@doop I guess “something that a few very influential people could manage” - a few reports in the FT for example could have an effect on the price. And many nation states could hide enough transactions to have a serious effect on the price in innocuous parts of their budget.

@hughrawlinson if something inflammatory wound up in the FT and set off a crash then it’s explicitly the Bank of England’s job to intervene and stabilise the market- as they did eg with the Liz Truss incident.

If you’re a nation state and you want to buy lots of gilts then you’ll also need to buy lots of sterling for them, which will do exciting things to your own exchange rate. In any case, you still have to buy the bonds from someone (or sell them to someone), and they will notice: in the primary market there are fewer than two dozen licensed market makers and half a dozen inter dealer brokers.

If you want to build up a large bond position without having to deal with the (significant) operational problems of buying or selling large amounts of gilts then you could do it through the futures market, but then you have the problem that the exchange knows exactly who you are and what you’re doing.

Soros pulled off his stunt in 1992 in part because the FX markets are more liquid, less transparent, and much less heavily regulated than the bond market. I’m not saying it would be impossible to do this in the bond market, but it would be tricky, and most of the obvious routes have been tried.

I think you’re absolutely right in the sense that the bond market is very underrated as a part of the economy - the mainstream press in particular has a weird obsession with pointless fluctuations in the equity and fx markets while disregarding much more significant moves in gilts, although it’s got a little bit better since 2008.