Benoit Coeuré - Agence France Trésor Benoit Coeuré took up his position as deputy chief executive of Agence France Trésor, the debt management office of the French Republic, in June 2002. Coeuré was previously chief economic adviser to the permanent head of France’s treasury before being appointed head of foreign exchange and economic policy, in charge of G7 and European macro policy co-ordination. Coeuré is also a professor of macroeconomics and economic policy at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris,

As the last G7 country to tap the inflation-linked market, now globally worth in excess of US$800bn, Germany's entry has provided diversification to a market already populated by its core European counterparts. France's 50-year conventional issue, meanwhile, has no peer within the euro-zone countries. Bankers look to the UK market and see the significance of both these sectors in terms of overall funding requirements, but the roundtable attendees that assembled at IFR's offices in London recentl

IFR: The market has recently been influenced by events in the equity markets and the movement of break-even levels on some US TIPS, which have moved out and then retraced. How, in your opinion, will these events influence inflation-linked issuance going forward? Gerhard Schleif (Bundesfinanzagentur): We have monitored the market for more than two years and felt in the Spring of this year that it was moving more towards an equal balance in terms of the different interests on the investor and issu