Sweden’s swap philosophy

The National Debt Office is Sweden’s largest derivatives end-user. Erik Thedéen, who heads its debt management department, discusses how he uses these tools to improve the nation’s balance sheet

Erik Thedéen approaches his job as head of the debt management department at Sweden’s National Debt Office with a philosophical flair. While his earlier work for JP Bank as a fixed-income analyst had been about helping investors create profit on a day-to-day basis, he says that when he moved to the National Debt Office in 1997 he realised he would now be thinking about the formidable task of reducing the government’s debt load over future decades. But, he says: “It’s a job I love and a job