Just got my lab results. fP-Kol 8.6 and fP-Kol-LDL 6.8.... there goes my ice cream and no comments today. MoreLiver is very, very angry.
News And Market Re-Cap – RanSquawk / ZH
Frontrunning: April 12 – ZH
The Lunch Wrap – alphaville / FT
EM New York headlines – beyondbrics / FT
Morning MarketBeat: Speed bumps ahead – MarketBeat / WSJ
Morning Take-Out – DealBook / NYT
Daily Press Summary – Open Europe
EURO CRISIS
The departure of Germany would take pressure off the weaker countries, and the costs of breaking up the Eurozone will have to be paid not matter who leaves.
Statistics Pocket Book, April 2012 – ECB (pdf)
Monthly Bulletin, April 2012 – ECB (pdf)
picks from the above Monthly Bulletin:
Analysing government debt sustainability in the euro area – ECB (pdf)
The development of prices and costs during the 2008-09 recession – ECB (pdf)
The French have never come to terms with the globalization of the world economy, and their attempts to resist globalization have failed.
Sovereign Debt Holdings By Type of Investor – The Big Picture
In Europe and Japan, the domestic banks are important creditors of the state, not so in US or UK
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CRISIS: PIIGS
Deutsche Bank: Spain has completed €40.5bn out of the estimated €86bn in issuances so far with €45bn expected in redemptions, leaving them essentially flat for the year. Italy on the other hand has completed €74bn out of the estimated €232bn in issuances so far with €128bn in expected redemptions, leaving a net issuance headroom of €30bn
There seems to be a pattern emerging as stressed Eurozone nations struggle against the austerity based policy that slowly strangles them. The first stage is a denial that anything is wrong, the second is that there is some problems but with renewed vigour the issues will be solved and the third stage is when reality finally begins to sink in that the country is in serious trouble and some form of external “help” is inevitable.
Italy Sells €4.884 Billion In Bonds, Just Shy Of High Target As Yields Climb – ZH
with roundup of initial comments
with roundup of initial comments
Steen Jakobsen: The increase in yields reflects a growing concern about Italy's and Spain's ability to continue to access the market without delivering some of the reforms they continue to promise.
OTHER
Evolution, Impact and Limitations of Unusual Central Bank Policy Activism – PIMCO
El-Erian: To put it bluntly, there are now multiple reasons to worry about central banks expensive (and expansive!) policy bridges risking to end up as bridges to nowhere. In other words, there is a growing possibility that, absent mid course corrections, unsustainability may by the common characteristics of the central banks’ unusual policy activism.
[CVA] The doom loop in sovereign exposures – alphaville / FT
Third part in the series, written by former ISDA’s head of risk
Third part in the series, written by former ISDA’s head of risk
BRICs on track – alphaville / FT
HSBC’s Emerging Markets Index quarterly has been published, download link in the article.
Facebook Friends Can Make You Poor – The Psy-Fi Blog
This type of conversational bias means that people hear more about other peoples’ investing successes than their failures and are correspondingly converted to active investing. The contagion effect biases the mass of socially interacting investors towards active strategies until some catastrophe occurs – or, as the paper puts it, “the mean return penalty to active trading is too much”.
OFF-TOPIC
A century of ocean shipping animated – FlowingData