Ping!
We have a serious problem. A quote from a mail from John Maulding sent an hour ago:
“There’s almost no trading being done in the $2 trillion Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) markets. Perfectly good bank loans are trading at discounts of between 10-20% to par, in addition to much higher and wider spreads. There are a lot of opportunities for intrepid investors who can distinguish solid value, as funds, banks, and pensions are having to unload loans without regard to value. It is a buyer’s market.”
and
“The failure of the monoline companies could trigger a very serious crisis, beyond what we have already seen. Of all the things on my worry list, this is at the top. It could trigger a counter-party credit risk in the credit default swap markets that might simply cascade to something hard to imagine. I don’t want to sound too alarmist - but we should be alarmed. This needs to be settled, and soon, so we can go on to the next set of problems. I think if the monoline problem can be resolved, we would be a major step toward the solution of the crisis.”
Cash is king.