 | |  | | For those who are speculating the bottom. I feel it's probably better to
know that there is an eager waiting on the time bomb - CDS now. No one
knows what the scale of the crisis. It's as big as 64 trillion USD. This
is a totally unregulated market with a sheer size that can cause a chain
reaction.
This Thursday, there will be an auction on Lehman's loads, with a notional
value of 400 billion, valued some thing around 10 cents on the dollar. The
size of CDS contract on Lehman is not know. If it is as big as the loan,
then the sellers will have to find 360 billion to settle. In September,
there are quite some naked CDS bought against Lehman speculating its default
.
Fed is trying to set up a CDS clearing house with the help from the big
banks. You can find this in News. If Lehman's auction goes well, then there
will be a relief on the market especially money market.
2F 's auction was done on Monday, with a recovering rate of 91-99.5 cents on
the dollar, the outstanding CDS settlement was aorund 20 billions. That was
not a catastrophic figure. But there is a lots of uncertainty about Lehman'
s CDS settlements now.
Another auction on WaMu's loan is on 22 Oct. It is the next window to gain
some insight about the potential danger of CDS.
FYI:
The largest sellers of CDS are MS, Deutsche, GS, JPM, UBS, LEH,
Barclays, Cit, CSFB (2005).
The largest hour reference bodies are GM, Ford, Brazil and Chrysler (as end
of 2005 I dont have newer data).
Be careful when you predicting the bottom -- unless you have taken what I
said into account. |  |  |  |  |
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