The rating agency Fitch for some time has warned of lax lending practices in the commercial real estate market. Bloomberg reports today that prices of derivatives protecting investors against default of the highest-rated commercial real estate securities have appreciated sharply in the last month, signaling the expectation of defaults ” rising to the highest level […]
Read more...Bloomberg reports that JP Morgan analysts forecast that large bank exposure to CDO-related losses could reach as high as $77 billion. Note that they have written off more than half that amount already. They also estimated aggregate losses at $260 billion. We have come up with larger back-of-the-envelope loss estimates, but that was based on […]
Read more...Another day, another adverse development in the credit markets, or so it seems. Except now we are getting more than one troubling sighting a day. The latest tidings: liquidity in the credit markets is falling to the point where the European Central Bank has announced it will inject new cash. The underlying cause is worry […]
Read more...It’s revealing that Robert Kuttner’s hard hitting, cogent testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services (hat tip Culture of Life News) has gotten very little attention in the media and the blogsphere. Perhaps it’s because Kuttner, an economist and former investigator for the Senate Banking Committee, argues persuasively that the strong ideological bias against […]
Read more...I am kicking myself that I didn’t come up with the proposal made by Brandeis professor Stephen Cecchetti in today’s Financial Times. His opinion piece, “A better way to organise securities markets,” is the single best idea for securities reform I have seen in a very long time. It is simple, elegant, and addresses many […]
Read more...Bloomberg Magazine, in “Unsafe Havens,” reports that money market funds run by Bank of America Corp., Credit Suisse Group, Fidelity Investments and Morgan Stanley owned over $6 billion of CDOs with subprime debt in June. The reason this is a serious issue is that money market funds have a $1 NAV, meaning “net asset value” […]
Read more...Part of the hangover that followed the dot-com bubble was rampant accounting fraud. Before then, accounting chicanery was virtually unheard of in Fortune 500 companies. It instead cropped up at high fliers with loose controls and/or overly aggressive cultures (remember Zzzz Best? Miniscribe?). But in 2002, it seemed endemic, and for the first time, involved […]
Read more...Paul Krugman, in this morning’s New York Times, tells us (subscription required) that mortgage borrowers in the US are feeling a world of hurt. The pain is moving up the food chain beyond stressed subprime borrowers into the Alt-A pool (which truth be told, never was much better than subprime, so this development was widely […]
Read more...Fragility seems to be the word on everyone’s lips today. As reported in the Financial Times, UBS market strategist William O’Donnell said that the commercial paper markets had dried up and, “Now the buyers are only interested in Treasury bills.” Overnight, Rams, an Australian home lender that, while not exposed to US subprime, had been […]
Read more...I am more than a bit late to this item, namely, an op-ed piece, “Our Risky New Financial Markets,” by Henry Kaufman in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. I’m puzzled at the lack of commentary on this article in the blogsphere. Kaufman, as chief economist of Salomon Brothers during its heyday in the 1980s […]
Read more...Nouriel Roubini, on his RGE Monitor, discusses the distinction between risk (variability in outcomes that can be estimated) and uncertainty (unknown or unmeasurable outcomes). Risk can be priced; uncertainty can’t (or at least can’t be priced by rational agents). Roubini argues that part of the panic in the markets stems from the fact that investors […]
Read more...An excellent article by Willem Buiter (Professor of European Political Economy at the London School of Economics and formerly a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England and Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and Anne Sibert (Professor and Head of the School of Economics, Mathematics and […]
Read more...I am sticking my neck out in this post, so if any readers disagree, don’t hesitate to speak up. We have seen the following over the last few weeks: concern about whether banks that have exposure to subprime can be trusted as counterparties; reports and rumors of losses at hedge funds (at a minimum, stat […]
Read more...The ECB made an unprecedented offer of unlimited funds to member banks as the demand for cash soared as a result of Paribas freezing redemptions of three funds. Mind you, these funds only had $2.2 billion of assets, far less than the troubled Bear hedge funds. The reaction seems disproportionate, unless you factor in that […]
Read more...An article in Wednesday’s Financial Times, Unbound, by Gillian Tett, discusses how trading in credit derivatives generally and in the iTraxx contract in particular has become more important than the bond markets. Because my brain is a bit fried due to jet lag, I will be brief and hopefully won’t oversimplify, although I will probably […]
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