In my research for Channel 4 Dispatches, I broke through Newham council’s wall of secrecy and learned that the council had at least £150 million of inverse floater LOBOs (believed to be with Royal Bank of Scotland), along with other councils such as Cornwall, Edinburgh and Newcastle that disclosed these RBS products in response to Freedom of Information requests. As discussed on the programme, these loans involve councils paying a variable coupon which goes up when market rates go down – coupons that recently have gone above 7 per cent. To understand these products, I priced a £25m Newham deal on a Bloomberg terminal, which allows the underlying cash flows to be modelled – from today until 50 years in the future. This is important because the concept of fair value involves combining all of a loan’s future cash flows into a single number.