Siesta

So what did happen in Spain today?  What is causing Spanish bonds to go down so much? The first answer is relatively easy.  Nothing much new happened in Spain today, just variations of the same theme that has been out there for weeks if not months.  What we have is a struggling country with many banks that would view struggling as a compliment. So why are bonds down so much?  Bonds are down because someone had some bonds to sell and that started the cascade.

Just for a moment imagine you are a market maker in the Spanish bond market.  You aren’t even an aggressive market maker, so you just make markets on the 5 year and 10 year bond.... You look up at the street screens and they just went offered.  Cr*p, no street bid. Now what to do? 

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The Greek parliament just passed the latest proposed austerity plan with a majority voting Yes. Judging by the reaction of the EURUSD, which experienced a modest 40 pip short covering squeeze in the last few minutes, one would imagine that today's Greek vote outcome is surprising. It isn't: after all, all Greece has done is promise to do something it won't do in hope it can get another bailout package, this time amounting to €210 billion (of which its people will pocket a de minimis 19%). As we said earlier: "The only real questions are i) what the Greek population may do in response to this latest selling out of a population "led" by an unelected banker, which if history is any precedent, the answer is not much, and ii) how Germany will subvert this latest event, and put the bail [sic] back in Greece's court once again." Sure enough, to paraphrase what we said before, the question now is what the popular Greek response will be having learned its politicians sold it out yet again, which will likely be nothing much, as it is 1 am local time, and as everyone knows revolutions in heavily socialist countries only start between 9 am and 5 pm, with a 2 hour break for siesta. More importantly, keep a close eye on headlines out of Germany. That is all that matters now.

Cue popular REM song...

The market stumbled a bit on Thursday on news of a potential government shutdown (and politicians quibbling over a $40B budget difference is like...

Europe bailout tracker update: Portugal edition. Hey Almunia, is there anything to be concerned about in Portugal? We thought so... The country's 10 year spread is now 18 bps wider to 147 bps after the country just had an almost failed BILL (12 months) auction. The country had previously announced an indicative offer of €500 million in 12 month bill to be auctioned. The result- a sale of just €300 million at yields over 50 bps higher compared to just two weeks ago. Oh, forget Greece, Portugal CDS is now trading at record wides.

Merely Siesta break? Or something more... getting more information.

Archive this one for the funny pages. It has been leaked by administration officials (and sponged up by Bloomberg), that on August 25, when the CBO releases its updated budget estimate, the 2009 deficit is expected to decline from $1.825 trillion to $1.58 trillion. And, get this, one of the reasons for the reduction is the FDIC spending $78 billion less, presumably due to "fewer bank failures than the administration anticipated." Pardon us, but last time we checked, not only did the FDIC have no cash left in the FDIC, and was effectively in a debtor position vis-a-vis the administration, but of the top 4 banks pending for blow up, Colonial was under (granted with some arbitrarily optimistic loss expectations), Guaranty was about to be hawked over to a few siesta loving left midfielders, and Corus was about to... well, we are not quite sure what the hell Corus is doing these days.

An interesting tidbit from Rosie's am commentary. He points out that between commodity inflation (gas prices), the pounding in mortgages (drop in mortgage refis and implied housing net worth) and dropping wages (yes, the skyrocketing unemployment rate does tend to do that), and there go the purported stimulus package benefits.

The chart below presents the top 20 sovereigns with the largest amount of net CDS (not gross) notional outstanding. Interestingly, Italy and Spain, with their $20.4 billion and $11.1 billion in net notional, have the most net risk exposure, (General Electric, parent of brutally realistic and objective financial news station CNBC is at $11.2 billion). Additionally, the chart demonstrates not just the current spread of any given sovereign's CDS level, but also the phenomenal tightening that has occurred since March 6.