April, 2009
US prepared to oust bank chiefs
US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warned on Sunday that the US government would consider ousting board members at American banks as a condition for giving the institutions “exceptional” assistance in the future.
Pensions body seeks change to payments
Employers will have to pay more into the Pension Protection Fund during good economic times to offset lower payments in a recession, under changes to the scheme set to be looked at by the body that provides the official safety net for pension schemes,
IMF urges eastern EU to adopt euro
Crisis-hit European Union states in central and eastern Europe should consider scrapping their currencies in favour of the euro even without formally joining the eurozone, according to the International Monetary Fund.
UK is urged to print money
The government will have to print money to finance public spending, moving quantitative easing to a new level, the manager of one of London’s biggest hedge funds told the FT. Mike Platt, co-founder and chief executive of BlueCrest,
Rio eyes $10bn rights issue option
Rio Tinto is ready to proceed with a rights issue of about $10bn if its agreed $19.5bn fundraising plan with Chinese mining group Chinalco falls through, the FT reported. Rio remains committed to the Chinalco deal,
Darling set to admit forecast error
Alistair Darling on Sunday prepared to acknowledge the biggest forecasting error made by a British chancellor, warning there was unlikely to be a resurgence in the economy this year. Mr Darling is expected to use his April 22 Budget to admit the recession is much worse than he forecast,
RBS needs five years to get over ABN fallout
Royal Bank of Scotland will take at least three to five years to recover after the disastrous acquisition of ABN Amro assets that were instrumental in damaging its balance sheet, chief executive Stephen Hester said at the bank’s annual meeting on Friday.
Investors snap up 97% of record £12.5bn HSBC issue
HSBC has received overwhelming support for its record-breaking £12.5bn ($18.5bn) rights issue, with investors subscribing for almost 97 per cent of the stock on offer. The offering is the biggest in the UK,
IBM and Sun deal talks stall
IBM’s talks over a deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, a rival computer maker, have run into significant obstacles and the companies are no longer expected to produce an agreement by Monday, the FT reported,
Trading for clients lifts bank revenues
Big banks that have been battered by the credit crisis are set to report a benefit from the turmoil: robust first-quarter revenues from the old-fashioned business of trading for clients in the capital markets.
City bankers made to pay for financial crisis
London bankers have emerged as the “poor relations” of the financial world with the end of the bonus bonanza and the fall out from global financial crisis, the Telegraph reported. Bankers’ average pay and bonus packages have been slashed by 62 per cent over the past year to leave them the lowest paid in the major financial centres for the first time.
Overnight markets: Onward and upward
Asian markets moved higher for a fourth consecutive session on Monday and the yen fell to a five-month low against the dollar and the euro as traders in the region speculated the worst of the crisis might be over.
The Weekender
This week on FT Alphaville,
- An emerging ‘sell’ at Merrill.
- An upcoming international FAS 157-e?
- The Recession as art.
- Terp-gate, revisited.
- DESPAIR! UK house prices went down!
- REJOICE! No they didn’t!
- Soros gets his way.
Madoff’s extremely bullish Florida estate
The Palm Beach Post reports:
Bernard Madoff’s $9.3 million Palm Beach mansion is now in the hands of the U.S. government, along with two of his boats and a Mercedes.
At 6 p.m. Wednesday, about a dozen agents from the U.S.
Correlating causality
Presented without comment.
Via The Atlantic :
And xkcd:
Related links:
‘Higher mortgage rates have led to higher house prices’ – TVHE
Signs recession nears bottom, but layoffs persist – AP via HuffPo
‘There would have been a ripple,
Bernanke’s balance sheet
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has been speaking. He hasn’t said much that’s new, but he does provide a very good basic description of the Fed’s ballooning balance sheet.
Here are a couple of the few highlights that we could pick out.
FHLB, the ‘B’ stands for Bowsher
Charles Bowsher is a name you probably don’t know.
Until March 24 he worked as chairman of the Federal Home Loan Banks’ (FHLBs) Office of Finance. Then he suddenly quit. Why?
Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil reports (HT Zero Hedge):
The 6am Cut — sign up for FT Alphaville’s free newsletter
Get up to speed from the moment you rise. Sign up (free of charge) for FT Alphaville’s 6am Cut, a tight but comprehensive briefing emailed to you at the start of every European weekday morning (or in the Asian afternoon or late-night US time).
Unemployment, Spanish edition
If you thought US jobless figures were gloomy, you might want to take a look at the statistics out of Spain.
In the US (emphasis ours):
Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline sharply in March (-663,000), and the unemployment rate rose from 8.1 to 8.5 percent,
Positive flows into emerging markets trigger a “sell” at Merrill
Dedicated emerging market equity funds posted a fourth consecutive week of positive flows during the week ended April 1, according to data from fund-tracker EPFR.
Investors poured just over $1bn into these funds during the week,
Finance’s last stand
Think the G20 City protesters were just a bunch of hippie, environmentalist, anarchist Commies? Think again.
Also represented among the G20 crowd were a variety of financial interests. For instance,
US payrolls fall 663,000 in March, jobless rate 8.5 pct
US non-farm payrolls as compiled by the Labour department have come in worse than expected, while the January data was revised to job losses of 741,000 in the month – the biggest decline since 1949. As Reuters reports:
The international FAS 157-e
The US accounting standards board – the FASB – voted to change mark-to-market rules yesterday, in a widely-expected move.
The analysts – and pundits – have had plenty of time to formulate their opinions on the subject; here’s a selection.
Recessionism, but is it art?
Art appreciator and Governor of Sweden’s Riksbank Stefan Ingves seems to think so.
In fact he provides a sweeping 9,000-word critical analysis — which would make any art critic proud — of exactly how the financial crisis is like a William Turner picture,
Lunch Wrap
On FT Alphaville Friday morning,
- Terp-gate, revisited.
- Despair! UK house prices fall, not rise!
- What $250bn of SDRs can get you.
- Changyou’s triumphant IPO.
- Old World news values in the ‘New World Order.’
- Grand National Tips,
Terp-gate, revisited
Remember this – former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson’s dramatic November U-turn on the Tarp?
Paulson abandoned his original Tarp plan to snap up toxic assets in favour of buying (toxic) bank shares.
CDS report: European credit derivatives narrow
European credit default swaps fell on Friday amid improving sentiment about the health of the world economy.
A combination of stabilising economic data, a positive outcome from the G20 gathering and changes to US accounting rules helped buoy the market.
Changyou’s triumphant IPO proves a thing or two
Of all groups to evoke shades of past dotcom mania — and prove that one can bring off a triumphant IPO in the US, Chinese video games maker Changyou.com on Thursday made the most successful stock debut in the US in nearly a year,
Markets live transcript 3 Apr 2009
Markets live chat transcript for the chat ending at 12:06 on 3 Apr 2009. Participants in this chat were: Neil Hume, FT (NH) Paul Murphy, FT (PM) NH:Good morning and welcome to Markets Live
Despair! UK house prices fall, or the battle of mortgage data providers
In Thursday’s house price post:
…in March, for the first time since October 2007 , according to the latest survey from the Nationwide.
But is this just a dead cat bounce or something more significant?
Nationwide is hedging its bets.