Archive - Jan 23, 2009

It is always entertaining to listen to Mark "Hogan's Bottom" Haines speculate about implied defaults, recoveries and what not... So we decided to dispel some ambiguity and speculation by presenting a brief overview of what the implied bankruptcy rate is, at least mathematically.

Yesterday all of the F/X research desk
Today virtually all the F/X sales and traders

• California blaming fiscal crisis on muni CDS traders (Bloomberg)
• Pfizer in talks to acquire Wyeth for $60 billion (WSJ)
• US-China trade tensions set to worsen on Geithner allegations (

In one of those nauseating mirror-in-a-mirror type of news events, NYT reports that the NYT is in advanced sale-leaseback talks with W.P. Carey.

Click this... Very interesting info on how the gov't is manipulating data as usual.

(thanks Paul)

Everyone knows there is something very screwy about LIBOR, with opinion ranging from it's way too high to the opposite. We also have been quite vocal in our opinion of the TED Spread but that's irrelevant for the time being. Lately we have been looking at the most recent BBA data for the 3 month LIBOR submission by bank and while the average is 1.122%, the range is quite wide: 1.04% at the tight end to 1.204% at the wide.