FT Alphaville
C&WW&Voda
A major telecom company said it was in the early stages of thinking about euthanising a corporate basket-case on Monday.
Cable & Wireless Worldwide shares were up 28 per cent at pixel time:
FT Alphaville were left scratching their heads about what Vodafone might want.
One Greek hurdle down, but more ahead
A tense Sunday in Athens as the Greek parliament approved an austerity budget amid violence in the streets that included riot police firing tear gas and stun grenades at protesters while buildings throughout the city were firebombed:
“Grexit”
Grexit being, of course, a Greek exit from the eurozone. (Also, an app for archiving and sharing Gmail threads. Bummer for them.)
The term comes from Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari at Citi, who are now leaning towards the “let them leave”
Non-farm payrolls 243,000
By Cardiff Garcia and Joseph Cotterill
Uncaptured seasonality effects or not, this is what a healthy employment report looks like.
Many of the underlying details look even better than the headline numbers,
FT Alphaville asks the bloggers
We submitted three questions to the latest quarterly survey of economics bloggers by the Kauffman Foundation. Click to open the pdf and see how our comrades from around the interwebs responded (note: they really like NGDP targeting)…
Further further reading
For the commute home,
- Facebook to file tomorrow morning.
- Is the market getting too quiet?
- US Reits are drawn to subprime securities.
- “Volcker Rule Will Be Bad For European Governments,
The Portugal enigma
Something to note about these Portuguese bond prices… (via Reuters)
(Other than that they dropped like nothing else on Monday)
The difference between the bid price and the ask price — a proxy of sorts for how liquid the bonds are — is enormous,
Portugal, back in the frame
Felix and Arianna want to move Davos to Patmos, but what about the Azores?
Have a look at the yields on the Portuguese 3-year…
… the widest flavour of paper at the short end of Portugal’s inverted curve,
Goldman in Q4…
Goldman in the fourth quarter: revenue miss ($6.05bn vs $6.54bn), 43 per cent plummet in investment banking revenue, but earnings per share rescued by…
Compensation and benefits expenses (including salaries,
A timely confirmation of risky behaviour
ECB papers are rarely the most riveting of reads but sometimes one crops up which is more attention-grabbing than usual…
This particular case, a paper by Biais, Heider and Hoerova, may be of interest as it at first glance appears to confirms what many already suspect — that hedging,
Pandit’s big idea
FT Alphaville has intercepted a recent phone call between banks and their regulators!!!
Regulators: “We’re going to revise the capital adequacy framework and increase transparency in the reporting of risk on bank balance sheets.”
US economic data sees ‘reversion to mean’
From a Europe mired in an unresolved sovereign debt crisis and in the midst of trying to recapitalise its banking sector, all this positive US economic data is frankly just irritating.
In fact it’s been so good in terms of positive employment and manufacturing metrics that the Rates &
UniCredit, OmniCredit [updated]
This is a reader appeal — just why are there so many banks working on Unicredit’s new rights issue? We still can’t work it out:
In addition, the Company informs that, following today’s Board of Directors meeting,
Presenting… the inaugural FT Alphaville awards
Our NY correspondents Cardiff Garcia and John McDermott present what we expect will be the first of many mirthful FT Alphaville annual awards. Watch the video below and:
LAUGH at Cardiff’s impression
Further further reading
For the commute home,
- The Trans-pacific Partnership, the most important trade deal you’ve never heard of.
- Worst. Empire. Ever.
- A timeline of the year in protests.
- Slate’s collection of tributes to Christopher Hitchens.
Super senior moments at RBS
It’s the middle of 2007. Executives at RBS are joining the dots about how even super senior tranches of CDOs offer scant protection in the face of a tsunami of subprime defaults.
A structure which would become commonly understood by many,
Collateral crunch, meet BoE
In light of the continuing exceptional stresses in financial markets, the Bank of England is today announcing the introduction of a new contingency liquidity facility, the Extended Collateral Term Repo (ECTR) Facility.
The S&P statement
Fifteen eurozone countries placed on CreditWatch negative, not just the six AAAs, as we’d expected earlier.
Here’s the statement:
FRANKFURT (Standard & Poor’s) Dec. 5, 2011–Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services today placed its long-term sovereign ratings on 15 members of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU or eurozone) on CreditWatch with negative implications.
Keeping it liquid Eurozone
An interesting data point in the wake of this week’s SMP sterlization fail.
The amount of cash on overnight deposit at the ECB has breached the ‘psychologically important’ €300bn for the first time since June 2010.
Further further reading
For the commute home,
- John Kay on John Maynard Keynes on the limits of knowledge.
- The revolution according to Steve Jobs.
- James Hamilton on this morning’s coordinated central bank announcement.
Euro *non*-redenomination risk
Amazing what you find in analyst reports on German telecom credit these days (via Societe Generale’s Juliano H Torii):
…we think investors might be waking up to the possibility of the mirror image of redenomination risk – what we will call “no-redenomination” risk (NORED) – a risk that may be severely underestimated for the German companies in our space.
A Minsky moment in the eurozone?
Named after the economist Hyman Minsky, the phrase describes a situation where investors who have borrowed too much are forced to sell even good assets to pay back their loans.
– The Guardian, 2007
BHL sur la crise
We don’t know. We really really don’t know.
Bernard-Henri Lévy writing for the Huffington Post:
Rome and Athens, epicenters of the economic and financial storm currently shaking Europe and the world.
Jefferies: lies, damned lies and the anonymous hedge fund who tells them
Another stridently penned letter from Jefferies that seeks to reassure the markets about its exposure to Europe and worries about access to short-term funding:
The note rehashes a few points the broker had already made in prior statements,
Is Basel 2.5 hitting the bond market?
What can be confusing about the carnage in eurozone sovereign bond prices, is that there are so many factors at work all pushing the same way.
There are technical and fundamental factors on top of the blind panic and fear.
A drachma-tic moment in Greek oil trading
European geopolitical FAIL:
LONDON, Nov 11 (Reuters) – Greece is relying on Iran for most of its oil as traders pull the plug on supplies and banks refuse to provide financing for fear that Athens will default on its debt…
Findings in the Goldman Sachs 10q filing
There’s a few interesting nuggets in Goldman Sachs latest 10q, which the bank filed on Wednesday.
As Goldman’s 3Q earnings suggested, it was a volatile quarter on the trading floors. Goldman traders lost money on 21 single days over the quarter,
Italian bond yields through 7 per cent
It’s happened: Tradeweb showed bid yields on 10-year Italian bonds quoted above 7 per cent on Wednesday morning. Reuters wasn’t far behind.
Seven per cent is generally seen as “needs a bailout now”,
Addio, Berlusconi
Il Bunga Bunga festa è finita.
Across all the wires a few minutes ago came the news that Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, had announced that Berlusconi’s resignation was imminent.
In a vote over the 2010 state budget accounts earlier in the day,