hier ein paar Meldungen: ;-)
November 2 - Financial Times (Gillian Tett): "The mood in credit derivatives markets turned ugly on Thursday, with the cost of insuring corporate debt hitting multi-week highs on both sides of the Atlantic. Speculation was rife that leading major investment banks were facing additional losses linked to complex mortgage-backed securities, while worries mounted over the health of major financial guarantors. 'It's scary out there - there's blood on the streets,' a trader at a US brokerage said. 'It's a real mess.' Five-year credit default swaps tied to Citigroup widened to 60 bps, meaning it cost $60,000 annually to insure Citigroup's debt against default for five years. A couple of weeks ago, that figure stood at $27,000. Contracts on Merrill Lynch...rose $18,000 to $103,000.... Bond insurers, or monolines, were also hit hard. '[These triple-A rated companies are] exposed to the crumbling housing market,' said Gavan Nolan, an analyst at derivatives data provider Markit... CDS on MBIA Insurance rocketed to a four-year high, of 345bp... Ambac Financial climbed to a five-year high of 310bp. In Europe, the iTraxx Crossover index of 50 mostly high-yield companies widened by 18 bp to 338bp, the biggest rise since August..."
November 2 - Bloomberg (Christine Richard): "Ambac Financial Group Inc. and MBIA Inc. were cut to 'in-line' from 'attractive' by Morgan Stanley, which raised the possibility that the bond insurers could face a 'downward spiral' if defaults on mortgages and home equity loans worsen."
November 1 - Financial Times (Stacy-Marie Ishmael and Gillian Tett): "The ongoing crisis in the US housing market is pushing a key mortgage-linked derivatives index to new lows, threatening to unleash a further bout of credit market upheaval. The price swing in the index, known as the ABX, is particularly significant, since it is starting to reduce the value of credit instruments that carried high credit ratings, and were therefore supposed to be ultra-safe... Until a couple of months ago, the part of the ABX index that tracks AAA debt was trading almost at face value. However, in the past three weeks it has fallen sharply due to downgrades by credit rating agencies and a slew of bad data from the housing sector... The swing could create real pain for investors, since in recent years numerous firms have created trading strategies which have loaded large debt levels onto these 'safe' securities, precisely because they assumed these instruments would never fluctuate in price. 'The last week has seen some of the worst falls in the ABX market this year, especially higher up the capital structure [with highly rated debt],' said Jim Reid, head of fundamental credit strategy at Deutsche Bank."
November 2 - Bloomberg (Shannon D. Harrington): "The risk of owning the debt of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Citigroup Inc. rose to the highest in at least five years on speculation that losses from the mortgage-market collapse will worsen."
November 1 - Bloomberg (Shannon D. Harrington and Hamish Risk): "The risk of owning corporate debt reached the highest in seven weeks as credit-default swap traders bet that companies, including Citigroup Inc., will further reduce the value of securities tied to subprime mortgages. The CDX North America Investment Grade Series 9 Index, a benchmark for the cost to protect debt that rises as investor confidence deteriorates, rose 5.75 basis points to 66.25 bps... Credit-default swaps tied to Citigroup and Merrill Lynch & Co. are at three-month highs, while those on bond insurers Ambac Financial Group Inc. and MBIA Inc. rose to the most in at least four years."
October 30 - Financial Times (Stacy-Marie Ishmael and Paul J Davies): "Investor worries are mounting that the next big casualties from the credit squeeze might be the specialist companies that act as guarantors for bond issuers. These companies, which write insurance to boost the credit ratings of various kinds of bonds, have seen their share prices pummelled and the cost of protecting their debt against default soar. Over the past week, sector leaders such as MBIA, Ambac, XL Capital Assurance, Radian and MGIC have all been hit hard. In recent years, these companies, known as monolines, have moved away from their role of guaranteeing, or wrapping, bonds issued by US municipalities towards writing business related to structured asset-backed finance deals, such as mortgage-backed bonds and collateralised debt obligations... 'Our conclusion is that MBIA and the rest of the financial guarantors are facing a prolonged period of stress,' said Rob Haines, an analyst at CreditSights..."
November 2 - Financial Times (Gillian Tett): "This week, a banking friend made a startling confession. In recent weeks he has been furtively unwinding some large investment portfolios linked to subprime securities. But as he has embarked on this sordid task, he has discovered that the only effective way to get rid of these distressed assets is to avoid putting any tangible price on the trade. Instead, he has resorted to using a tactic more normally associated with third world markets than the supposedly sophisticated arena of high finance: barter.
'Barter is the only thing that works right,' he chuckles grimly. 'It is like the Dark Ages.' ...Never mind the fact that the risky tranches of subprime-linked debt (the so-called BBB ABX series) have fallen 80 per cent since the start of the year; in a sense, such declines are only natural for risky assets in a credit storm. Instead, what is really alarming is that the assets which were supposed to be ultra-safe - namely AAA and AA rated tranches of debt - have collapsed in value by 20% and 50% odd respectively. This is dangerous, given that financial institutions of all stripes have been merrily leveraging up AAA and AA paper in recent years, precisely because it was supposed to be ultra-safe and thus, er, never lose value."
October 30 - Dow Jones (Anusha Shrivastava): "The higher-rated tranches of the subprime mortgage-based ABX index were being clobbered Monday after Fitch Ratings said the credit ratings of $23.9 billion of the highest-rated collateralized debt obligations could be downgraded. The AAA-rated slice of the index based on home loans from the second half of 2006 was quoted at 80.5 cents, according to one primary dealer. It had closed at 83.39 cents Friday, according to index administrator Markit. Its AA-rated slice hit 47.5 cents, down from a close of 52.04 cents Friday."
November 1 - Bloomberg (Deborah Finestone): "The Federal Reserve added $41 billion in temporary reserves to the banking system, the largest one-day cash infusion since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The amount reflects the central bank's effort to push the effective rate lower after policy makers reduced their target yesterday by a quarter-percentage point to 4.50 percent."
November 1 - New York Times (Eric Dash): "Nearly three weeks after the country's biggest banks announced a $75 billion fund to help stabilize the credit markets, the reality is sinking in that the plan will provide hospice care to troubled investment funds, not resuscitate them. The reason, market participants say, is that the structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that helped fuel the Wall Street loan-packaging boom hinged on confidence in the quality of the $400 billion in securities they bought and on easy credit from investors. Now, that trust has been shattered and most of the investors have fled. Many say that the business model is dead, or soon will be."
October 30 - Bloomberg (Neil Unmack): "Sachsen Funding 1 Ltd., a $2.2 billion debt fund set up by Landesbank Sachsen Girozentrale said the value of its assets fell, preventing it from being able to borrow in the commercial paper markets. The company, a so-called SIV-lite, is now in 'restricted issuance' after a 'recent reduction' in the market value of its assets... In the 'restricted issuance' state, the company is not allowed to sell further debt, or invest in assets other than deposits or short-term investments..."
October 30 - Bloomberg (Sebastian Boyd): "Axon Financial Funding, a $9.5 billion structured investment vehicle or SIV, had its debt ratings cut by Standard & Poor's after it sold assets at a loss. S&P cut its rating on the company's debt by eight steps to BBB, two steps above high-risk, high-yield, from the top AAA investment-grade ranking."
October 30 - Bloomberg (Jacob Greber): "UBS AG, Europe's largest bank by assets, reported its first quarterly loss in almost five years after declines in the U.S. subprime mortgage market led to $4.4 billion in losses and writedowns on fixed-income securities."
November 2 - Bloomberg (Allen Wan): "Merrill Lynch & Co., the world's biggest brokerage, may need to write off another $10 billion of losses in collateralized debt obligations, Deutsche Bank Securities said in downgrading the stock today. 'New CDO writedowns could approach $10 billion given a worse CDO market,' Deutsche Bank analysts wrote..."
October 30 - Bloomberg (Sebastian Boyd): "At Merrill Lynch & Co., a lot more was lost than the $2.24 billion, or $2.82 a share, Chief Executive Officer Stan O'Neal said would be subtracted from the third quarter. The real damage to shareholders came with Merrill's $8.4 billion writedown. It is the biggest in the history of Wall Street and wiped out four quarters of growth in shareholders' equity, according to Merrill's published figures. The charge, mostly for collateralized debt obligations and subprime mortgages, left the New York-based company with $38.8 billion of assets minus liabilities. Losing '20 percent of shareholders' equity in one fell swoop is a serious blow,' said Robert Willens, the accounting analyst at Lehman Brothers..."
November 2 - The Wall Street Journal (Susan Pulliam): "Merrill Lynch & Co., in a bid to slash its exposure to risky mortgage-backed securities, has engaged in deals with hedge funds that may have been designed to delay the day of reckoning on losses, people close to the situation said. The transactions are among the issues likely to be examined by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC is looking into how the Wall Street firm has been valuing, or "marking," its mortgage securities and how it has disclosed its positions to investors, a person familiar with the probe said. Regulators are scrutinizing whether Merrill knew its mortgage-related problem was bigger than what it indicated to investors throughout the summer... In one deal, a hedge fund bought $1 billion in commercial paper issued by a Merrill-related entity containing mortgages, a person close to the situation said. In exchange, the hedge fund had the right to sell back the commercial paper to Merrill itself after one year for a guaranteed minimum return, this person said."
October 30 - Financial Times (Haig Simonian): "UBS committed itself on Tuesday to improving radically its risk assessment and control procedures as a bank once renowned for its risk awareness admitted it had slipped up grievously in the US credit turmoil... UBS will "de-emphasise" proprietary trading, and introduce measures to reprice capital put at traders' disposal. Staff in its investment bank will also receive a higher proportion of compensation in UBS shares in a further effort to underline the potential consequences of their decisions."
October 30 - Bloomberg (Gavin Finch): "The cost of borrowing euros for two months rose the most in eight years as banks sought loans that will cover their commitments through to the start of next year. The London interbank offered rate that banks charge each other for the loans climbed 28 bps to 4.59% today... It was the biggest one-day increase since Oct. 28, 1999, when it soared 54 basis points in the run-up to the new millennium on concern computer systems would crash at the turn of the year."
October 31 - Bloomberg (Caroline Salas): "Residential Capital LLC, the biggest privately held mortgage lender, is the worst performer of the 50 biggest issuers in the high-yield, high-risk bond market this month, according to index data compiled by Merrill Lynch & Co. ResCap's bonds lost 9.45% in October..."