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Posts by "qiman"
248 Posts Total by "qiman":
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Posts by Anonymous "qiman":
"Sovereign bonds have been defaulting for almost as long as there have been sovereign bonds. The problems go back many centuries. A good overview created for the IMF is The Costs of Sovereign Default by Eduardo Borensztein and Ugo Panizza. Some countries are serial defaulters, with a long history of sovereign defaults. Many have defaulted on sovereign debt five times or more."
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/07/part-2-how-often-have-sovereign.html
The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund have all recently warned of a looming crunch, especially in Europe, where banks have enough trouble raising money as it is.
Their concern is that banks hungry for refinancing will compete with governments which also must roll over huge sums for the bond markets favor. As a result, credit for business and consumers could become more costly and scarce, with unpleasant consequences for economic growth."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/business/global/12refinance.html?_r=1
"And that is the problem with the world of finance. Every day is the World Cup final. Trillions of dollars. Creation and destruction of societies. The stakes are that high; so players will flop, fake and play dirty because at the end of the day, no one remembers or cares about second place. Like their referee counterparts, regulators find themselves in the impossible position of judging unbelievably talented people who are willing to do just about anything to win. Which is why when I see headlines like this weekends Bank of America Says $10.7 Billion of Trades Wrongly Classified, I really am not surprised anymore."
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/world-cup-final-perfect-microcosm-world-finance
What appears to have really happened is that one nation or more needed foreign exchange to counter some shortfall in its accounts and raised these funds as a short-term liquidity measure, believing that it would be able to return the currency and receive its gold back. The gold would then be returned at the conclusion of the swap period in return for the currencies swapped. If it fails to return these funds to the BIS, then the BIS could discreetly place the gold with another central bank, should it not want to keep the gold. If it did so, the BIS would simply report its disposal of the gold, the originating central bank would report the drop in its gold reserves and the gold buying bank would report its increase in the reserves.
This puts the transaction into an entirely different category. It seems that one or more of the developed world's central bank's credit is not good enough for other governmental institutions. If word got out as to which this country is, then the financial markets would go into quite a spin, shaking the global financial system to its core. No wonder the B.I.S. is keeping such a low profile!
http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page103855?oid=107700&sn=Detail
In the minds of many Spaniards here, there will perhaps be no bigger "stress test" than the one that's coming on Sunday when virtually the entire country will grind to a halt to watch 'La Roja' take on Holland for the World Cup title.
Forget the housing crisis, unemployment, the downgrades, the slumping growth, the metro strikes, the pay cuts, and the finger-wagging over debt by the International Monetary Fund and others, or the hamstrung government. Spain, which has never made it to the finals of the World Cup before, is in the throes of the biggest sporting event in history for the country, and perhaps one of the biggest marketing events since the Barcelona Olympics in 1992.
"It's more important than the economy, than potatoes, than olive oil, than (worker) strikes," said Eduardo Lorenzo Conde, a retired Madrid worker, who adds that he prefers bullfights to football. Conde, who gathers with other older men at a south Madrid train station near his home each morning to chat and read the newspapers, said everyone here has a need for Spain to win.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-spain-world-cup-is-the-big-stress-test-2010-07-09