Rising market pressures may trigger third wave of credit crisis

Business Times – 11 Mar 2008

Nervous investors hanging on to pronouncements of central bankers

(LONDON) Tight money markets and tumbling stocks and the US dollar are expected to increase worries for investors this week as pressure mounts on central banks facing what looks like the third wave of a global credit crisis.

Last week, money markets tightened to levels not seen since December, when year-end funding problems pushed lending costs higher across the board.

In response, the Federal Reserve unveiled new measures to ease liquidity strains on Friday – injecting US$200 billion into the banking system – and said that it was in close consultation with central bank counterparts.

However, the Fed failed to lift the mood much. Investors, keen to see if any further plan is in the works to prevent a financial market seizure, will scrutinise words from key central bankers including Fed officials this week.

‘It’s another round of the credit crisis. Some markets are getting worse than January this time,’ said Jesper Fischer-Nielsen, interest rate strategist at Danske Bank in Copenhagen. ‘There is fear that something dramatic will happen and that fear is feeding itself. Central banks have shown great resolve to try to solve the problems (on money markets) and I’m sure they will do again.’

Philipp Hildebrand, vice-chairman of the Swiss National Bank, warned last week that the world might be in a new, more dangerous phase of the crisis.

If that is the case, the latest wave is the third one.

The first round began in August when interbank lending dried up as banks realised they did not know which was dangerously exposed to the meltdown in the US sub-prime mortgage market.

Then, late last year, pressure intensified again in the money markets – after some of the world’s biggest banks began writing off colossal sums of money – prompting top central banks to inject billions of dollars into the system.

Renewed problems in the credit market – including fears that US mortgage lender Thornburg might go bankrupt and acute cash flow problems at a Dutch fund – and concerns over slowing world growth led to a sell-off in stocks last week.

World stocks, as measured by MSCI, fell more than 3 per cent on the week while the dollar lost more than one per cent to hit record lows against a basket of six major currencies at one point last week.

Also reflecting investor jitters, two-year US Treasury yields hit a four-year low below 1.5 per cent as investors flocked to government bonds.

The cost of corporate bond insurance hit record high levels on Friday and parts of the debt market are also getting hit.

‘A funding freeze by lenders, that appears already in progress, could cause first-round casualties in Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Austria, countries collectively identified as the euro zone liability group,’ a UBS note said.

The G-10 policymakers came up with a cash injection plan late last year, with the top five central banks injecting liquidity into banks.

However, after weeks of calm, stress is building up again in money markets.

‘The level of financial stress is . . . likely to continue to fuel speculation of more immediate central bank action either in the form of increased liquidity injections or an early rate cut,’ Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients\. \– Reuters

Buy-and-hold strategy looks as good as it ever will

WHAT a difference a year makes. Each year, Jim Reid and his colleagues at Deutsche Bank AG publish an influential analysis of credit markets that puts current yields and fundamentals in historical perspective.

If you buy a bond from a company that might go bankrupt, then you expect to receive a higher interest rate. In an efficient and well-functioning market, the higher yield in a diversified portfolio of such bonds should offset the losses you would incur over time because of defaults. If a 10-year Treasury is yielding 4 per cent, then you should only buy a 10-year bond from a company with a good chance of defaulting if the yield is significantly higher than 4 per cent.

How much higher? That is exactly the question addressed with impressive analytical precision by the Deutsche Bank report. It provides a great thermometer reading of the bond market. The report calculates how large the default probabilities must be to command the current yields on different classes of bonds.

A comparison of this year’s report with last year’s provides a striking and even startling view of how rough the credit crisis has become.

‘Last year, spreads on high-yield bonds were so low that you could have expected to lose money if you purchased them, even if they defaulted at the lowest rate in history,’ Mr Reid, head of fundamental credit research at Deutsche Bank in London, said in an interview last week. ‘This year, spreads are so high that you can expect to make money even if they default at the highest rate in history.’

Default rate

That’s one way to say that corporate bonds look like a good buy right now. If you think about it in terms of implied default probabilities, the analysis gets downright shocking.

Looking at the iBoxx Dollar Liquid Investment Grade Index, Mr Reid and his colleagues estimated that current spreads imply that 19 per cent of five-year bonds in the index will default during the next five years. This is an unbelievably high rate.

The highest default rate for these bonds was just 2.4 per cent, and the average rate since 1970 was 0.8 per cent. From Citigroup Inc to JPMorgan Chase & Co, financial firms have been particularly hard hit in this crisis. This is apparent in Mr Reid’s numbers as well. Current prices suggest that 21 per cent of five-year bonds in the financial industry are expected to default during the next five years. This places financial bonds – the debt of some of the bluest of blue-chip firms – smack dab between single A- rated bonds (which have an implied expected default rate of 20 per cent) and BBB-rated bonds (which have an implied expected default rate of 22 per cent).

Historical record

Those implied default rates are also way outside of historical experience. The highest five-year default rate for A- rated bonds was 2.5 per cent. The most for BBB-rated bonds was 5.8

per cent. The mayhem, of course, hasn’t just affected five-year bonds. Longer maturities have even more extreme default scenarios priced in. Current prices suggest that 29 per cent of corporate bonds will default over the next 10 years. That rate is six times higher than any 10-year period since 1970.

It is worth noting that these default probabilities are probably somewhat inflated, as default risk isn’t the sole consideration when looking at bond prices. Even so, the market is pricing in a bond-market catastrophe that’s far worse than anything that has ever happened.

What should one make of these numbers? Even an optimist should be startled by what bond markets are saying. The market isn’t just expecting a downturn; it’s expecting a calamity. A University of Chicago-style believer in the absolute wisdom of markets should be loading up on canned goods and checking the fortification of his underground bunker.

A more rational response to this report might be to recognise that markets, while they are right on average, tend to overreact in both directions. A person with this sentiment would have looked at last year’s prices and concluded that they were irrationally low. Now, panic has set in and spreads are way too high, pricing in something close to the end of civilisation. The world economy has survived wars, oil embargoes and even a depression. That suggests that it can survive this, too, even if things get worse before they get better. If you believe that, then a buy-and-hold strategy on bonds looks about as good as it ever will. If enough investors see that, then this credit crunch might finally begin to ease.

Kevin Hassett is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own

Source: Bloomberg (Business Times 5 Mar 08)

Markets brace for news of big losses by banks

Citigroup could write off US$24b, lay off 20,000 staff

(LONDON) Major American banks are expected to unveil substantial losses and secure more cash from abroad in what is shaping up to be a pivotal week for the global credit crisis.

Citigroup could write off as much as US$24 billion and lay off 20,000 workers in a drive to cut costs and boost capital, CNBC said on its website in a report dated Sunday.

CNBC said the plans will be unveiled today when Citi, the largest US bank by assets, reports its fourth-quarter results.

Investment bank Merrill Lynch is just as troubled.

The Financial Times said yesterday that Merrill was seeking about US$4 billion in a second capital raising, and the Kuwait Investment Authority was expected to be a significant investor. A deal could be announced as soon as midweek, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The New York Times on Friday said that Merrill was expected to suffer US$15 billion in losses stemming from bad mortgage investments, almost twice the company’s original estimate, when it releases its results later this week.

FT also reported on Saturday that Citigroup was putting the final touches to its second big fund-raising, seeking up to US$14 billion from Chinese, Kuwaiti and other investors.

The US$200 billion Kuwait Investment Authority had no immediate comment yesterday on the reports that it may buy into the two damaged American banks.

Banks, wrestling with huge losses stemming from mortgages lent to people ill-equipped to repay them, have been seeking cash from sovereign wealth funds.

In December, Merrill secured as much as US$7.5 billion by selling a stake to Temasek Holdings and New York based money manager Davis Selected Advisors.

The month before, Citi agreed to sell up to a 4.9 per cent stake to Abu Dhabi for the same amount.

As well as Merrill and Citi, other big names such as State Street and JP Morgan report results this week.

Wall Street analysts have turned increasingly wary over US financial results for the fourth quarter as well as the first two quarters of 2008, according to a weekly survey by Reuters Estimates yesterday.

The survey showed that analysts expect S&P 500 companies’ fourth-quarter earnings to fall 9.1 per cent from a year earlier.

That was gloomier than the 8.4 per cent decline forecast a week earlier, and the 11.5 per cent growth forecast in an Oct 1 survey.

The Federal Reserve was to auction US$30 billion later yesterday and the European Central Bank and Swiss National Bank will continue their unprecedented US dollar lending to banks as part of coordinated central bank efforts to help calm credit market tensions. The Bank of England will also weigh in.

Results of the latest ‘term auctions’, a plan agreed in December and one which has helped money market rates ease, will come today.

One to three-month Euribor interbank interest rates fell yesterday amid central banks’ moves to inject liquidity into markets.

Most analysts say the threat of further losses at major banks from investments tied to US sub-prime mortgages means the crisis is far from over as crucial lending between commercial banks remains patchy at best.

The Fed is forecast to use its other policy lever – interest rates – before the month is out. It is seen slashing rates by a half-point at its two-day meeting ending on Jan 30 after Fed chairman Ben Bernanke gave a downbeat assessment of the US economy last week and said the central bank was ready to take ’substantive additional action’.

Swiss banking giant UBS appealed to shareholders last week to back a capital injection by Singapore’s Temasek and a Middle East investor and warned it still could not predict how the sub-prime crisis would play out.

And shares in Northern Rock fell as much as 7 per cent early yesterday on fresh concerns that the bank is facing imminent nationalisation. Northern Rock is Britain’s biggest casualty of the credit crunch and has borrowed around 26 billion pounds (S$72.8 billion) from the Bank of England since it requested emergency funds in September.

 

Source: Reuters (Business Times 15 Jan 08)

Inflation fears drag global stock markets down

LONDON – ASIAN and European stocks tumbled yesterday as last week’s strong United States inflation data reduced expectations that the US Federal Reserve would deliver further interest rate cuts soon.

Also, in a sign that rising food and agricultural prices may push inflation up globally, US wheat futures surged more than 3 per cent and surpassed US$10 a bushel for the first time.

Investors took their cue from Wall Street’s sell-off last Friday in the wake of unexpectedly strong inflation figures.

US consumer prices jumped 0.8 per cent last month. On a 12- month basis, inflation hit 4.3 per cent, the fastest since June last year. New York’s Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 1.32 per cent last Friday in a volatile session as the price data raised fears of stagflation – a combination of slower growth and stubborn inflation pressures.

Inflation concerns generally weigh on equities as they erode corporate profits.

They are also nagging the world’s central banks as they wrestle with persistent tensions in money markets, which are showing only modest signs of easing after policymakers announced a plan last week to inject liquidity. The plan started yesterday.

Markets are now pricing in around a 78 per cent chance of a January Fed cut in benchmark interest rates to 4 per cent, which will follow three easing moves since the credit crisis broke in August.

Earlier this month, markets fully priced in a cut.

Developments in money markets are key in a week when investors will receive more evidence of how the financial sector is coping with the US sub-prime mortgage fallout as major US banks release quarterly earnings.

In morning trade, London’s FTSE 100 index of leading shares dropped 1.44 per cent, while Frankfurt’s DAX 30 slid 1.2 per cent, and Paris’ CAC 40 shed 1.88 per cent.

Earlier in Asia, Tokyo closed down 1.7 per cent, Hong Kong slumped 3.51 per cent, Seoul shed 2.9 per cent, Shanghai gave up 2.6 per cent, and Mumbai lost 3.8 per cent.

 

Source: REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE (The Straits Times 18 Dec 07)