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In an amusing expose on the negative basis trade, Bloomberg has identified AllianceBernstein and TIAA-CREF as the winners in the trade where Deustche Bank and Citadel crashed and burned.

Former Drexelite and PE legend Leon Black has struck gold after panhandling in front of the headquarters of Calpers and The Teacher Retirement System of Texas for 16 months.

At last check, LUV was down 18%, or $1.75 to $8.06. Despite posting earnings that were a little better than expected yesterday, Calyon analyst Ray Neidl cut the stock to a Sell, with a $7 target. As we had previously noted, any airline which will forcefully deplane a hot chick for wearing a miniskirt deserves all the wrath of the market (that, and some other reasons as well).

Despite losing over 35% of its combined savings in the stock market, the general public had taken Wall Street's shenanigans in stride.

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.