Many observers had expected quite a few hedge funds that had subprime exposures to report significant losses for June, and there have been rumors of funds that had begun the liquidation process because it was apparent they were too badly damaged to survive. But the specter of investors clamoring to pull funds out of a […]
Read more...John Kay, in an interesting but somewhat discursive opinion piece in the Financial Times, compares the structuring of complex securities to alchemy, with all its negative connotations. He points out that the elaborateness of the models has the effect of obscuring risks that would be more apparent otherwise, namely, that if you believe markets are […]
Read more...Credit default swaps prices have risen sharply all over the globe. Nevertheless, the CDS related to the debt of major Wall Street players have been particularly hard hit, which isn’t surprising, given their LBO financing commitments, exposure to hedge funds via their prime brokerage operations, and falling profitability. Some experts, however, think the CDS are […]
Read more...European and Asian equity markets performed well overnight, and according to the futures market, US stocks are set to have a good day as well. Yet the credit markets are in a state of near-panic. Some illustrative factoids and comments from the Financial Times: “It is nothing short of ugly in credit land,” said Alan […]
Read more...Those of you who are long in tooth might remember the days when Dr. Doom, aka Henry Kaufman, chief economist of Salomon Brothers, could move the market. Kaufman was intellectual, articulate, and insightful. I remember as a summer associate listening to his section of the Monday morning meeting at Salomon. You could hear a pin […]
Read more...A draft of a paper, “Innovations in Credit Risk Transfer: Implications for Financial Stability,” by Stanford’s Darrell Duffie, investigates ” the design, prevalence, and effectiveness of credit risk transfer,” with an eye to implications for the financial system. The paper is worth reading for those seriously interested in the CDO/CLO markets, and sets forth a […]
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...Does anyone on Wall Street have any sense? If you are designing transactions that are solely or primarily about tax avoidance, you don’t leave a mile-wide paper trail, particularly documents with titles like “Tax Efficiency” for the IRS to find. From “IRS Probes Tax Goal of Derivatives” in the Wall Street Journal: Federal tax authorities […]
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...This post is mainly for those who like data. The Financial Times, citing the Bank of International Settlements, reports that worldwide sales of collateralized debt obligations were $251 billion in the first quarter of 2007, and synthetic CDO sales were $121 billion, both record levels. To give a sense of magnitude, total US rated subprime […]
Read more...One of the themes du jour is the overrated reporting that goes on in the Wall Street Journal (and we’ve waxed eloquent on this subject many times before, as the posts tagged ‘Media Watch” will attest). While the Journal’s coverage of company news is generally good to very good, it appears that they put their […]
Read more...It’s probably a character defect, but I get wound up when I read something that is directionally correct but then discredits itself by getting important facts wrong. The latest case in point is a Huffington Post post by Eugene Linden on “The Ecology of Toxic Mortgages.” It’s a more than usually frustrating example because 1) […]
Read more...With the holiday news slowdown, we thought we’d use the opportunity to focus on good posts on other sites. One by Christopher Whalen at Seeking Alpha, “Collateral Debt Obligations: Mark-to-Dealer,” addresses some topics near and dear to our heart, namely, whether there is systemic risk and if so, where will it manifest itself? Whalen’s views […]
Read more...James Hamilton of Econbrowser, in “CDOs: what’s the big deal?” weighs in on the question of what went wrong in the CDO market. He makes a point I haven’t seen stated as clearly anywhere else, namely, some CDO tranches may have been been likely to lose money from the get-go: The benign view of CDOs […]
Read more...I’m a bit late to this article from Friday’s Financial Times, “Bear Stearns assured investors on leverage,” which gives some new information on the formation of the Enhanced Leverage Fund, the one that went into crisis first, and how it went pear shaped. Cioffi had the bad luck to not only have some trades fall […]
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