A friend across the pond forwards this:
You can’t make this stuff up!
Synthetic Credit Event Postponed . . .
June 28, 2007 9:04pm by Barry Ritholtz
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Parsing the Fed
ROFLMAO, haha
dude, that’s the guy’s real phone number….
that has to be a joke. There’s just no way the universe conspires like that…..
Yeah… and my Procrastinators International club meeting got canceled too!
Okay Barringo, are you gonna make us beg?… Did’ja shitcan V.L.?
~~~
BR: No.
I unpublished all of the off topic comments (a significant percentage of which were his).
I asked him to contact me privately — which he didn’t.
Like everyone else, he is still free to post comments on relevant ON-topic subject matter . . .
the spin is enough to make you weep or the stupidity of those running the show is enough to make you weep.
BERLIN, June 28 (Reuters) – Allan Hubbard, an assistant to U.S. President George W. Bush on economic policy, said on Thursday the U.S. housing market had slowed down but remained quite robust.
“Housing has slowed down but the good news is it continues to be relatively strong,” he told reporters at the U.S. embassy after meetings in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Union officials.
“It’s been healthy that there’s been a slowdown and it’s contributed to what appears to be a soft landing,” he said.
Hubbard also rejected the idea that the slower housing market was a sign of a general slowdown in economic activity in the United States.
The strengh of the financial world is “Amnesia”
BIS warns of Great Depression dangers from credit spree
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Some 40pc of China’s state-owned enterprises are loss-making, exposing the banking system to likely stress in a downturn.
It said China’s growth was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable”, borrowing a line from Chinese premier Wen Jiabao
The BIS said last year’s record issuance of $470bn in collateralized debt obligations (CDO), and a further $524bn in “synthetic” CDOs had effectively opened the lending taps even further. “Mortgage credit has become more available and on easier terms to borrowers almost everywhere. Only in recent months has the downside become more apparent,” it said.
CDO’s are bond-like packages of mortgages and other forms of debt. The BIS said banks transfer the exposure to buyers of the securities, giving them little incentive to assess risk or carry out due diligence.
Mergers and takeovers reached $4.1 trillion worldwide last year.
Leveraged buy-outs touched $753bn, with an average debt/cash flow ratio hitting a record 5:4.
“Sooner or later the credit cycle will turn and default rates will begin to rise,” said the bank.
“The levels of leverage employed in private equity transactions have raised questions about their longer-term sustainability. The strategy depends on the availability of cheap funding,” it said.
That may not last much longer.
Bear Stearns has reinforced the three great economic truths:
1. It is different this time
2. We’re a lot smarter/know a lot more than we did back then.
3. Nothing like that could ever happen today.
I don’t know about you, but those thoughts make me warm down to my toes, and I have this compulsion to buy something…anything…using lots and lots of leverage.
Risk? We don’t care about no stinkin’ risk.
Rutters
June 28, 2007
New York, New York
In a last ditch effort to save two troubled hedge funds, Bearn Stearns announced today it would hold a save-the-hedge-funds charity car wash and bake sale.
Bear Stearns spokesman, Lev Raj Tudamax, said, “We are confident we will be able to raise the necessary capital in only one weekend – New Yorkers are used to paying higher prices. Maybe in some areas a $5000 car wash and $25,000 baker’s dozen of cookies would seem high-priced, but here it’s just another charitable contribution tax write off.”
Unnamed sources state that the car wash and bake sale were last ditch efforts after a save-the-hedge-fund concert in Central Park collapsed when it was discovered that Billy Joel had purchased $50 million of CDOs from Bear Stearns.
Danke from Germany!
:-)!!!!!