November 7th, 2007 - Stamford, Ct The Emperors' New Clothes?: After the Credit Crunch, What's the Future of Structured Credit, Financial Guarantors and Rating Agencies? The Credit Crunch continues ... spreading from subprime mortgages to CDOs to CMBS to ABCP programs to SIVs and beyond. Widespread Debt downgrades occur frequently across the "alphabet soup" of [...]

With Barclays Center gone dark, about the only action left involving the arena can be found in, of all places, the bond market. Because it could be a long while before there’s another Nets game or concert, bonds backed by luxury-suite sales, sponsorships, concessions and other income streams at Barclays have slumped by 6%—a startling move [...]

NYU Stern recently presented a series of White Papers titled “Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System”. And how exactly does NYU plan to repair the system? The answer is by getting into the ratings game. This wouldn’t just be the letter ratings but a quantitative approach to measuring how “systematically risky” a [...]

Ed Grebeck, CEO of Tempus Advisors had an interesting story to share that may be pertinent to the recent Sober Look post on the Goldman - Buffett transaction: 1999: gold price declining and volatile. GS approached me [Employers Re., a subsidiary of GE capital] with a transaction to hedge their exposure to 3 gold mines [...]

Here is a great BNN interview with Ed Grebeck discussing bank capitalization and the rating agencies. Of particular interest is the discussion on rating agencies' methodologies and the resulting ratings that vary across the various departments within a single agency. Here are some highlights: 1. Basle-II convention treats a company (such as GE) debt "AAA" [...]