PrefBlog

Daniel Bouton is resigning as chairman of SocGen, brought down – at least in part – by the Kerviel scandal which exposed grossly incompetent management.

And Ken Lewis is defending his role in BofA’s Merrill purchase, on the grounds that he is responsible for the global financial system. Perhaps the global financial system should be the one paying him.

Ravi Balakrishnan (IMF), Stephan Danninger (IMF), Selim Elekdag (Central Bank Turkey) and Irina Tytell (IMF) have published an essay on VoxEU, How financial stress spreads – A first comprehensive look at the current crisis, in which they claim:

The twist in the current crisis is that bank-lending linkages appear to be the main driver, rather than the more mobile portfolio investment links that drove the Asian crisis. Since the mid-1990s, Western European banks have dominated bank-lending flows. Emerging Europe stands out as the largest recipient (Figure 2). Using an econometric model for stress transmission, we find that an increase in bank liabilities to Western Europe from 15% to 50% of GDP (roughly the difference between Emerging Europe and other emerging regions) doubles the strength of stress transmission. It is no surprise therefore that Emerging Europe was the first emerging market region to be hit hard by the crisis.

Just another reason to surcharge Risk-Weighted-Assets for bank size and for recent growth. There is also probably good reason to apply a higher risk-weight to holdings due from other banks.

A very good day for the market on increased volume … possibly artificially juiced by portfolio adjustment for the closing of RY.PR.Y. PerpetualDiscounts now yield 6.79%, equivalent to 9.51% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.4x. Long Corporates now yield 7.4% (a hair under? Maybe.), so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread is now 211bp … about average for the Credit Crunch, well down from the highs of November, but still above the pre-Crunch range of 100-150bp.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 7:44 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.