PrefBlog

The voluntary ha-ha Greek debt swap might succeed:

Investors with 58 percent of the Greek bonds eligible for the nation’s debt swap have so far indicated they’ll participate, putting the country on the verge of the biggest sovereign restructuring in history.

Greece’s largest banks, most of the country’s pension funds, and more than 30 European banks and insurers including BNP Paribas SA, Commerzbank AG (CBK) and Assicurazioni Generali SpA (G) have pledged to accept the offer. That brings the total so far to at least 120 billion euros ($157 billion), based on data compiled by Bloomberg from company reports and government statements.

CalPERS, the gigantic pension fund best known for not doing its own credit analysis, may lower its return expectations:

Actuary Alan Milligan recommended trimming the annual return estimate yesterday to 7.25 percent from 7.75 percent, potentially driving up what the fund, known as Calpers, requires from taxpayers to provide benefits for more than 1.6 million employees, retirees and their families.

Public funds have come under fire for using investment assumptions that hide the true size of shortfalls. The $238.1 billion fund last adjusted its rate of return in 2004, to 7.75 percent from 8.25 percent. The plan is to be considered by the Calpers board next week.
…
The pension fund estimates that it has about 75 percent of the money it needs to cover promised benefits. That differs from a Stanford University report that said Calpers was only 58 percent funded, based on a 6.2 percent annual return on assets.

Will wonders never cease? There’s price competition in the Canadian mortgage market:

Canada’s fourth-largest bank is bringing historic low rates back into the market, only a few weeks after it and several other lenders pulled similar discounts, amid concerns over collapsing profit margins. The bank lowered the rate on a five-year mortgage to 2.99 per cent, a drop of a half a percentage point. It also cut the rate on 10-year mortgages to just 3.99 per cent, a level that no Big Five bank has posted until now.

It was a modestly positive day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualPremiums winning 7bp, FixedResets up 6bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 4bp. Volatility was nothing special. Volume remained at low levels.

PerpetualDiscounts (all seven of them!) now yield 5.08%, equivalent to 6.60% interest at the standard 1.3x equivalency factor. Long corporates now yield a little under 4.5% (!) so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (which, in this context, is the Seniority Spread) is now about 210bp, a meaningful widening from the 195bp reported on February 22.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.