One of the side benefits of Greece taking whatever somewhat irreversible steps it is now taking is that something will happen to CDS written on existing Greek debt and that will mean that we can stop talking about what will happen to CDS written on existing Greek debt and start talking about more interesting things like quasi-CDS written by the EFSF on shaky Eurozone government debt.
For now, though, we’ve got at least a few more weeks of surprisingly and unsurprisingly ill-informed fretting that triggering the $4bn of Greek CDS will Bring Down The Entire Global Financial System. That seems sort of silly because notionals aren’t that big, mark-to-market collateral is mostly being posted, and at this point the marks are pretty close to what you’ll get from Greece so it doesn’t look like there’s tons of unknown unrecognized losses lurking out there.
On the other hand, we’re mostly through with the speculation that not triggering Greek CDS will Prove That CDS Is Worthless and thereby Bring Down The Entire Global Financial System, so that’s nice. The reason that’s mostly over is that it sure looks like Greek CDS will in fact trigger, as Athens has moved to adopt a collective action clause that will flip the Greek restructuring from “voluntary, heh heh heh” to “involuntary” and thus trigger the ISDA restructuring event definition. You can argue that the mechanics of the cash settlement auction will mildly screw CDS holders but I’m not so sure, and in any case this is pretty solidly in the category of derivatives nerdery rather than Bring Down The etc. Continue reading »
Here’s a delightful idea that is also a nice piece of synergy. Apparently Yale economist and half-a-housing-index Robert Shiller has been floating this idea since 2009 but I just saw it today in a new Harvard Business Review piece (via Counterparties):
Corporations use a combination of debt and equity to finance their investments and operations. Nations, in contrast, rely exclusively on debt. When a nation’s economy stalls and its debt continues to grow—you may have noticed this happening a lot recently—disaster looms for the country’s taxpayers. This is why Europe is in turmoil right now. But things don’t have to work this way.
Here’s an audacious alternative: Countries should replace much of their existing national debt with shares of the “earnings” of their economies. This would allow them to better manage their financial obligations and could help prevent future financial crises. It might even lower countries’ borrowing costs in the long run.
The proposal is for something he calls “trills,” which pay a dividend equal to one trillionth of GDP: Continue reading »
You may have heard that the Dow hit 13,000 today before subsiding to a shameful 12,965.69. You may not have heard this, or cared, because the Dow is for morons, being a price-weighted index of thirty semi-random companies that, gah, aren’t even “industrial” any more.** There are alternative theories but those theories are wrong:
Joe Weisenthal in defense of the Dow has been noting its very high correlation with other, broader, more sensible indexes. I see this as further undermining the Dow’s legitimacy. If it’s very different methodology were leading to some kind of meaningfully different result, then we could perhaps argue that it’s adding value in some kind of way. But instead what’s going on is that the Dow’s creators are hand-picking which stocks to include in the index specifically with an eye toward constructing an index that mirrors the other, better indexes out there. Apple and Google, for example, aren’t in the Dow and aren’t doing to get in any time soon because their very high share prices would skew the index in weird ways. This just goes to show that the Dow’s creators already “know” the right answer (from looking at the S&P 500 and the Wilshire 5000) and then are trying to assemble an index to create the predetermined result.
Maybe! An alternative theory is maybe suggested by [Occam's razor and] this piece from the Journal this weekend about index funds that I just loved and so am now going to inflict on you at unnecessary length: Continue reading »
If you’re into Greece you’ve probably already read all about it and if you’re not I can’t make you. But in brief: Greece is fixed and we will NEVER HEAR ABOUT ANY PROBLEMS EVER AGAIN. In less brief:
(1) Some folks stayed up all night and produced a statement.
(2) Greece’s private creditors will be offered the long-anticipated opportunity to voluntarily exchange their old bonds for new bonds, which will for the most part be the same as the old bonds except for minor differences including but not limited to a greatly extended maturity (to 2042), a 53.5% reduced face amount, and a 3.6% blended interest rate.
(3) If they don’t voluntarily exchange, which they will because – hilariously – they’ve already taken accounting writedowns (and also because I guess it’s better than a disorderly default), private holders will get CAC’ed, which may or may not be as bad as it sounds, but in any case at least CDS will pay out, unless it doesn’t.
(4) Also the public sector will do various helpful, confusing things.
(5) In exchange for this, Greece will enact horrible austerity, and because no one believes that Greece will actually do that, there will be escrow accounts and what Reuters ominously calls “permanent surveillance by an increased European presence on the ground.”
(6) Everyone is pretty sure we’ll be doing this again in six months and, look, just fair warning, I will not be writing about it then, because feh.
We haven’t had a serious international bankruptcy, which this pretty much is, since I started paying attention to the financial markets, two months ago, so I mostly think about insolvency from a US bankruptcy law perspective. One thing that happens in bankruptcy is that, like, really really roughly speaking, the creditors stop being creditors and become the owners. This isn’t always the case but the basic playbook of US bankruptcy law is: Continue reading »
Ken Livingstone has provoked fresh controversy, after telling an audience: “Hang a banker a week until the others improve.” … A spokesperson for Livingstone insisted it was simply a joke. Livingstone made his comments a week after stating in an interview that a gay banker would not be enticed to leave London to work in Dubai because he could “get his penis cut off”, as he highlighted the English capital as a key financial centre. In a similar vein, he told the Guardian in a recent interview that City workers favour London over other capital cities as a place to work because “young men want to go out on the pull and do a lot of cocaine, and they can’t really do that easily in Frankfurt”. [Guardian, related]
One thing that I may have mentioned here is that, before I was lured to the blogging industry by the outrageous lucre on offer, I worked at this little establishment called Goldman Sachs. One thing that I probably haven’t told you, but that I’ve mentioned to a few friends and co-workers, is that due to some frankly inexplicable confusion, the time between my telling people “I am leaving to go work for Dealbreaker” and my being escorted out of the building by active-duty Navy SEALS was somewhat longer than you might expect (viz. several nanoseconds). One thing that I’ve never told anybody, so let’s keep it between us, is that I made good use of the delay to download certain files to a flash drive. I won’t discuss all the details, since I’m using some of those files to set up my own high-frequency insider trading fund, but I will mention that with the right codes the voice recorders in the GS elevators can be accessed remotely.*
One reason I never told anyone about this before is that Goldman takes it badly when people take stuff with them on the way out, and has a tendency to react by having them imprisoned for the better part of a decade. After today, though, it looks like I’m good to go: Continue reading »
One kind of obvious thing about financial markets is that you can’t just call everyone into a room and tell them, “look, guys, just be honest about the price that you would pay / receive for Thing X.” This is because financial industry traders are degenerate lying scumbags. No, wait, that’s not right. This is because if everyone just told each other their reserve prices then it would be really hard for them to make any money trading and so we, like, wouldn’t have a financial system. So you have things like anonymous execution on stock exchanges and dark pools and, um, lying scumbag traders. And that allows you to have profitable trading.
Of course you have to put some limits on the lying scumbaggery: you can’t tell people you’re investing their money while really blowing it on hookers, and I guess now you can’t sell someone synthetic CDOs without telling them who was on the other side. But a little fudging around the edges about the price you’re willing to pay or receive – or the price you could pay or receive elsewhere – is kind of at the heart of what trading is.
So in a sense the amazing thing about the Libor scandal is that people are amazed by it. A quick recap: Continue reading »
