The drumbeat of grim news on the housing front continues apace. From the Financial Times: Peter Kretzmer, an economist at Bank of America, said: “We are in the second wave of declining home sales. The first wave was the breaking of the upward momentum and flattened out late last year. But now we are seeing […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal, in “Barclays Spars Over Its Losses at Bear Stearns,” discusses how Barclays is wrangling with Bear over what may be as much as $400 million in losses related to the failure of its two hedge funds run by Ralph Cioffi. The article is remarkably unclear as to what exactly the disputes […]
Read more...The Financial Times’ Paul Davies has written a good short piece on the basics of CDOs, which is useful if you are ever in the unfortunate position of having to explain them to someone new to the concept. He also suggests that subprime-related CDOs going pear shaped is not an indictment of the technology. Nevertheless, […]
Read more...Floyd Norris has an article in today’s New York Times, “Market Shock: AAA Rating May Be Junk,” that is enough off the mark to be annoying. The problem with the article isn’t so much inaccuracy as superficiality. Norris points out correctly that a lot of buyers are waking up to the unpleasant reality that that […]
Read more...Investment News Daily said that a major hedge fund index had to revise its performance results downward due to the losses reported at the failed Bear Stearns hedge funds. Normally, this sort of event wouldn’t be noteworthy. A number of different indices measure hedge fund performance, and they report it by strategy (e.g., global macro, […]
Read more...Yesterday, we commented critically on a remark by JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon in an interview on LBO lending published by Bloomberg, and a reader was kind enough to point us to another Dimon interview, this time in Der Spiegel. “Keeping the Hedge Funds in Check.” It’s a refreshing read, if for no other reason […]
Read more...News reports on a Fitch study on credit default swaps came out yesterday, and I saw it reported in the Financial Times and decided to pass, but other elements of the report have been picked up elsewhere, and I changed my mind. Basically (surprise!) leverage cuts both ways. The FT cited the results of a […]
Read more...Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, fesses up that commercial banks like his have overdone it on LBO debt and are likely to take writedowns. At this point, this statement is no revelation. The main point of Dimon’s remarks is to reassure investors that the prospective losses are not significant relative to JP Morgan’s capital […]
Read more...I’m sure you know the old saw about the drunk looking for his keys. A cop comes across a drunk crawling on all fours under a street lamp. The cop asks what he is doing. The drunk says he is looking for his keys. The cop looks about and can’t find any keys, and asks […]
Read more...Tanta at Calculated Risk reported on Fitch’s downgradesof two mortgage trusts. The amount at issue isn’t large. For each of the two First Horizon Home Loan Mortgage Trust issues (series 2006 AA-3 and Series 2006-F-2), Fitch downgraded the lowest two tranches (the BB tranche became B+, the B tranche was downgraded to CCC and and […]
Read more...Today was the day that Bear Stearns was to issue its delayed report on the net asset value of its two failed hedge funds. As we had indicated, investors who had tried selling their interests for 11% of their April value did getting any takers. There had been bids of 5% on the more leveraged […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal has mentioned in passing that investment bankers have been stuck with hung LBO financings, the result of investor resistance to the terms on offer. This Bloomberg story highlights the degree to which the Wall Street players have been left holding the bag. Unless there is an unexpected change in sentiment, the […]
Read more...There was cheery talk of the rally in Treasuries Monday, but that was in large part due to a continued flight from risk. One symptom was that the riskiest ABX index, ABX.HE 7-01, which is a proxy for recent vintage BBB- subprimes, took a nosedive and then recovered, Traders used swords like “panic” rather than […]
Read more...Why do Americans save so little? It’s the temptation, stupid. John Kay of the Financial Times ponders why Americans and Brits are so lousy at saving when our advanced capital market offer us more attractive investment (and speculative) vehicles than other economies. Because they also offer more, and more varied borrowing products, and let’s face […]
Read more...More gallows humor from the Housing Bubble Blog. You know you are subprime when….(note at least nine of the items on this list happened): The Borrower doesnt know there loan amount, interest rate or mortgage payments. You spend your closing cost money on a motorcycle 2 days before closing. You are adding your boarder’s kid’s […]
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