John Paulson, of the eponymous hedge fund Paulson & Co., contends that the credit contraction has run only about 1/3 of its course as far as writedowns are concerned. He anticipates that the total credit losses will reach $1.3 trillion, which exceeds the IMF’s forecast of $845 billion. Paulson, who made a spectacularly successful bet […]
Read more...Let me tell you, if we have a revolution in the next decade, one of the triggers will have been the flagrant disregard shown by big players like MBIA for regulations, legal commitments, and fair dealing. I’m not surprised to see financially oriented sites calling for mass protests (but not yet against bond guarantors). The […]
Read more...I’ve had less cause of late to criticize the Wall Street Journal as the paper has made strides in its coverage of the credit markets. However, today’s paper has a story in which ideology appears to have compromised its reporting. Today Charlie McCreevy, EU internal markets commissioner, is to outline proposals for closer, tougher oversight […]
Read more...In a board meeting where it was believed that Martin Sullivan, AIG CEO, would resign, the expected took place. Robert Willmustad has been designated CEO of the insurer. From the Wall Street Journal: Robert Willumstad, a former Citigroup Inc. executive and chairman of the board of American International Group Inc., has been appointed chief executive […]
Read more...We’ve read from time to time that European banks have been launching deals, and not particularly good ones at that, solely for the purpose of using those securities as collateral for loans from the ECB. However, we hadn’t seen a longer-form treatment of that phenomenon. The Economist has decided to step into the breach. The […]
Read more...A solid column from Bloomberg’s Caroline Baum on what she sees as the market’s irrational expectations for the Fed. Key points: Investors focused on Bernanke’s remarks about inflation and the dollar, when he also stressed the less than robust growth outlook The last time the central banks said it saw inflationary risks predominating it wound […]
Read more...While this Bloomberg story notes that the bath Goldman took on a leveraged loan to Dutch TV producer Endermol was considerably below recent LBO loan haircuts (27.5% versus the typical
Read more...MBIA’s conduct continues to be shameful, yet the company is not getting the pillorying it deserves, at least from the media. Its latest bit of misbehavior: the company has reversed itself on its decision to remit $900 million of the proceeds of highly dilutive fundraisings to its insurance subsidiaries. Why might that be? Well, the […]
Read more...Do you remember the Ford Pinto? The 1970s car had a nasty tendency to explode into flames in rear end collisions. But the piece de resistance was when litigation exposed a Ford internal memo that showed the company was not only aware of the problem, but had run the math and concluded reinforcing the car […]
Read more...Moody’s reports that global junk bond defaults have doubled in the first five months of 2008 compared with their level at year end 2007 and forecasts that the default rate at the end of 2008 will be 5 times the level of year-end 2007. Those rates were 1.0% at year end 2007, rose to 2.0% […]
Read more...A piece by John Dizard in the Financial Times, “Get used to underwriting big lenders,” made me realize a bit of cognitive blindness. Central banks are committed to backstopping the credit default swaps market. Of course, that should be obvious. The Bank of England, ECB, Fed, and other central banks have intervened in various ways […]
Read more...In a nutshell, yes, but not in the way the industry hopes. In a Financial Times article. Gillian Tett files a somewhat dumbfounded report from the European Securitization Forum in Cannes. While the event has gone wildly downscale from last year’s bash, the participants were hopeful that the return of good times was just around […]
Read more...An institutional investor passed along these initial estimates of the damage that the Street will take from the downgrade of MBIA and Ambac, Bear in mind that these presumably do not become operative until Moody’s joins S&P in deeming both concerns’ insurance subs to be AA. These loss forecasts are only those to banks and […]
Read more...So at least one big rating agency, Standard & Poor’s, finally got some nerve and downgraded the two big monolines, MBIA and Ambac . Note that this downgrade applies only to the insurance subsidiary, but that is the critical entity, the one that provides debt guarantees. From Bloomberg: MBIA Inc. and Ambac Financial Group Inc., […]
Read more...We had said that the melodrama with the big bond insurers MBIA and Ambac early this year had failed to solve their underlying problems and was merely postponing the inevitable by a few months. Readers may recall that an effort by New York insurance superintendent Eric Dinallo to get the monolines to raise substantial amounts […]
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