PrefBlog

They don’t issue preferreds, but this is interesting anyway – S&P downgraded Sears by two notches:

• The decline in operating performance at U.S. retailer Sears accelerated in 2011, and we expect operating performance to remain pressured in 2012, potentially resulting in negative EBITDA.
• Sears’ liquidity sources will narrow, given the negative EBITDA we expect and the need to fund operating losses, capital spending, and pension contributions.
• We are lowering our corporate credit rating on the company to ‘CCC+’ from ‘B’ and the short-term and commercial paper ratings for Sears Roebuck Acceptance to ‘C’ from ‘B-2’.
• The negative outlook reflects our expectation that Sears’ liquidity could diminish in 2013.

This means that Eddy Lampert could be in trouble:

Edward Lampert’s hedge fund cut its stake in AutoZone (AZO) Inc. late last month to meet client redemptions amid a series of setbacks at Sears Holdings Corp. (SHLD), one of its biggest and highest-profile investments.

ESL Investments Inc., the firm run by Lampert, distributed about $1.02 billion worth of AutoZone stock to investors in connection with the closing of one investment partnership and the restructuring of another, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. The Greenwich, Connecticut-based firm also used $351.4 million of shares in AutoZone and AutoNation Inc. (AN) as payment in kind to meet year-end redemptions from its main fund, ESL Partners LP, the filing showed.

Lampert has been selling AutoZone and AutoNation shares while holding onto his entire stake in Sears, a strategy that could leave his main hedge fund further concentrated in the Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based retailer. AutoZone rose 19 percent last year and AutoNation shares gained 31 percent, while Sears shares plummeted 56 percent.

It was a good day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts winning 29bp, FixedResets up 7bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 22bp. For the second successive day there was a lengthy list of issues gaining more than 1% – with SLF issues notable for their presence among the better performers, while Floaters continued to signal retail expectations of inflationary times ahead. Volume remained significantly below average, but it is recovering.

Have we seen this movie before? Esoteric assets are being securitized in volume:

Sales of bonds backed by everything from timeshare rentals to shipping containers to entertainment royalties are poised to rise this year as investors seek to boost returns with interest rates at about record lows.

So-called esoteric asset-backed securities issuance may soar 12.9 percent to $35 billion, compared with debt linked to more traditional collateral such as auto and credit-card loans, which will grow 8.75 percent to $87 billion, according to a forecast from Credit Suisse Group AG.
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Investors willing to hold BBB rated bonds backed by franchise royalty fees of the Sonic Corp. (SONC) fast- food chain may receive as much as 2 percentage points more annually than similarly rated securities tied to auto loans, according to Barclays Capital’s Cory Wishengrad in New York.
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Cronos Containers Ltd. boosted the size of its November offering of bonds tied to shipping container lease payments by $50 million to $200 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. An A rated $170 million portion maturing in five years priced to yield 5 percent.

It was quite a good day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts – what are left of them! – winning 53bp, FixedResets up 9bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 19bp. Floating Rate issues also appear to be celebrating the new year. Good volatility – all winners! Volume was quite low, but better than the comatose levels of the last week.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.08%, equivalent to 6.60% interest at the standard conversion factor of 1.4x. 1.3x. Long corporates now yield about 4.65%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (also called the Seniority Spread) is now about 195bp, significantly narrower than the 205bp reported December 30.

Nothing happened today.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts roaring ahead 34bp, while FixedResets were down 4bp and DeemedRetractibles gained 8bp. Volatility was quite good, with Floaters doing particularly well. Volume continued to be abyssmally low.

A Financial Times article titled Flash Crash Threatens to Return with a Vengeance leads me to a paper by Dave Cliff and Linda Northrop titled The Global Financial Markets: an Ultra Large Scale Systems Perspective. The jargon in the abstract is priceless:

We argue here that, in recent years, the global financial markets have become a complex adaptive ultra-large-scale socio-technical system-of-systems, and that this has important consequences for how the financial markets should be engineered and managed in future. The very high degree of interconnectedness in the global markets means that entire trading systems, implemented and managed separately by independent organizations, can rightfully be considered as significant constituent entities in the larger global super-system: that is, the global markets are an instance of what is known in the engineering literature as a system-of-systems (SoS). The sheer number of human agents and computer systems connected within the global financial-markets SoS is so large that it is an instance of an ultra-large-scale system, and that largeness-of-scale has significant effects on the nature of the system. Overall system-level behaviour may be difficult to predict, for two reasons. First, the constituent (sub-) systems may change their responses over time, either because they involve human agents as key “components” within the system (that is, the system is actually socio-technical), or because they involve software systems that evolve over time and “learn from experience” (that is, the system is adaptive). Second, even when given perfect knowledge of the constituent systems that combine to make up the SoS, the overall system-level behaviour may be difficult or impossible to predict; that is, the SoS may exhibit emergent behaviour. For these reasons, the global financial markets SoS can also rightly be considered as a complex adaptive system. Major failures in the financial markets SoS can now occur at super-human speeds, as was witnessed in the “Flash Crash” of May 6th 2010. Events such as the Flash Crash may become more commonplace in future, unless lessons are learned from other fields where complex adaptive socio-technical systems of systems have to be engineered for high-integrity, safety-critical applications. In this document we review the literature on failures in risky technology and high-integrity approaches to safety-critical SoS engineering. We conclude with an argument that, in the specific case of the global financial markets, there is an urgent need to develop major national strategic modelling and predictive simulation capabilities, comparable to national-scale meteorological monitoring and modelling capabilities. The intent here is not to predict the price-movements of particular financial instruments or asset classes, but rather to provide test-rigs for principled evaluation of systemic risk, estimating probability density functions over spaces of possible outcomes, and thereby identifying potential “black swan” failure modes in the simulations, before they occur in real life, by which time it is typically too late.

To my gratification, the authors highlight the inadequacy of the official SEC report:

The SEC/CFTC report was met with very mixed responses. Many readers concluded that it left more questions unanswered than resolved, and a subsequent much more detailed analysis of the time-series “tapes” of market event data conducted by Nanex Corp.1 offered an alternative story that many market practitioners found more plausible: see Meerman et al. (2010) and Easley et al. (2011) for further details of the extent to which the CFTC/SEC version of events is disputed.

The times they are a-changin’! The Meerman reference is:

M. Meerman, et al., (2011). Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box. Documentary produced by VPRO (Dutch public broadcaster), available as an iPad application. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/money-speed-inside-black-box/id424796908?mt=8&ls=1#

I don’t recall ever seeing a citation of an iPad application in a scholarly text before! The Easely paper has been previously mocked on PrefBlog.

The Hungarians have nerve, whatever else might be the case!

Hungary’s chances of obtaining a bailout receded after lawmakers approved new central bank regulations that prompted the International Monetary Fund and the European Union to break off talks this month.

Parliament in Budapest stripped central bank President Andras Simor of his right to name deputies, expanded the rate- setting Monetary Council and created a position for a third vice president. A separate law approved earlier today makes it possible to demote the central bank president if the institution is combined with the financial regulator.

Hungary received its second sovereign credit downgrade to junk in a month when Standard and Poor’s followed Moody’s Investors Service in taking the country out of its investment grade category on Dec. 21. The forint has fallen 15 percent against the euro since June 30, making it the world’s worst- performing currency in the period.
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The new central bank regulations “seriously harm” the country’s national interests, allow for political intervention in monetary policy and threaten economic stability, the Magyar Nemzeti Bank said today. The laws have led to the “indefinite postponement” of talks on a financial aid package, the central bank said in a statement posted on its website.

While a possible Hungarian agreement with the IMF and the EU on an assistance package would boost confidence, the Cabinet can do without it, [Prime Minister Viktor] Orban told MR1 radio in an interview today.

“If we have an IMF safety net, then we face the coming period with greater self-confidence and greater security,” Orban said. “If we don’t reach an agreement, we’ll still stand on our own feet.”

It’s always helpful to have your own currency that can be devalued at will!

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts losing 24bp, FixedResets up 5bp and DeemedRetractibles winning 27bp. Volatility was reasonable. Volume was pathetic.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.12%, equivalent to 6.66% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long Corporates now yield 4.6%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (also called the Seniority Spread) is now about 205bp, unsurprisingly unchanged from the figure reported December 28.

And that’s it for another year!

Italy sold some debt – possibly with some assistance:

Italy auctioned 7 billion euros ($9 billion) of debt to bring the total raised this week to almost 20 billion euros, underscoring how the European Central Bank is helping the world’s fourth-biggest borrower tap markets.

Today’s sale by the Treasury in Rome fell short of the 8.5 billion-euro target even as borrowing costs declined from last month. Italy sold 9 billion euros in bills yesterday at about half the rate of the previous sale last month in its first auction since the ECB loaned 489 billion euros to banks to ease credit amid the region’s debt crisis.
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The euro fell to its lowest against the dollar since September 2010 and 10-year Italian notes slid after today’s sale, keeping their yield above 7 percent, the level that led Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek bailouts. Short-term securities rose.

The Frankfurt-based central bank bought Italian bonds today, according to two people with knowledge of the transactions who declined to be identified because the trades are confidential. An ECB spokesman declined to comment when contacted by phone.

Italian 10-year bonds (.IT10) stayed lower after the auction. The 10-year yield was 7.01 percent at 3:41 p.m. Rome time, pushing the difference with German bunds to 514 basis points. The five- year yield was down seven basis points at 6.16 percent, as investors pointed to the ECB as buoying the shorter-term debt.

The Treasury sold today 2.5 billion euros of securities due in 2014, less than the 3 billion euro maximum for the sale, to yield 5.62 percent. That was down from 7.89 percent at the previous sale on Nov. 29. The Treasury priced 2.5 billion euros of its 5 percent 2022 bond to yield 6.98 percent, compared with 7.56 percent on Nov. 29. Italy also sold about 2 billion euros of bonds due 2021 and a floating-rate security due 2018.

Thailand is contemplating monetizing its bank bail-out debt:

Thailand’s government will today press the central bank chief to take on $35 billion of legacy debt from bank bailouts as Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra looks for fiscal scope to finance flood defenses.

Bank of Thailand Governor Prasarn Trairatvorakul meets with cabinet members in Bangkok over the proposal to shift the debt to the BOT’s balance sheet. Deputy Prime Minister Kittiratt Na- Ranong said yesterday the step would save the government as much as 65 billion baht ($2 billion) in annual interest costs that could be used to fund anti-flood measures.

Japan is being more sensible:

Japan’s ruling party compromised on a plan to double the sales tax by 2015 to help reduce the world’s largest public debt, delaying implementation by six months to help lawmakers meet a campaign pledge.

The proposal by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda would raise the sales tax from 5 percent to 8 percent in April 2014 and to 10 percent in October 2015. The agreement, reached late yesterday, must be approved by a government panel led by Finance Minister Jun Azumi before discussion with the opposition.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 11bp, FixedResets winning 13bp and DeemedRetractibles down 12bp. Volatility was good. Volume continued to be lousy – not surprisingly, given the time of year.