Asian stock markets followed yesterday’s European stock markets and US futures markets straight down.
Yesterday, European markets saw their biggest one-day losses since March. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were off 187 points.Everyone is talking about the effects of Dubai World asking creditors for an extension on its debt.
So here’s a quick whip around what happened when Asia woke up to its first day of trading following the Dubai World news.
Fears of a dangerous new phase in the economic crisis swept around the globe yesterday as traders responded to the shock announcement that a debt-laden Dubai state corporation was unable to meet its interest bill.
Shares plunged, weak currencies were battered and more than £14 billion was wiped from the value of British banks on fears that they would be left nursing new losses.
Last night PBS’s Frontline aired a new documentary called The Warning. If you missed it, you are in luck. We’ve got it right here.
Here’s how Frontline describes the documentary.
"We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"
In The Warning, airing Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Breaking the Bank) unearths the hidden history of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.
"I didn’t know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton’s powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group — former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — convinced him that Born’s attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake."
Born’s battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President’s Working Group vehemently opposed regulation — especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.
"I walk into Brooksley’s office one day; the blood has drained from her face," says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. "She’s hanging up the…
Nouriel Roubini used to be known Dr. Doom. These days, however, he insists he is a "realist."
What does that mean? Well, it means that he doesn’t think we’re in for a V shaped recovery but he doesn’t think we’re going L shaped either.
Appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning, he said we’re headed for an anemic, U-shaped recovery. Why not a V? Here are his reasons:
1. Labor market is still awful, labor income and consumption down.
2. U.S. consumer is shopped out; they save more, consume less.
3. Corporate sector- glut of capacity. Utilization is 69%
4. Financial system is damaged, credit growth is limited, can’t finance residential investments
5. Fiscal stimulus will be a drag, and lead to crowding out of product spending
6. Overspending countries like U.S. are now spending less, and oversaving countries like China, Japan, Germany are not increasing their private domestic consumption to compensate for falling U.S. demand.
Sylvain Raynes, an ex- Moody’s vice president of the ABS group, agrees with the agency’s whistleblower Eric Kolchinsky, who said that Moody’s is still issuing inflated ratings.
In an exclusive interview with The Business Insider, Raynes said that Kolchinsky is right on the money, and this pattern of behavior has been going for years at Moody’s.
Raynes was fired from the firm for raising concerns about ratings on several deals.
“Moody’s should be liquidated right now. They need to be put out of their misery, and the CEO should resign now,” he says.
Talking about the deal Kolchinsky raised questions about, Raynes qualifies it as “bullshit” one.
"They needed a Baa2 rating to sell it--no one would buy a deal like that right now," he said.
Asked about why Moody’s-–which has come increasingly under fire in recent weeks--is still in business, Raynes says: "It’s like prostitution. It’s a crime but it’s feeding a need."
Martin Jacomb gets to the heart of one of the least understood aspects of the bubble that broke the banks: why banks bought and held so much securitized debt.
Under one now-discredited theory, banks made so many toxic mortgage because they could securitize them and offload the risk to others. But this doesn’t explain very well why the banks wound up with so much of the toxic securities on their balance sheet. Banks owned almost half of all the securitized mortgages that were produced during the bubble.
Jacomb’s FT op-ed today explains why this happened: because the capital reserve requirements rewarded turning loans into securities and more or less paid banks to hold them. In short, the rules told banks that the securities were safer and banks behaved as though they were. (Whether the rule or something else convinced the banks they were safe is another matter.)
In fact, at the heart of the present catastrophe was a singular regulatory error: the failure of the Basle international rules to impose weighty capital requirements on the super senior tranche of securitised mortgage obligations held in banks’ trading books. It was there that vast quantities of the toxic stuff accumulated. Because these securities could be held with minimal capital backing, banks thought it was all right to do so, and some built up gigantic portfolios. When these holdings turned out to be unsaleable except at a huge loss, the disaster was exposed.
People tend to let their eyes glaze over when they hear about Basel rules, assuming they are way too complicated to even bother understanding. That’s too bad. Because it’s actually quite easy to see what happened.
Under the international Basel capital requirements, a well-capitalized bank was required to hold $4 for every $100 in individual mortgages —a 4% reserve requirement. But if it held the securitized the AAA and AA tranches, the bank only had to hold $1.60 in capital. That’s a huge incentive to trade in a loan for a mortgage backed security.
But the capital regulations did more than just create incentives to own mortgage backed securities. They allowed banks to dramatically grow their balance sheets. The lower reserve requirement allowed banks to buy even more securities than it could make…
It looks like the pure fear that gripped the markets about an hour ago and dropped the Dow by 2% is subsiding. Stocks are still lower but the nosedive has subsided.
The fact that drop came so suddenly and on the back of good economic news was a striking demonstration of just how fragile the stock market is right now. It has been quite a long time since we saw the market respond that powerfully to vague rumors.
Lots of people aren’t even sure what the rumor was. Someone might default. CNBC reported that traders were talking about a "bank default."
But we have bank failures every week. Why was this one sending traders to place sell orders? Well, some were saying that "a west coast bank" was in trouble. On the message boards, which are often populated by day trading trolls hoping to move markets, there was talk that it was Wells Fargo. Commenters on blogs pointed the finger at Citigroup.
Still others said it was a European bank on the verge of failure. One trader told us that this was a misinterpretation. It was, he said, Europeans who were whispering about a US failure. Specifically, the default on a Cerberus fund. That particular version of today’s scare story got so much traction, Cerberus was actually forced to issue a formal denial.
Regardless of the substance or accuracy of the rumor, the takeaway here is that we’re once again back to rumors trumping news to move markets. The fear trade is back on.
It looks like the rumor that killed the rally today was that some Cerberus funds were on the verge of default.
And now Cerberus Capital Management LP has been forced to formally comment on the rumor. Most companies loathe commenting on rumors. Hedge funds all the more so.
The rumor was apparently gaining traction among traders in London and Frankfurt this morning.
"There is absolutely no truth to the speculation," said Tim Price, a Cerberus managing director and spokesman for the firm, told Reuters.
Losses on private equity investments in Chrysler and GMAC seem to have prompted investors pull a reported…
These days it is a pretty sure bet that Chris Flowers regrets telling investors in his private equity funds that "every single investment" would make money. His largest fund is said to be down between 60% and 70%, and some secondary market buyers assign shares in it no value at all.
William Cohan has an extraordinary piece in Fortune on the rise and fall of Flowers, the former Goldman Sachs wonderboy (once the youngest partner ever) who became one of the biggest names in banking by buying Japan’s Shinsei bank for $1 billion in 2000 and IPOing it four years later for $10 billion. But these days his reputation is under fire as the banking system tries to recover from the ruinous 2008.
"He did one great assisted transaction in Japan," one unnamed banker tells Cohan, "and off that he raised $7 billion. The great failing in private equity is to assume that you can repeat the past. I think he just assumed, for instance, he could repeat Shinsei over in Germany. Big mistake."
That person is referring to the $1.5 billion tender offer Flowers big fund made to acquire 24.9% of Hypo Real Estate Holding, a Munich-based commercial real estate lender. Flowers paid a 25% premium to where the shares were trading before the deal was announced. Just four months later Hypo had to turn to the German government for assistance. The German government ended up owning 90% of Hypo, drastically diluting Flowers’ stake. These days his investment in the bank has probably dropped in value by 87%.
But what may have hurt Flowers’s reputation even more than his investment losses is the role he played in Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Flowers, while at Goldman Sachs, had helped put together the merger of NationsBank and Bank of America. In early 2008, when Merrill looked to raise capital, Flowers poured through its books but concluded the asking price was too high. But when the crisis hit on September 11, Flowers found himself back at Merrill as an adviser to Bank of America.
Flowers issued a "fairness opinion" on the deal, endorsing the 70% premium Bank of America paid for the shares of Merrill Lynch. He was repeatedly invoked in the press…
Goldman Sachs has issued a memo to clients blasting the Wall Street Journal’s article on the "huddles."
"A ‘huddle’ is not a forum for sharing stock or sector ‘tips,’" Goldman writes in a memo first published by Bess Levin at DealBreaker.
It seems very clear that Goldman clients--the ones not invited to huddles--must have been raising questions about why they were being left out. The most damaging aspect of the article was the possibility that some "most-favored" clients were getting information or advice that conflicted with what Goldman was telling ordinary clients got. For example, clients coaxed to go long asset backed securities might be peeved if there was some secret Goldman huddle where top clients were told to short.
Goldman is now on the record denying that this occurs.
Improvement in first time unemployment claims is slowing. Actual, not seasonally manipulated data, including an adjustment for the usual weekly upward revision, shows that the year to year rate of change is on the cusp of a possible upside breakout, which would be good news for stock market bears if it happens.
Initial Unemployment Claims Chart- Click to enlarge
Here’s why it’s mind blowing. I’ve plotted it below on an inverse scale with the S&P 500 overlaid.
Unemployemt Claims and Stock Prices - Click to enlarge
Major US Markets including (NYSEARCA:DIA), (NYSEARCA:SPY), (NASDAQ:QQQ), and (NYSEARCA:IWM) dropped over 3% each on Italian bond fears and an increased worry that Europe will not be able to bail out its 4th largest economy. Furthermore, the iShares MCSI Italy Fund (NYSEARCA:EWI) wiped out over 9% today, further illustrating the dire situation in Italy and the European Union: ...
The second economic disappointment of the day comes from the Dallas Fed, which dropped from -2.0 to -11.4 on expectations of -9.0- this was the 4th consecutive negative print month. The report was, in a word, horrible, with just 2 of the 15 constituent indices posting an increase, and the bulk solidly in the red, led by Unfilled and New Orders which dropped 16.8 and 11.2, respectively: not good for economic growth. On the employment side there was nothing good either, with both employment and hours worked declining by -...
Bloomberg reports that Diana Containerships (NASDAQ: DCIX) files to offer stock up to $172.5M. Diana Containerships says that Diana shipping will also buy $20M of stock.
Top 5 RisersStockRatingAnalysisVLOSTRONGBUYAn increasingly positive growth rate of past earnings, along with improving expectations for long term growth, make Valero a good prospect for high returns.KROSTRONGBUYKronos Worldwide has been gaining recognition from analysts as a good canditate for achieving higher than expected earnings along with higher overall projected valuation.SFIBUYiStar is one of the top candidates projected to achieve both higher than previously projected earnings in the short run and a higher earnings growth rate in the long run.AMATSTRONGBUYApplied Materials has been...
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February is now past, and the Biotech Porfolio is loaded with winners and a miss (PLX). MRK is down a bit, but I expect that trade to recover, and one could be more agressive and double down on it, or play another round at the Jan13 $30 options for roughly the same price. Below is the summary, and note the grey boxes are ones that did not fill. I am still a fan of BMRN, and like DEPO as well. Now let's look at a few others.
Table 1. PSW Biotech Plays Since January 2011
 
Our newest play is Momenta Pharmaceuticals (MNTA), who is pursuing a three-part business model which includes complex generic equivalents in partnership with the Sandoz division of Novartis, proprietary compounds, and follow-on- biologics (FOB). It seems that this company is tied up in competition/litigation wit...
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(