Full story here. We’ll see who wins the Accidental Irony Award…
“On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.
“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”
Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.” (more…)
Repo timb-bomb redux
Monday, December 7th, 2009Full story here from Henry CK Liu via AsiaTimes.
“On December 2, 2009, the US House Financial Services Committee approved a bill to regulate systemic risk in financial markets which, aside from proposing a new systemic regulator, includes a little-noticed proposal that when any large bank fails in the future, it should be placed into a resolution regime, with creditors losing up to 20% of the value of the debt.
While haircuts are normally part of any restructuring, haircuts have never been applied to the repo (or repurchase) market, where banks raise short-term funds by lending out assets. The new rule would destroy the repo market as a low-cost source of borrowed funds. “The implications will be horrendous … doing this would be madness,” the Financial Times quoted what it said was the head of one large bank as saying. (more…)
Tags: bankruptcy, FDIC, finance, Henry CK Liu, repo
Posted in Commentary, Futures Market, Futures Market Commentary, Futures Trading | No Comments »