ROUND-UP
US stocks shrugged off the economy and Brent crude hit $101 a barrel again. The S&P 500 rose 0.62 per cent to 1,374.02, led by energy stocks — and posting its best three-day stretch since December (Reuters). Read more
Click for Goldman’s ‘living will ‘ for regulators, listing how it would try to resolve by selling parts of its business under bankruptcy:
It relates to government-guaranteed bank bonds. In plain English — this appears to be tightening banks’ future use of them as collateral but with exceptions for some banks.
From Tuesday’s decision: Read more
Assuming there are no voting hiccups in getting the ESM to buy sovereign bonds on the secondary market…
Some arguments that bailout fund’s limited size means it will eventually hit a floor which will ultimately make bond market liquidity worse. Read more
Back in 2009 Standard Chartered’s Wei Li and Stephen Green figured out that while the great Chinese firewall may be capable of restricting access to undesirable internet content on the mainland, it can’t stop people from searching for said undesirable content.
While Google has suffered some setbacks in China, the analysts believe the search engine is still responsible for some 12-13 per cent of mainland searches. Read more
Libor has, in many ways, already been disowned by the industry. But now the discussion of its inadequacies has entered the mainstream, thanks to the fines recently levied on Barclays for manipulating the rate, and its drawing unwelcome attention to the fact that it’s still used to determine payments on hundreds of trillions of financial products.
Some of the holders of said products are not happy, and have filed class action suits to show it. Clap your hands. Read more
Click through the pic to the full IMF report on country x to find out. (p. 17)
FT Alphaville had an interesting email exchange with Peter Stella this past week, snippets of which we would like to share (with Stella’s permission).
Stella is currently the director of Stellar Consulting, an organisation that provides macroeconomic policy advice and research to central banks, governments, and private clients. He was formerly the head of the Central Banking and Monetary and Foreign Exchange Operations Divisions at the International Monetary Fund. He has co-authored a number of papers on the topics of money supply, collateral and risk-free assets. Read more
FT Alphaville didn’t enter the Wolfson economics competition, in part because our pizza drawing skills don’t pass muster, but Nomura’s Jens Nordvig and Nick Firoozye did. Their entry landed them one of the five finalist spots (more about those here).
Ahead of the announcement of the winner on Thursday, the pair have published a rather interesting and disturbing list of what they learned in the process of eurozone breakup solutionising. It won’t please anyone who’s been arguing that a break-up might not be such a big deal. Here’s a tl;dr version of their list of grim learnings: Read more
If there was ever an expression of the fight facing the Bank of Japan in a risk-off world if it wishes to keep the yen down, then the IMF’s latest round of Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER) data out last week is it.
The COFER data remains the best snapshot of what is going on in one of the most important elements of the FX market. Admittedly China is annoyingly missing from the allocated reserve data, but with 55 per cent of reserves are reported, it remains an indicative dataset. Read more
Ireland is heading back to the debt markets. It plans to recommence Treasury Bill auctions on Thursday 5 July 2012 by offering “€500 million of Treasury Bills with a three-month maturity in its first such auction since September 2010″:
Live markets commentary from FT.com
Good morning, New York…
FT ALPHAVILLE – Bye, bye Bob Special Read more
Elsewhere on Tuesday,
- Money makes people less humane. Read more
Diamond threatens to drag in BoE: Pressure on Barclays CEO Bob Diamond remains after the bank’s chairman, Marcus Agius, resigned on Monday (Reuters). Diamond has sought to alleviate some of the pressure by “threatening to reveal potentially embarrassing details about Barclays’ dealings with regulators if he comes under fire at a parliamentary hearing on Wednesday”, according to people close to Diamond. (Financial Times)
Microsoft has taken a $6.2bn writedown on its internet business, underscoring the failure of the company’s push into the internet advertising market. The charge mainly relates to the $6.3bn acquisition in 2007 of AQuantive, which was then a leader in automated online ad sales and placement. Google acquired DoubleClick the same year and has since led the field. (Financial Times) Read more
Step 1. Make exemplary use of the passive voice in communications to the Treasury Select Committee and staff.
Step 2. Wait for someone else to fall on his sword. Read more
1Bernanke weighs in on robot wars; brings Keynes for backup
2Secret liquidity and Scottish independence
3Spain's awful unemployment
4S&P 2,100, by Goldman Sachs
5Pump up, debase
Show more6Buyback to enrich
7Collateral crunch-counting gets sophisticated
8Everlasting credit, the long view
9Apple Operations International, facts (?) du jour
10In which the FTSE puts the crisis behind it
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