Category Archives: bonds and loans

Will China Prevent the CDO Meltdown?

If fund managers don’t look down, maybe they won’t fall.
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The Bear Bailout: A Plea for Transparency

Now that the public gets its financial information from an incredibly wide range of sources, it’s becoming less and less useful for banks and other financial entities to talk only to a small number of media sources.
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How the Subprime ABX.HE Index Works

What it all adds up to is something which is not necessarily representative
of anything much at all. But it’s the best we’ve got, so it’s what people use.
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Do Covenants Provide Real Creditor Protection?

Could it be that creditor protections are not ever and always a good idea, from the point of view of lenders?
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Will the Prime Brokers Lose Money on the Bear Stearns Funds?

There’s a very scary tidbit hidden at the bottom of the NYT
coverage
of the Bear Stearns mortgage mess today:
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Bear Funds Being Liquidated: Who Wants to Buy?

It will take a brave and aggressive investor to enter this market today. On the other hand, there are lots of brave and aggressive investors out there.
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The Newly-Normal Treasury Curve: Good News or Bad News?

If the yield curve is starting to look normal, the spread curve is likely to move back to a more normal shape too, sooner or later. I’d be much happier in Treasuries right now than in credit.
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Why Bearish Forecasts are Meaningless

What I’d dearly love to see from some of these people is something they’ll
never provide: call it falsifiability, in a nod to Karl Popper.
Ask yourself if there’s any conceivable state of affairs which would prove these
people wrong. If the answer’s no, then frankly their warnings are pretty meaningless.
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Anecdote Inflation

What’s $10 million between friends anecdotes?
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Bear’s Benighted Bearish Bear-Market Bet

How did Bear Stearns lose money betting that a falling market would drop?
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Answers About Bear Stearns’ Mortgage Exposures

Banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers have made a lot of money in recent years from the mortgage sector in general and the subprime part of it in particular. For the foreseeable future, they’re going to have to look elsewhere for those profits.
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Questions About Bear and Goldman’s Mortgage Exposures

Do banks only make money on mortgages by being long the market?
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Bill Gross, Prose Stylist

Apparently "the wait is excruciating, and in some cases painful".
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A Closer Look at Cov-Lite Loans

Catherine
Craig
has a great, in-depth look today at the "cov-lite" phenomenon
whereby loans are increasingly being syndicated without the restrictive covenants
of yesteryear.
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Noise in the Markets, Treasury Sell-Off Edition

Trying to extract a signal from all the noise has become, to all intents and purposes, impossible.
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Loans: More Liquid Than Bonds

There are impressive financings, and then there are mind-blowing financings. And they way that KKR is raising $24 billion to fund its acquisition of First Data definitely falls into the latter camp.
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Can Bondholders Make a Profit When a Company Defaults?

Trying to explain record-tight bond spreads.
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Credit Deteriorates, Spreads Stay Tight

Rarely are the markets and the experts more divergent than when it comes to the issue of credit quality.
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The RBS Consortium’s Huge Financing Line

The huge cash component of the RBS consortium’s bid for ABN Amro means that they have a lot of work to do in both the debt and equity markets.
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Credit-Bubble Datapoints of the Day

Let’s assume that everything in the fixed-income market is
mispriced. Now what?
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When Can Securitized Mortgages Be Modified?

Helping homeowners whose mortgages are owned by bondholders.
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Debt Datapoint of the Day, EMBI+ Edition

JP Morgan’s EMBI+ index
of emerging-market bond spreads hit
an all-time high yesterday
, yielding just 144 basis points over Treasury
bonds.
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Will Venezuela Really Default on its Bonds?

If Venezuela withdraws from the IMF, that could put the country into technical default on its bonds. But it’s not a major worry.
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Uruguay: A Quiet Latin Success Story

Carlos Steneri and the resurgence of Uruguay.
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The Silver Lining to Banking Crises

Prosperity is closely linked to homeownership. But to get there, the occasional banking crisis might not be such a bad thing after all.
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