Archive - Jun 2009 - Story

In an interview with MarketWatch's Jon Friedman, Janet Robinson, CEO of embattled former media titan and now merely distressed media company scrambling to plug debt covenant holes, New York Times, has announced that she has had it with other members of the evil, speculative media world.

The following may or may not be all the emails that will be referenced at the hearing tomorrow. Oddly (or not) the $78 billion portfolio of problem positions has been redacted.

Spreads were tighter in the US as all the indices improved (though 2-3bps wider than the pre-FOMC tights in IG). Indices generally outperformed intrinsics with skews widening in general as IG's skew decompressed as the index beat intrinsics, HVOL outperformed but widened the skew, ExHVOL outperformed pushing the skew wider, XO's skew increased as the index outperformed, and HY outperformed but narrowed the skew.

Developing story from Huffington Post:

Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary, supposedly emailed telling BofA that they couldn't back out of acquiring Merrill Lynch, according to CNBC. An email by Geithner telling BofA to close the deal would be a proverbial smoking gun, since BofA honcho Ken Lewis has said he was forced into buying the bank and not publicly revealing the poor financial shape that Merill Lynch was in, in the wake of pressure from the government.

hat tip Vaughan

The brand spanking new team (and legacy boy Craig Schmidt) that Merrill recently acquired from some other bank (I wrote about this, but frankly don't remember where these clowns came from nor do I care), just went to town all over the REIT bathroom and marked their territory effusively. ML in fact distributed a 45 page reinitiation report, which I have no intention of ever reading.

This is what direct, premeditated, overt manipulation looks like.

Was that Cramer complaining there is too much democracy in this country? My dear, you of all people should be so glad for First Amendment rights after losing hapless mom and pop retail investors, whose only sin is listening to you, countless billions and billions of dollars.

With a subtitle like "From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again" run, don't walk, to your nearest kiosk and buy Matt Taibbi's latest piece in Rolling Stone magazine.

If anyone knows what the hell is going on with the market since the Fed release (aside from South Carolina Governor Sanford being a big fan of the Buenos Aires Hustler Club), please advise.

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in April suggests that the pace of economic contraction is slowing. Conditions in financial markets have generally improved in recent months. Household spending has shown further signs of stabilizing but remains constrained by ongoing job losses, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Businesses are cutting back on fixed investment and staffing but appear to be making progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales.

From Citi - Outlook for 2007: Will Protection Buyers Finally Emerge? The market may have, therefore, come to realize several truths that seasoned CMBS veterans have pointed out for some time: there is little or nothing that could actually cause a principal loss on a super-senior triple-A CMBS, and even the subordinate investment-grade tranches are unlikely to experience severe performance issues in the first few years of the deal.

Inflation expectations last seen at a local Duane Reade buying lots of vaseline.