On FT Alphaville this morning,
- The shock waves spreading across the Atlantic from the US subprime melt-down have claimed another victim. Caliber Global Investment, which in May revealed it had suffered a $8.8m loss for the quarter and appointed Lazard to help with a review of the fund’s strategy and operations, on Thursday said that it intended to move forwards with “an orderly return of all of its capital to investors over the next 12 months.”
- “The forward calendar of institutional term loans driven by jumbo LBOs stands at a new record high of $215bn,” says S&P Leveraged Commentary & Data in their latest report, neatly summing up the scale of the problem facing the banks who have signed up to underwrite this monster pipeline of financing.
- Impregilo, Italy’s largest construction company, has been banned from bidding for public waste management contracts for a year. The move follows a fraud investigation. While the company denies any wrong doing, a payment of €750m to the company related to work on an incinerator has been blocked.
- In a detailed FT analysis, Saskia Scholtes and Gillian Tett examine a central concern of the moment: that the prices attached to many collateralised debt obligations, designed to provide both juicy investment returns and high credit ratings, have not been tested in the market.
On FT.com this morning,
- HMV showed signs of recovery on Thursday as the struggling music and books retailer sought to put a difficult year behind it. Annual profits slid by more than 70 per cent but Simon Fox, the chief executive who joined last September from electricals retailer Kesa, said the retailer had made a “robust start to the year”.
- Christine Lagarde, France’s new finance minister, said on Thursday that the government had not set a timetable for the merger between Gaz de France and Suez but it hoped to take a decision on the matter in a relatively short period of time. Ms Lagarde made the comment in an interview on a French radio station on Thursday morning. The day before, GdF shares rose 3.7 per cent on speculation that the merger could get the go-ahead imminently.
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