The race to offload the world’s biggest pool of assets

Specialist insurers on both sides of the Atlantic expect a bumper post-Covid second half of 2021

In 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang echoed through the City of London, the first Treasury bill traded on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange and the Sun newspaper alleged that comedian Freddie Starr ate a live hamster.

Twenty miles south of the hubbub, a more staid corner of financial markets was born. In St Monica’s Road, Surrey, Dennis Canham, a now retired Legal & General actuary, was put in charge of the “Bulk Purchase Annuities” department with the instruction