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Qimonda, a unit of chipmaker Infineon, filed for bankruptcy today "after failing to secure sufficient financing following a slide in memory-chip prices this year." The company has 12,200 employees.

we don't disagree

Xerox (XRX) announced in its Q4 press release that its earnings for 2009 will likely be about $1/share, significantly below the consensus estimate of $1.13. We will keep a close watch on them to see if they merit a Death Watch badge in the coming months.

We usually make a lot of fun of Yahoo Finance for their sophisticated outlook on the economy. In this case they may have been on to something.

In a recent press release, insolvent trucking company Greatwide Logistics, announced that it was "sold" to an investor group consisting of DE Shaw and Centerbridge. While no cash changed hands, the two Hedge Funds have agreed to a debt for equity swap: the company's total debt would be reduced by 77% from $620 million to $140 million.

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.

According to the SEC filing, Carlos is now the proud owner of 25,754,000 shares of Class A NYT stock, or 16.21% of the outstanding stock.

A $100 million loan BWIC made the rounds today. Roughly a third of the names in the list are € denominated, with the biggest among them is MacDermid 2.25% TL at 9 million.
In the dollar denominated space most names are relatively obscure with the most sizable being Sensus 2% TL-B1 at $8.7 million and Grant Forest 1st Lien at $7 million.
Deleveraging over? Not so much.

"2008 was the first year that we lost money since we opened our doors in May 1996. We are disappointed about our 2008 result, and we are sure you are as well."
....
"We don't know where the bottom will be and don't want to bet the farm on guessing, so we did our buying with restraint."
....
All this, and a very personal vendetta with the German authorities on how the Volkswagen bandwagon could have been allowed to lose money, you can read here.