PrefBlog

Well, let’s think about bankruptcy … banks are no longer allowed to go bust … countries are no longer allowed to go bust … now, it would appear, power companies can no longer go bust:

Japan’s government will provide financial aid for Tokyo Electric Power Co. to protect the utility from bankruptcy as it pays compensation to those affected by the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.

Japan’s government will create a body to handle claims made against Tepco, as the company is called, and will issue bonds to fund them, according to a statement released today after a meeting of Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s cabinet.
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“Our requirement is that the company continues to operate as a listed company and continue to provide a stable supply of power,” Trade Minister Banri Kaieda told reporters after the statement was released. He said Tepco bondholders rights will be maintained.

Power companies that operate nuclear stations will be required to pay into the compensation organization being set up by the government, according to the statement.

Tepco will be monitored by the government as a condition for aid to ensure full compensation will be paid to those affected by the disaster, Kaieda said earlier this week.

“Eventually, the matter could become one of how to share the burden between Tepco and the government, but it will be something to be decided in the distant future,” [Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio] Edano said.

Still, it hasn’t done the Samurai market any harm:

HSBC’s unit HSBC Bank Plc sold 108.2 billion yen of five- year, 0.91 percent bonds priced to yield 31 basis points more than the yen swap rate, and 35.2 billion yen of floating-rate notes that pay 46 basis points over the three-month London interbank offered rate, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The bank had planned to sell at least 50 billion yen of notes, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.
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Lehman defaulted on 195 billion yen of Samurai bonds when it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, a collapse that froze global credit markets and curbed investor demand for all but the safest government debt. Today’s sale is the biggest without a sovereign guarantee since Citigroup Inc. sold 186.5 billion yen of three-year, 2.66 percent Samurai bonds to individual investors in June 2008, Bloomberg data show.

US inflation ticked up a bit:

The cost of living in the U.S. rose in April, led by increases in food and fuel costs that are starting to filter down to other goods and services.

The consumer-price index increased 0.4 percent, matching the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and following a 0.5 percent advance in March, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. Excluding volatile food and energy, the so-called core gauge rose 0.2 percent, also as projected.
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Oh, the joys of doing business in kleptocracies run by thugs:

Yahoo! Inc. fell for a third day as signs of tension with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. raised speculation it may benefit less from part ownership of China’s largest e-commerce provider.

Concerns surfaced after a May 10 Yahoo filing that said Alibaba Group spun off the lucrative Alipay online-payments business, and then deepened the next two days amid conflicting statements from Yahoo and Alibaba over Alibaba Group’s disclosure of the transfer.
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Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, fell as much as 7.1 percent to $15.96 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. It has lost 10 percent since May 10, when it said the entire equity of Alipay had been transferred to a company controlled by Alibaba Chief Executive Officer Jack Ma.
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Alibaba was paid about 300 million yuan ($46 million) for Alipay by a company controlled by Ma, Caing.com reported today, citing public company registry data. Alibaba’s Spelich declined to comment on the report.

Alipay has a value of $5 billion, Brett Harriss, an analyst at Gabelli & Co., wrote in a report yesterday.

The Bank of Canada has released a discussion paper by David Bolder, Simon Deeley titled The Canadian Debt-Strategy Model: An Overview of the Principal Elements:

As part of managing a debt portfolio, debt managers face the challenging task of choosing a strategy that minimizes the cost of debt, subject to limitations on risk. The Bank of Canada provides debt-management analysis and advice to the Government of Canada to assist in this task, with the Canadian debt-strategy model being developed to help in this regard. The authors outline the main elements of the model, which include: cost and risk measures, inflation-linked debt, optimization techniques, the framework used to model the government’s funding requirement, the sensitivity of results to the choice of joint stochastic macroeconomic term-structure model, the effects of shocks to macroeconomic and term-structure variables and changes to their long-term values, and the relationship between issuance yield and issuance amount. Emphasis is placed on the degree to which changes to the formulation of model elements impact key results. The model is an important part of the decision-making process for the determination of the government’s debt strategy. However, it remains one of many tools that are available to debt managers and is to be used in conjunction with the judgment of an experienced debt manager.

I mentioned Jonathan Weill’s excellent column Greeks Blaming Speculators Sure Sign of Panic yesterday and now there’s reason to mention it again, now that Irshad Manji has written a column in the Globe titled The paranoid can’t handle the truth:

Routine, reactionary denial is a dead end. When conspiracy-peddling persists, what can ever be true? Indeed, the very idea of truth loses meaning. Which is why I can’t ascribe the popular label “truthers” to those who claim that 9/11 was itself an inside job.

It’s easy to dismiss the hyperventilating as simple nuttiness. But the nutters have an outsized impact on shared values, a crucial aspect of the glue that holds societies together. The decibel level of conspiracy merchants, amplified by the explosion of media platforms through which to express themselves, infects our very capacity for common purpose – and our human need for hope.

Is there a solution? I’d argue that students should be taught to think not just critically, but also “generatively,” so they can rationally reassemble the pieces of what they’ve just ripped apart. Thinking critically enables us to question the information we’re being fed, and that’s a good thing. But what then? Unless we can reason our way to factual accuracy, critical thinking easily degenerates into emotionalism – conflating emotion with evidence. Not a good thing.
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Americans, for starters, should ask at what point Ronald Reagan’s adage of “trust but verify” encounters its corollary – “verified, now trust.”

Without insisting on each of these halves, citizens in any society can’t achieve a consensus that’s whole enough to move on to new challenges. Blowhards will keep poking holes in old news, falling through those holes and toward a pit where believing in nothing becomes the hallmark of truth. Sounds to me like a lie.

This is an interesting counterpoint to Jonathan Weill’s observatins:

For instance, the first paragraph of the article said euro- area finance ministers and European Commission officials had scheduled a secret meeting for that night in Luxembourg. That same day, a spokesman for Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who is chairman of the euro area’s council of finance ministers, told reporters for several news outlets that there was no meeting and that this part of the Spiegel story was wrong. Actually such a meeting did occur on May 6. The spokesman, Guy Schuller, later conceded he had lied.

Asked to explain why, Schuller told the Wall Street Journal that “I was told to say there was no meeting,” and that “we had certain necessities to consider.” The euro was falling on the Spiegel report and “there was a very good reason to deny that the meeting was taking place,” he said, namely “self- preservation.” Besides, he said, when Juncker says something to the markets, “nobody seems to believe it.”

And let’s not even get into Spend-Every-Penny’s blase dismissal of the Junior Republicans’ campaign pledge on the deficit.

Ms. Manji makes good points, but she ignores the other side of the equation. A world in which lying has become acceptable is a fertile ground for conspiracy-theory wingnuts.

A relatively quiet day on the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 10bp, FixedResets gaining 3bp and DeemedRetractibles basically flat. There were two entries in the Performance Highlights tables, both MFC issues which went ex-Dividend today. Volume was low, although there were some pockets of size.

Foreclosures are down in the States, but it’s not really good news:

Foreclosure filings in the U.S. fell 34 percent last month from a year earlier as lenders already swamped with seized homes delayed action on thousands of additional delinquent mortgages, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

A total of 219,258 properties received default, auction or repossession notices in April, the fewest in 40 months, the Irvine, California-based data seller said today in a statement. It was the seventh straight month that filings dropped from a year earlier. They were down 9 percent from March. One in 593 U.S. households got a notice.

“Banks already sitting on thousands of properties they can’t sell as quickly and profitably as they’d like aren’t going to be anxious to accelerate foreclosures on tens of thousands more,” Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s senior vice president, said in an e-mail.

But commercial real-estate is doing well enough:

Investors are turning to secondary markets as credit availability improves and surging demand for properties in New York, Washington and San Francisco boosts prices and reduces returns in those areas. Cities such as Dallas and Houston are attracting real estate buyers because of the prospects for job and population growth, according to Robert Bach, chief economist for Grubb & Ellis Co., a Santa Ana, California-based broker.

Jonathan Weil made a good observation yesterday:

Whenever you see an issuer of securities — be it a sovereign nation or a Wall Street bank — blame speculators, journalists or rumor- mongerers for its troubles, you know the bosses there are panicking.

One could even add “bloggers” to that list, nowadays!

It was a mixed day in the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts off 6bp, FixedResets up 3bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 12bp; but all three entries in the Performance Highlights table were positive. Volume was very light and spreads on some of the less liquid issues reached ridiculous levels.

Nothing happened today.

It was another good solid day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 4bp, FixedResets gaining 13bp and DeemedRetractibles ahead 11bp.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.55%, equivalent to 7.22% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Volatility was muted and volume was average. Long Corporates now yield 5.4%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread is now 180bp, a little wider than the April 27 figure of 175bp.

Global markets are getting more efficient:

Computer-based trading in India’s $1.5 trillion stock market may double to half of all orders within three years as demand for speedier execution surges, according to the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Automated programs carry out about 25 percent of Indian orders currently, Sayee Srinivasan, head of product strategy at Asia’s oldest bourse, said in an interview yesterday. About 60 percent of U.S. stock trades daily come from firms that rely on fast-paced executions, according to Tabb Group LLC.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and Nomura Holdings Inc. (8604) say a mix of tight buy and sell spreads, a large volume of smaller orders and no midday break make India ideally suited for growth in algorithmic trading.

The BSE and National Stock Exchange of India Ltd., the nation’s biggest, started high-speed trading in 2009, about a year before the Tokyo Stock Exchange Group Inc. introduced its Arrowhead platform that cut processing to 5 milliseconds from 2 to 3 seconds. Australia’s ASX Ltd. in December moved to a platform that reduced the average time to 250 microseconds from 3 milliseconds.
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India “is a big priority for us,” Murat Atamer, head of electronic trading product at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong, said in a phone interview. High-frequency trading accounts for as much as 60 percent of trades done by some of firm’s clients in the South Asian nation, greater than the proportion in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, he said.

The TMX Annual Report talks a lot about its “low latency”, but doesn’t provide any numbers … which reminds me of the time, years ago, when I was buying a new computer. Due to the state of the art at the time, the speed of the L2 onboard cache was an important determinant of total speed – so I asked the friendly salesman what it was. After nagging him for a couple of days, I finally got an exasperated answer: “Look, it’s fast OK? It’s fast.”. I changed suppliers shortly afterwards.

All I can find for the TSX is a 6-millisecond response time for the Quantum system in 2008, but I don’t even know whether that measurement is comparable to the latencies discussed above. Still, if they were tops you know we’d never hear the end of it. A recent TMX release trumpets “40,000 order messages per second”, which imples 25-microseconds per message if they’re sequential, but again I don’t know if that’s a comparable number – I suspect not, since the feeds are partitioned.

Gwyn Morgan shows a prediliction for easy answers in his column Wanted: clear thinking on educating the work force:

In a recent column, I criticized Canadian universities for turning away up to half of applicants for in-demand programs such as engineering, information technology and health care, while continuing to allocate much of their money to programs with poor job prospects.
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The person went on to say that arts and classics students “understand that their mind is theirs to educate for their fulfilment, not to train for some random future employer.” Another respondent noted that liberal arts courses “educate the mind to think.” Both apparently believe that possession of an arts degree is a vital prerequisite to one’s ability to actually think.

Naturally, there is no discussion on the actual hiring process. In my experience, corporate hiring is abysmal, with grossly incompetent Human Resource people trying to find precise matches of presumed skills to presumed needs. The best example is Commerce degrees – does anybody know anybody with a B.Comm. who can actually do anything? Who did anything in University other than regurgitate superficial explanations of high-level economics? Yet these people are in demand – hiring them is a low-risk proposition for an HR specialist.

Aside from those with actual skill-sets (such as engineering, hard sciences, nursing, etc.), the only people worth hiring for entry-level jobs are those who adored their University studies and as a result worked their buns off. Doesn’t matter if the particular subject was Ancient Greek Pottery or Economics. Once you know how to work, how to think, how to meet a deadline … the rest is just details.

Mind you, for analytical work I have a strong preference for science grads – hard science, mind you – on the grounds that by both prediliction and training, they are likely to believe that for any question, there’s exactly one correct answer.

Royal Bank’s American unit was downgraded:

Standard & Poor’s has downgraded its ratings on RBC Bank (USA) to BBB from A- as a result of changes to Royal Bank of Canada’s long-term strategic plan for its U.S. commercial banking subsidiary amid reports the operation is up for sale.
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The rating agency said this is primarily a result of the highliy competitive U.S. banking landscape and RBC Bank’s small regional presence.

S&P also revised its view of RBC Bank to “non-strategically important” from “strategically important,” which shaved three notches off its rating. However, it applied one notch of support to reflect the bank’s shared branding, infrastructure, management, liquidity and capital support from its parent.

The Portuguese Emperor is contemplating action against the boy who shouted ‘No clothes!’:

Portuguese authorities have opened a criminal inquiry into three international credit rating agencies following a complaint, the Attorney General’s office said Monday.

The inquiry is based on a complaint filed last month by four Portuguese academics, an official with the Attorney General’s office said on condition of anonymity, in keeping with departmental regulations.

The four economists claimed the agencies — Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch — caused severe financial losses for Portugal and demanded to know whether they profited from the ratings.

They also complained that the agencies dominated the ratings market and want to know whether competition rules were broken.

The inquiry will determine whether there is evidence for charges to be brought.

It was another strong day across the board for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 31bp, FixedResets gaining 11bp and DeemedRetractibles winning 23bp. Not much volatility. Good volume, with some very impressive spikes.