Buy The Dip?
We have been hearing a lot about “buying the dip” lately. It has largely worked, but it didn’t work on Friday, and didn’t work yesterday, and today we are looking at the weakest overnight futures performance of the year. Is this an opportunity to buy the dip, or the start of a bigger decline? I […]
(BN) Venizelos Says Greek Debt Swap Is Best, Only Offer for Investors
He is still afraid of triggering CDS and just said that with a high enough percentage they won’t. Low participation – back to the drawing board and everyone in same boat. Medium participation – we CAC you, you get same as everyone else. High Participation, but not 100%, get paid par, because we don’t want […]
Vampire Squids, Zombie Banks, And Caminhada Banco Mortos
Okay, I don’t know if that is a good translation of Dead Bank Walking into Portuguese, but I didn’t think zombie banks was sufficient. As noted earlier Portuguese banks are borrowing almost €48 billion from the ECB’s short term facilities. I have been told that this number doesn’t include any LTRO borrowings. I assume this […]
Europe’s Junk Borrowers Tap U.S. at Record Pace: Credit Markets
This is interesting since one of the main reasons for investing is US HY is that it is a “domestic market” not affected as much by the problems in Europe. While still only a portion of the market, European based issuers are increasing their presence in the indices bit by bit and many of the […]
(BN) ECB Financing to Portuguese Banks Rises to 47.6 Billion Euros
I’m not sure if this includes LTRO2 or not, but definitely doesn’t count government bonds held as part of SMP. The central bank is supporting equity valuations and sub debt valuations at its own risk. There needs to be some culling and pain at those levels since the risk being taken hasn’t done much and […]
(BN) Greek Private Investors Are Slow to Commit to Debt Swap, FT Says
(BN) Greek Private Investors Are Slow to Commit to Debt Swap, FT Says This shouldn’t be surprising. The invitation is 167 pages, so even if some institution (European Bank) has no choice but to agree, it will take a couple of days to read the document. Given the number of problems in every other document produced in the […]
My Big Fat Greek Restructuring – The Week Ahead
The situation in Greece should create some big headlines this week. The bond exchange “invitation” is set to expire at 3pm EST on Thursday March 8th. This is the so-called Private Sector Involvement or PSI. Greece has other steps to take during the week, and ultimately the Troika will determine how to proceed with the […]
TBIF – Too Bad It’s Friday
What a strange few days. On Wednesday it looked like LTRO was priced in and QE3 was in doubt. Yesterday, Italian bonds were incredibly strong and even Spain was good. Data didn’t seem to matter, dips were there to be bought. Everyone, bulls and bears, were wondering if the market could go down. If LTRO […]
The Geithner Letter
I do agree with the Amnesia analogy. We see it even in Europe today. Suddenly it’s “crisis over” yet printing money and providing extremely cheap debt to banks hardly seems like a solution. There has already been push back on anything that increases regulatory capital requirements. Now, in this period of calm is the time […]
The Day Italian Bonds Captured The Market
Yesterday’s trading was dominated by the stellar performance of the Italian bond market. The stock market tried to give back some early gains on the back of a disappointing PMI report, but just couldn’t. The Italian bonds in particular, but also Spanish bonds were on fire. There was growing hope that LTRO2 had not been […]
