March, 2009
Resolution disclosure probed
A probe by the UK’s FSA watchdog into insurance entrepreneur Clive Cowdery is examining whether there was full disclosure of the financial position of Cowdery’s original Resolution investment vehicle when he sold £125m shares in it in December 2007.
Rusal pledges 25% stakes in units
Oleg Deripaska’s UC Rusal has pledged 25% stakes in its main aluminium subsidiaries to the Russian state as an additional condition to a $4.5bn government bail-out loan, the head of the state-owned bank VEB has revealed.
MUFG to raise $1bn
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Japan’s biggest bank, said it will raise nearly $1bn by issuing preferred securities, its latest step to shore up its battered capital base, reports Reuters. MUFG said it will issue Y97.4bn ($1bn) worth of the securities,
Icahn moves on Lions Gate
Carl Icahn has increased the pressure on the board of Lions Gate Entertainment by announcing plans for a tender offer for as much as $325m of the group’s debt. The activist investor has built a stake of about 15% in the embattled studio,
Murdoch revamps top team
News Corp has moved swiftly to restructure its top management team ahead of the imminent departure of Peter Chernin, with promotions for some of Rupert Murdoch’s key lieutenants. Chernin has been Murdoch’s right-hand man for several years but will step down in June to pursue a film production career.
Overnight markets: Relief
Asian stocks rose on Friday, as banks and electronics makers led the regional benchmark index to the first weekly gain in a month, after Bank of America said it was profitable and Japan signalled further stimulus steps.
CDS update: Markets resilient despite weakening sentiment
This CDS report was written by Markit’s Gavan Nolan
European credit markets gave back some of their gains from yesterday as the positive sentiment surrounding financials faded. But the spread widening at the close was modest compared to the morning session.
Ice-cream depression marketing wars
(Hat tip to the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times for this one)
As any girl can tell you, the best cure for a bout of unexpected depression is ….ICE CREAM (d’oh!) Now, even scientists agree.
Lombard: “Public toughening of the FSA’s stance is right”
No more Mr Nice Guy. Hector Sants, chief executive of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, has marked the definitive end of the era of regulator as facilitator.
But if you think the FSA has only just changed course,
NOW EVENING STANDARD DISCOVERS AIG FP MANIAC!!!
Here he is, the evil ‘rogue trader’ Joseph Cassano, who dug a black hole in Mayfair “equivalent to the annual GDPs of Hungary and Denmark put together.”
Obviously, AIG’s Mayfair office in the heart of London’s hedge fund district has been dubbed the “ground zero”
Third Point turns to gold
Dan Loeb finally has a target who can’t argue back. The manager of Third Point, the New York hedge fund, and writer of famously rude letters to corporate management he doesn’t like, has plonked a big chunk of his $1.48bn offshore fund into gold,
First step towards mark-to-market suspension?
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke alluded to the possibility in his Tuesday speech. Now this story has crossed our radar:
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative GOP lawmakers,
The curious case of ETF NAV deviations
It would probably be fair to say that since launching in the 1990s, exchange-traded funds — hailed as among the most innovative and attractive retail investment products of recent times — have caught the investing public’s imagination.
Nouriel Roubini is a Ponzi
We wouldn’t have thought to ask Nouriel Roubini about Bernie Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme. But someone else has, and it’s thrown up an interesting tirade from the master of economic doom and gloom. Reprinted in its full forcefulness below,
Madoff pleads guilty to all charges
Bernard Madoff, the New York broker accused by the SEC of operating the largest Ponzi scheme on record, on Thursday entered a guily plea at a hearing before a Manhattan judge.
The guilty plea – which will only become official when accepted by the judge – applies to 11 separate charges,
25 decisions to save the world
All of them readable in their condensed, occasionally redacted glory, here.
Prize for the first reader to tot-up the total uses of exigent. (Hat tip – Alea)
Quantitative easing: not much bang for the buck
So says Goldman Sachs’ US economist, Andrew Tilton.
As a reminder, having lowered the US target rate to its absolute minimum, the Fed is now pursuing unconventional monetary policy in an effort to increase available credit and decrease its cost.
S&P downgrades GE
Standard & Poor’s on Thursday stripped General Electric of its historic triple-A rating, downgrading to the global conglomerate by one notch to AA+.
The move follows a warning from S&P in December that GE had a one in three chance of losing its gilded rating within the new two years.
Why letting Lehman go did crush the financial markets
For some time now, the folks over at Clusterstock – notably John Carney – have led a challenge to a particularly virulent piece of received wisdom: that the failure of Lehman was necessarily an inflection point that took the severity of the financial crisis to a whole new level.
Getting the IMF to take the heat — and sell its gold?
The latest partial solution to many problems besetting – well, all kinds of sectors and areas of the world – seems to be to pump money into the IMF (ie, to massively expand the so-called “New Arrangements to Borrow”,
An 1897 boom and bust retrospective
Rolfe Winkler at Option ARMageddon has done us a favour. He’s typed up an 1897 article on booms and busts that bears an impressive resemblance to the current crisis.
The article was written at the end of the US Long Depression (officially 1873 to 1875,
Lunch Wrap
On FT Alphaville Thursday morning,
- Criminal negligence or just insane?
- Interest rates and the housing bubble.
- All Reuters needs now is a name.
- Quote du jour from Hector Sants.
- The Aviva(derci) rally.
CDS report: Insurers lead market wider
Losses from Standard Life and Aegon, the UK and Dutch insurers, cast a pall over the sector in credit markets Thursday morning, leading to significant increases in the cost of protecting insurance and reinsurance company debt against default across Europe.
Markets live transcript 12 Mar 2009
Markets live chat transcript for the chat ending at 12:15 on 12 Mar 2009. Participants in this chat were: Paul Murphy, FT (PM) Neil Hume, FT (NH) PM:Hello PM:Welcome to Markets Live
Criminal negligence, or just insane?
Going about his usual innocent business (predicting a 10 per cent GDP shrinkage peak to trough; a Great Unwind 2, as massive global external imbalances produce a major liquidity squeeze amongst emerging markets and other producers of commodities),
Interest rates and the housing bubble: less maestro, redux
On Wednesday, Alan Greenspan, former maestro, exculpated himself from blame for the Mess We’re In in a WSJ editorial.
David Merkel at the Aleph blog, and ourselves here (less maestro, more ingénue),
All Reuters needs now is a name
Navel-gazing time now on FT Alphaville.
Rattled by the growth of the online financial commentariat – see expansion plans at the WSJ’s Heard on the Street column, Breaking Views, the FT’s influential Lex column and (cough) this humble blog – Thomson Reuters is launching its own opinion service this summer.
Quote du jour – Hector Sants, FSA
From Reuters.
“PEOPLE SHOULD BE VERY FRIGHTENED OF THE FSA”
You have been warned.
Update: Another killer quote from Hector.
I continue to believe the majority of market participants are decent people.
Aviva(derci) rally
After a couple of sessions in the black, Aviva has resumed its downward slide.
In early morning trading, shares in the insurer are down 14 per cent, at 183p. Andrew Crean of Citigroup, seen by many as the best insurance analyst in the Square Mile,
How tangible is the book?
Inevitable, really. Having whittled bank valuation metrics down to tangible book values, analysts are now starting to question how tangible those books might actually be.
An interesting note out of Citigroup this week focuses on the issue of deferred tax assets,