal, gas and electricity markets which is a reflection of the high level of risk around energy.

As of December 2021, ESG funds had $2.7 trillion assets under management ; 81% were in European funds. ESG funds perform poorly in financial terms and they don’t deliver better ESG performance either, as reported by the researchers of Columbia University, London School of Economics and the European Corporate Governance Institute.

University of Zurich compared SLBs to their non-labelled equivalents. 55 of the bond pairs saw a sustainabilty premium larger than penalty attached for not meeting KPIs. 36 of the pairs saw no or a negative premium. Premium was higher for callable bonds, where the issuer may repay the debt before maturity and often before the KPI measurement date.

Polish energy providers detail the cost of carbon-emission permits in invoices to households. These costs are high, as Poland relies on coal for more than 70% of power generation. It will cost $415 billion, or about two-thirds of gross domestic product, for Poland to reach the EU’s net-zero emissions goal by 2050, according to government estimates.

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange marked the admission of the first financial instruments registered on a public distributed ledger technology (DLT). The three series of security tokens admitted on LuxSE SOL are digital covered bonds (housing finance bonds) and structured products. They are financial instruments and debt securities under French law.

Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norway’s $1.3tn sovereign wealth fund said inflation could be stronger than expected: “It hits bonds and shares at the same time. For the next few years, it will hit both.” AQR Capital Management estimated that a classic portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds would return just 2% annually after inflation over the next 5-10 years.