Archive - May 27, 2011

Canadian private equity is booming, helped in large part by large Canadian public pension funds, and increasingly attracting global tech leaders. Is this the beginning of a renaissance period for Canada's PE market, or a sign that an overheated and over-leveraged economy is peaking?

Personal income, completely irrelevant and mostly made up consumer sentiment and pending home sales.

Hiroko Tabuchi is a NY Times Reporter who received this letter from a mother in Fukushima on a recent trip. She promised to translate it and share it. It just popped up on Twitter and after reading it I feel compelled to repost it here as well. It is heart breaking and the plea by those suffering fellow citizens of our planet deserves to be heard and acted upon by all of us.

Update 2: DEXB.BB reopen 0.5% lower than prehalt.

Update: DEXB.BB to resume trading at 1340 CET according to the market regulator

Two days ago Zero Hedge revealed that "someone" may know something is fishy in Belgium's biggest bank Dexia, after two of the biggest investors in the bank's recent €3.2 billion FRN issuance decided to put their portion back to the bank. Sure enough, less than 48 hours later, the company's shares were halted, without much information, and it was subsequently revealed that the bank would book a multi-billion loss on asset sales, as a result it would accelerate the sale of non-core assets, and would divest its financial products portfolio. As a result of the €3.6 billion charge, "The second-quarter provision to cover future losses will reduce Dexia’s
Tier 1 ratio, a measure of the bank’s ability to absorb losses, to about
11 percent from 13.4 percent at the end of March, the bank, based in
Brussels and Paris, said today in an e-mailed statement." Once again, we see efficient markets in action. Luckily for Blackrock and Barclays, the market was just a little more efficient for them than for everyone else. And to anyone who dipped into Dexia protection as per our suggestion, now may be a good time to take some profits... or not. After all the last thing the bank needs now is to have to raise even more cash to meet the put demands, which are likely set to surge across all bond issues that have this investor-friendly option.

A snapshot of the European Morning Briefing covering Stocks, Bonds, FX, etc.
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