The highlights and lowlights of this morning’s sharemarket activity.
Mortgage backed securities
Ratings agencies asleep at the wheel over sub-prime crisis
Aside from banks such as Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and UBS (who between them have dropped more than US$30 billion and counting), some of the biggest victims of the sub-prime credit crunch have been the reputations of ratings agencies, writes Adam Schwab.
Morning Market Report
The highlights and lowlights of this morning’s sharemarket activity.
The problem with giving CEOs short-term bonuses
Outgoing Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal’s was a true American rags-to-riches tale. The African-American son of a factory worker grew up in poverty, attended Harvard and rose to become CEO of one of the world’s largest brokerages, writes Adam Schwab.
Rams pricing and rates out of line
Before skiting to Australia’s biggest selling newspaper that you’re about to sell $500 million in mortgage-backed securities – labelled a “lifeline” by the Herald Sun yesterday morning – it’d be a good idea to have the investors committed.
Ratings agencies investigated over subprime mess
The role of credit rating agencies like Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch in the subprime mortgage mess is going to be investigated by the European Commission, writes Glenn Dyer.
Will China be the biggest sub-prime loser?
We all know that China has accumulated a staggering $US1.3 trillion in foreign reserves over the past few years, but it’s only starting to now dawn on analysts that the one-party totalitarian state might in fact be the biggest losers from the collapsing US sub-prime mortgage market.
The US stumbles… but it’s only the US
Funny thing about credit ratings agencies: instead of warning there’s a bomb inside the building, they have a marked tendency to subsequently examine the rubble and announce it’s not worth as much as it used to be.
