Posted on 01/31/2008 8:07:03 PM PST by bruinbirdman
"The monoline bond insurance industry provides services to one industry - the capital markets."
The beams are creaking. Plaster is falling from the ceiling. The cracks in the walls are widening. The entire edifice of wholesale financial markets is under the greatest strain in years. No one any more believes the soothing noises from the builders (aka investment bankers), who say the worst will soon be over. The Federal Reserves drastic cuts in interest rates amount to little more than a bit of cosmetic repointing.
Yesterday there was a fresh buckling noise coming from the foundations, where the monoline insurers reside. These are the institutions that insure trillions of dollars of bond issues against default. Having strayed from their original safe but dull role of insuring municipal bonds to underwriting racy sub-prime-backed securities, they are paying the price. One of the biggest, MBIA, announced a $2.3 billion loss yesterday, while another, FGIC, was downgraded by Fitch. All have seen their shares thumped and face further downgrades.
No one quite knows how bad the impact would be if one failed. Together they insure bonds with a face value of $2,400 billion. Most are rock solid, but there is still a residual $231 billion of more questionable securities, a large chunk of them backed by US sub-prime mortgages. Defaults by struggling American homeowners are going to work their way back along the food chain, ultimately to the monoline insurers.
Monolines played a key role in the gigantic game of financial pass-the-parcel that has characterised the credit markets in the past few years. The basic rule was to make a quick turn and pass the risk on to the next mug as quickly as possible. Monolines were where the buck was supposed to stop. If one of these insurers were to fail, the liability would be passed back to the banks.
Toby Nangle, a fund manager with Baring Asset Management, reckons a failure would create panic on the same scale as Long Term Capital Management. LTCM, the hedge fund that failed in 1998, was of itself tiny, but was at the centre of a cats cradle of trillions of dollars of bets with counterparties comprising most of the worlds biggest banks.
It was the number of zeros on the face value of those bets, plus the uncertainty of who the counterparties actually were, that created the jitters ten years ago. This time around, markets are again unnerved by the size, complexity and opacity of both the underlying assets and the insurance policies supposedly underpinning them.
Private sector attempts to shore them up have not been happy thus far. Warburg Pincus appears to be sitting on a nasty loss from its rescue investment in MBIA, although its shares perked up last night after some encouraging words from its chief executive.
An industry-wide lifeboat orchestrated by the New York State Insurance Superintendent could work, but has dispiriting echoes of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsons doomed super-SIV plan.
Researchers at Oppenheimer say there is no systemic risk and insurers could fail and not spark a cataclysm. But it would certainly sort the sheep from the goats: the limping trio of Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and UBS would bear the brunt of an additional $40 billion in writedowns this year. It isnt yet time to doff the hard hats.
Bob Prechter fan?
That’s what i see too...that uptick may be one big bear trap, just waiting for the reversal to come...
For Wiley Coyote, it’s a retest of the law of gravity..
MBIA was up 11% today. Ambac was up 7%. Pulte Homes was up 20%. Fannie and Freddie were up 8%.My daughter sells real estate here in California. Last Sunday she showed 14 properties and wrote 2 offers.
Locally, car dealers are expanding, a new (huge) Car Maxx is almost ready to open. The local shopping mall expansion is beginning and another new shopping center is getting ready to break ground.
Well, here’s one thought to ponder:
Since the Fed has been using the funds/discount rate as their primary liquidity tactic in the last couple of meeting periods, we have only 300 basis points left to play with.
And we have not started the wave of option-ARM loan resets yet.
There’s a veritable mountain of poo out there waiting to be launched at fan blades...
Gold looks a little frothy right now. it’ll probably move a little higher I just do not have the nerve to do it after a 100% run up. Who knows maybe the financial crisis will resolve itself or stabilize in a couple of weeks then gold will have a pullback and that bear trap is stuck on my leg
I try to buy at the bottom and sell high :)
I am a lousy momentum trader
If I was going to buy gold the time to buy it was back in ‘05-6 for me right now it would like buying the DJIA @ 14,000 IMO
Up 11% from 14.
52 wk high=73.48
True, 11%/day times a couple hundred trading days is a hefty profit in a year. But I think one won't get it from MBI.
yitbos
The “real” employment numbers have been obscured for years — the books padded with estimates. I think it’s going to be volatile tomorrow.
What worries me isn’t the state of the economy, which is shakey, but the attitude among so many people that everything is okay or happening someplace “far away.” When these abstractions hit home, then it’s gonna get ugly.
“””Bob Prechter fan?”””
Nope just read the Elliot Wave and 15 other books. Lost some money in the beginning. learning to be cautious and controlling greed in investing has worked best for me.
A cursory knowledge of the technical is helpful but I really did’t start to make money until I beat that greed thing combined with caution.
Wow..That chart speaks volumes !...Look at that downtrend since October...Tells me that the Wall Street pros and Fund managers smelled trouble way before the stuff hit the fan...They could tell already from rumblings in the subprime lending market that the insurer’s liquidity was also going to be affected and they started bailing out way before the little guys found out amd started moving their 401K money into cash...The little guy...screwed again...
” Fannie and Freddie were up 8%.”
They should be. We are working 18 hour days putting new mortgage applications in our system.
It’s going to be a heck of a February and March at least.
Several big numbers come out tomorrow...will be a very volatile day for the market...
They wrung the shorts out today, tomorrow first thing they’ll take the profits and wait, check the numbers, let the numbers run up again and sell by noon...hit the watering hole by 12:30...The Eagle flies on Friday..
There is no law that says a little guy can't spend a couple of hours a week to learn what to do with his hard earned money.
If he does not, there is always some little guy who did and will take advantage of the guy who did not.
That is the American way. The little guy often makes a conscious decision not to grow.
yitbos
We’ll see...my prediction: A lot of people are gonna be mad as hell by the end of the summer.
If I’d been short on these guys, I probably would have covered this week after the Fed’s move too.
Someone is ferociously short MBI. A little profit-taking on the short could have done that pop easy.
The way the CEO of MBI conducted himself on the conference call does not inspire confidence. Reminds me of the OSTK CEO.
The little guy is constrained by a belief that doing what you are “supposed to do” and common sense will bring rewards. Nobody will ever shake that belief.
Unfortunately the monetary systems current survival is dependant upon #1 and #2, that’s how it [money] gets created and if you even slow the velocity of the growth you face deflation, particularly with all of the sketchy instrument overhang. Politicians like fiat expanded fractionally. They love the votes generated by the fast and loose money booms and they all think that when the music stops it’ll be the “other guy” in office to take the heat.
“Someone is ferociously short MBI”
You got that right !...The downtrend started in October, yet the big spike in volume didn’t come until December and continued after that...Takes awhile for information to flow, even to some of the guys shorting that stock...It could be a large investor or a few somewhere in the Mideast who waited too long. like aside from Google or Yahoo, who would think that a Triple AAA Insurer would dive from the 70s to the teens in just a couple of months !..Eempossible !
That is a brutal head and shoulders pattern. That just isn’t going to snap up and out of that decline. If it did, it would be because someone turned a torrent of printed dollars on it and when the previous high was passed you’d be paying 6 dollars for gas and 10 for a loaf of bread...
The first and last days of the month are very often contratrend. We will see what the jobs report does tommorrow and where the market is say next Tuesday. I trade the market every day and am out of it every night. It is a good sign that financials which led the market down have appeared to bottom. But just financials and retailers will not lead this market back to where it was. At this point I am still tending to pick my spots shorting strength, although I am not shorting strength in the financials and actually longing them a little on intraday weakness.
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