April, 2009
Capital & Regional in Junction rescue
Capital & Regional, the property fund manager and investor, has confirmed plans to raise about £65m for the Junction retail park fund, mostly through a placing of units with Area Property Partners, the US private equity group.
Pearson capital-raising plan rebuffed
Pearson, the educational publisher and owner of the FT, has been rebuffed after sounding out investors last week about a possible £270m capital-raising. The company asked some top shareholders to support a placing of new shares equivalent to 5% of the group,
Icap loses 85% of mortgage bond trading
Icap, the world’s largest broker of trades between banks, has lost 85% of its business over six weeks in the most active part of the mortgage-bond market as Wall Street firms shift trades to their own electronic network,
EU hedge fund rules attacked
The European Commission’s plans to regulate hedge funds and private equity threaten to become a key issue in the European parliamentary election campaign after key MPs on Monday criticised draft proposals as “almost worthless”.
UK case tests pre-nup principle
One of Germany’s wealthiest women is seeking to enforce a pre-nuptial agreement that would leave her former investment banker husband with nothing in the latest landmark divorce case to hit UK courts.
Stanford denies Ponzi scheme
Billionaire Texan Allen Stanford said on Monday denined he ran a Ponzi scheme, as US regulators have charged, and asserted in what may be a preview of his defense that his companies were well-run until the government seized them in February,
Overnight markets: Sliding
Asian stocks slumped on Tuesday, dragging the regional benchmark index from a three-month high, as lower-than- expected profit at China Mobile, the world’s biggest wireless carrier, weighed on regional markets.
CDS report: Markets correct as sentiment shifts
This CDS report was written by Markit’s Gavan Nolan
European credit indices were wider today, tracking a downward movement in global stock prices. The Markit iTraxx Europe index closed around 154bp, nearly 6bp wider than Friday’s close.
Rally monkey fired?
We’ve had six weeks of bouncing markets, but is today the day the Rally Monkey gets fired?
The S&P 500 was down 3.4 per cent at 838.99 at lunchtime on Monday in New York…
Markets and sunspot cycles
Steen Jakobsen, chief investment officer at Capinordic — and formerly of Saxobank — believes we may be at the critical turning point in the bear market rally. His latest blog entry, penned Friday, states:
What Darling has to play with
Only one of these UK tax growth rates is still in positive territory, according to UBS.
Related links:
Darling to admit £60bn bail-out bill – FT
Twitter fail on Twitter Fall at the Telegraph – #Telegraphfail?
They love Twitter at the Telegraph. Editor Will Lewis is was an enthusiastic tweeter.
Accordingly, editorial underlings are also mad for it.
Anyway, what with the UK budget coming up, presumably some tech-savvy bods over in Victoria thought they should be all web 2.0 and create a Twitter Fall – that is,
US credit markets appear to thaw, but fundamentals weak
Last week appears to have been a good one for US credit markets even if data suggest all is far from well in the financial world, according to a slew of recent research notes.
Analysts at Moody’s Capital Markets Research Group (CMRG) described this situation as a “mud thaw”:
A Citi-fied Catch-22
We find this very amusing. But then, we have a very dark sense of humour.
Banks have been posting stellar first-quarter results in their fixed income divisions. These shouldn’t really be a surprise.
Stress testing the stress test reports
The Turner Radio Network claims to have obtained the stress test results for the top 19 banks in the US, which are said to be “very bad.”
1) Of the top nineteen (19) banks in the nation, sixteen (16) are already technically insolvent.
Rigamortis for Halliburton
The banks may be in the Q1 happy club, but that’s not so much the case for oil firms, and specifically the oil services firms, which this time last year happened to be the talk of the markets (see chart below).
Bank of America in Q1 happy bank club
Definitively even. Expectations were for EPS of 4 cents. From the press release.
Earnings Exceed All of 2008
Record Revenue of $36 Billion and Pretax, Pre-Provision Income of $19 Billion
Merrill
Lunch Wrap
On FT Alphaville Monday morning,
- Quant funds: Victims of the dash for trash.
- The Bank of England, the building societies and the SLS.
- Shipping rates: tanked.
- DarlingTube.
- China,
CDS report: European credit derivatives widen on risk aversion
European credit derivative spreads widened on Monday as risk aversion rose amid warnings by policymakers of potential economic problems ahead.
Barack Obama, US president, said at the weekend that it was a difficult time for the economy and that credit markets were likely to remain seriously restrained.
Tanked
Most people will have heard about the dramatic collapse in dry bulk shipping rates that occurred in October/November following the paralysis that hit global trade in the weeks after the Lehman Brothers collapse.
DarlingTube
He’s had a haircut, he’s looking stressed, (he’s probably a bit narked with Ed Balls, who’s apparently been briefing against him – and cabinet colleagues – for months) but here he is anyway, with a cheeky pre-budget YouTube clip on preparations for Wednesday’s budget:
Markets live transcript 20 Apr 2009
Markets live chat transcript for the chat ending at 12:12 on 20 Apr 2009. Participants in this chat were: Paul Murphy, FT (PM) Neil Hume, FT (NH) PM:Hi there! PM:Welcome
The American dream
From a very thorough BIS paper on leverage and procyclicality, picked up by Alea, this frightening little graph:
Victims of the dash for trash
Quant funds, of course, who have been buried during the recent bear market rally according to Bloomberg.
Companies with the most debt and lowest returns on assets are turning the biggest six-week rally in stocks since 1938 into a bloodbath for last year’s best-performing trading strategy. Investors in so-called “quantitative momentum”
The Bank of England, the building societies, and the SLS
The Sunday Times ran with a very interesting story on UK building societies at the weekend (and the Times had a rather more muddled version out Monday).
The Sunday paper noted that seven building societies were “locked in talks with the Bank of England”
China the “lovable force”?
This is definitely a space to watch: A more confident – and definitely a more acid-tongued – China is preparing to swagger back out there with its shopping trolley and invest in Europe and elsewhere, according to the head of China Investment Corp,
[Ireland's Bad Bank] AIB: the stress-test arms race?
AIB statement, emphasis FT Alphaville’s:
On 12 February Allied Irish Banks p.l.c. (“AIB”) [NYSE: AIB] announced an agreement with the Irish Government in relation to the proposed recapitalisation of the bank.
Further reading
Elsewhere on Monday,
- The Citi market barometer.
- The return of junk.
- On nationalisation.
- The great oil rebound.
- Don’t bank on it.
- Why inflation is not the answer, this time around.