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 Reserve’s 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 cat’s cradle of trillions of dollars of bets with counterparties comprising most of the world’s 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 Paulson’s 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 isn’t yet time to doff the hard hats.
That just means we're doomed! /s
Ever catch one of these steers with one of those things?
Yep.
It sort of focuses one’s mind on the fact that there’s only about 300bp left.
I see that the Fed has $60B planned for two auctions in Feb.
Bullish. Dow 20,000 by the end of summer. Right? Right? Anybody?
2,000. Right?
It is not like he likes their common stocks...
Well, in that case he only missed the bottom by about 6 hours. (And about 200 points.)
There have been people here on FR who have been calling for a real estate bust for well over a year, and who have advised people to take positions to profit from it, e.g. to short FNM. Adamselene235 is one such person. But, he’s a gold bug, so he’s been summarily dismissed by many.
Oh, btw, I’m a gold bug too.
Thank God, at first I thought that was and article about the collapse of the monofilament fishing line industry.
500 points.
The market opened ~300 points lower that day, so if he called the bottom in the morning, he only missed the actual bottom by ~200. The bottom was 500 down from Friday’s close, but not from Monday’s opening.
Maybe it opened 200 points down, and went down another 300 that day. But it did open down with a huge gap.
He called a buy at 2247 and the Dow closed that day at 1739. That is a BAD call!!
I still can’t discern from your posts when he called a buy signal, Friday before close, or Friday after the close, or Monday after the open. I do know that the market closed down 508 points from Friday’s close to Monday’s close, which is the difference between your two numbers. So I’m guessing he called the buy after Friday’s close. In that case, no lemming blindly following his advice could have possibly bought at 2247, the markets were closed. They could have only bought Monday at the open, which would have saved them some 200-300 points.
True, the markets would have closed sharply down from that price, making it a “bad call”, but he missed the bottom by only one day (Monday’s close, not Friday’s close) and he does get credit for the gap down, because no client would have bought Friday’s price which you quoted, if the buy signal was issued after Friday’s close.
Before the opening on Monday. It could have been taped over the weekend.
In that case, no lemming blindly following his advice could have possibly bought at 2247, the markets were closed.
Doesn't matter. News letter guys get graded based on the time they make the call, not whether you could buy or not. They get graded with certain assumptions of the commissions you pay, whether that's what the typical investor would pay or not.
True, the markets would have closed sharply down from that price, making it a “bad call”, but he missed the bottom by only one day
Yup, he missed the bottom by only 22%. Hardly worth mentioning.
and he does get credit for the gap down
No. He said 2247 was the bottom. He was wrong.
Well, that's a stupid metric that I don't accept, even if it's the standard. It isn't real. Why do you accept it?
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According to Yahoo, they'd have saved 82 points.
If you want your blood to run cold, take a look at the article on bloomberg about how the rules are being....”adapted” with regard to capital reserves for the banks right now so they can continue to keep massive losses from MBS, CDOs off the balance sheets.
I'm sure that if he said 2247 was the bottom and the market open up at 2500, he'd have refused credit. LOL!
It isn't real. Why do you accept it?
They need a standard method of comparing news letters. Sorry if you don't think it's fair.
Thanks for posting the Yahoo data, but I’m not sure that’s real either. Not all Dow stocks start trading at the same time, so as each one actually starts trading, the index drops more. That’s how the market drops 400 points in the first couple minutes of trading, as for example just happened three weeks ago. The futures were far below the “open” price, and I’m not sure any trades happened at that price either. Not three weeks ago, and not in 1987.
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