Monday, June 30, 2008

Sir, monolines coming into our sector!

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It hasn't been a great year for monolines, and Pershing Square Capital's Bill Ackman has been one of the main beneficiaries. He'...
12 comments:
Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Economy to the Fed: I thought I told you to remain on the command ship

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The Federal Reserve is set to announce its rate decision today, and is broadly expected to hold their Fed Funds target rate steady at 2%. Ho...
42 comments:
Sunday, June 22, 2008

Moody's Global Scale: The last remnants of the old ratings have been swept away

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Bowing to significant political pressure, Moody's is set to change the way they rate municipal bonds . The change will result in thousan...
16 comments:
Thursday, June 19, 2008

I'll come right back and give you a hand!

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Bill Ackman has gone long FSA CDS , in effect betting that FSA will go bankrupt. Its moved 200bps wider today (now 645/695). I want to write...
18 comments:
Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Credit Default Swaps: All craft retreat!

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Credit-default swaps ( CDS ) pose the greatest systemic risk to the worldwide financial system. Housing and oil may be what's pushing th...
34 comments:
Thursday, June 12, 2008

News! on the March!

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Obviously the Lehman story is dominating headlines. Lehman CDS has been all over the board this morning. I've seen it quoted as wide as ...
8 comments:
Wednesday, June 11, 2008

LIBOR our only hope? No... there is another!

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ICAP's, the largest broker of inter-lender transactions, has developed their own measure of U.S. inter-bank lending rates, ostensibly to...
11 comments:
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

How are bonds quoted?

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By popular demand, welcome to yet another installment of Accrued Interest's How To series. This is on the subject of how bonds and vario...
13 comments:
Sunday, June 08, 2008

Monolines and Bank Write-downs: I wonder if your feelings on this matter are clear

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The most important question regarding yesterday's downgrade of Ambac and MBIA is obviously not about munis but about ABS and CDOs. As r...
31 comments:
Thursday, June 05, 2008

S&P to Moody's: Well, I wasn't gonna let you get all the credit

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S&P just downgraded Ambac and MBIA out of nowhere. Both now AA. Its hilarious how much the two ratings agencies parrot each other. Here...
5 comments:
Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Monolines: Let me see you with my own eyes

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That snapping sound you hear is the last ray of hope for MBIA and Ambac shareholders. Moody's put both on negative watch today, which te...
14 comments:

Lehman Brothers: Destructive power greater than half the starfleet

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What to make of the fact that Lehman was apparently buying their own stock in the open market yesterday? Who knows. I think its supposed to ...
9 comments:
Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Lehman Brothers to the Market: Your destiny lies with me!

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Our discussion of Bear Stearns' collapse (check out the comments, some really good stuff there) and what may or may not have prevented ...
16 comments:
Thursday, May 29, 2008

CDOs: The Future of Leveraged Fixed Income

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Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) have been the bane of Wall Street recently. Falling CDO prices have been a major player in the write...
15 comments:
Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Bailouts, Wall Street, and the Bad Motivator

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Bailout. To any believer in real honest-to-goodness capitalism, bailouts are an anathema. The way our system of economics is supposed to wor...
44 comments:
Wednesday, May 21, 2008

That thing's operational! (More on the GSE's)

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Yesterday's post on the GSE's garnered a lot of great comments and I wanted to answer some of them in a new post, as I know the maj...
12 comments:
Monday, May 19, 2008

How Safe are the GSE's?

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Freddie Mac's earnings release from last week created quite a buzz. It was initially viewed as an unmitigated positive, but upon further...
29 comments:

You know better than to trust a strange statistic!

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Stock futures got a little bump, and bond prices took a dive, immediately after Friday's better-than-expected housing start number. Thin...
4 comments:
Friday, May 16, 2008

Your overconfidence is your weakness

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Apparently everything is doing just swimmingly. So much so that the Fed is going to hike rates later this year. Check out Fed Fund implied r...
18 comments:
Thursday, May 15, 2008

These aren't the prices you're looking for...

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Inflation has become a dominant theme in investment markets recently. There is considerable debate over what measure of inflation is the bes...
30 comments: