*** I’m usually pretty alert to matters that relate to the regulation of credit rating agencies… so how did I miss the release of the SEC’s Annual Report to Congress under Section 6 of the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006?
I found it on the NRSRO page of the SEC site while working on my comments on NRSROs…
Geez… the report is an excellent summary of the the state of the current market for credit ratings provision, NRSRO examinations and the new proposed rules… kinda like “cliff notes”…
*** Pantheon back door, Rome, Italy
Techcrunch reports on a mature Web 2.0 partnership/application… New York Times and LinkedIn… useful customizing… what is the licensing deal?
~~~~ ” The NYTimes and LinkedIn are announcing a partnership this evening that will bring tailored headlines in the NYTimes Business and Technology sections to users based on some of their profile information. The example the NYTimes uses: LinkedIn members who work in the energy sector will see Times stories that cover the energy business. Users can also share stories with other LinkedIn users (this feature adds LinkedIn to the list of other bookmarking services like Facebook, Mixx, etc.).
The targeted headline feature will highlight the five latest NYTimes stories relevant to the user’s profession or industry. It’s likely that LinkedIn is sharing revenue or paying a bounty to the NYTimes for the partnership, although the companies aren’t commenting on the financial part of the deal.” ~~~~
Given the size of the recent fiscal stimulus, ~ $ 150 billion, why should we worry about the possible cost of the GSE rescue plan?
It’s estimated at $ 25 billion… pocket change… actually I wish we could see other analysis of the cost…
Acting Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Anthony Ryan Remarks on Effective Capital Markets and Market Discipline….
~~~~ ” …. There also is a need to move forward on a longer-term, strategic basis. Treasury released a Blueprint for Financial Regulatory Reform in March 2008. The current U.S. regulatory structure is not optimally positioned to address the modern financial system with its diversity of market participants, innovation, complexity of financial instruments, convergence of financial intermediaries and trading platforms, and global integration and interconnectedness.
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David Brooks writes today in the New York Times about America’s debt hangover… he is right in positing that this problem comes from inner weaknesses and societal signals… go anywhere, online or street level, and you are bombarded with consumerist noise… in fact its deafening… buy, buy, buy…
So he urges individuals and society to turn away from material matters… give up the pleasures of shopping and consuming… what a sea change for our nation if that happened… but what is happening in us? What is the motive force that moves millions to the mall?
It’s an elemental part of us… consumption … consume… connect… consuming is satisfying… it does gives pleasure… it takes the outside world and brings it inside..
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DTCC and Markit to Form Strategic OTC Derivatives Partnership…
It’s actually pretty astounding to think that a market the size of CDS… ~$450 trillion~ is only now getting some “official” centralized trade processing and confirm utility… good thing I wasn’t holding my breath … it’s the middle of the trade cycle… no price discovery… no settlement…. (ties to DTCC settlement… separate…)
~~~~ ” …. In addition to facilitating greater industry adoption of electronic confirmation, the new company will offer automated trade affirmation, trade allocation and novation consent solutions to the market on a cross-product basis. It will initially support both DTCC’s and Markit’s confirmation platforms. .”~~~~
We coulda built that in the time since Bear failed and more… it’s a show horse… not a work horse… it will give a “line of sight” to regulators on “aged fails” and other useful metrics… the weakest part is that its in London… home of FSA oversight… will anyone really “oversee” it? It’s likely that the dealer/owners will continue to control this space…
I saw Werner Herzog’s movie about the scientific community at the south pole, Encounters at the End of the Earth yesterday…
Herzog is German and he is described like this in Wikipedia ~~~~ “…His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams or people with unique talents in obscure fields….” ~~~~
This documentary movie encompasses both elements of that description… beautifully … the visuals are unlike any you will see anywhere… cell biologists scuba diving under the ice cap of the Ross Sea… photographing and documenting the animal life that lives there… single celled and many steps up the biologic ladder… this is the end of the earth here… uniquely talented people in obscure fields… Herzog slides up and brings us to the point of discovery…
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James Grant builds a mighty riff about the Credit Crisis of 2007/08 and Wall Street in the weekend WSJ…
~~~~ ” …. Now began one of the wildest chapters in the history of lending and borrowing. In flush times, our financiers seemingly compete to do the craziest deal. They borrow to the eyes and pay themselves lordly bonuses.
Naturally — eventually — they drive themselves, and the economy, into a crisis. And to the scene of this inevitable accident rush the government’s first responders — the Fed, the Treasury or the government-sponsored enterprises — bearing the people’s money.
One might suppose that such a recurrent chain of blunders would gall a politically potent segment of the population. That it has evidently failed to do so in 2008 may be the only important unreported fact of this otherwise compulsively documented election season…. ” ~~~~
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What a lovely week… the MSRB began outbound communication today of actions reviewed and taken by its Board of Directors … kudos… http://www.msrb.org/
~~~~ “The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board would like to provide dealers and other interested parties with information about actions taken by the Board at its quarterly meetings. Beginning today, the MSRB will post on its website and send to its e-mail subscribers a summary immediately following each Board meeting.
The information below summarizes the Board’s most recent meeting, which took place July 16-18, 2008.
( To subscribe go here…)
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The SEC is seeking comment on the issue of credit rating agencies reporting their “default statistics”. As part of the new round of rulemaking the Commission has elevated the importance of default statistics as a public measure of the accuracy and reliability of credit ratings… ”show us the proof” …
This is vital for the continued central place that ratings provide in credit markets… ratings are part of our sturdy framework… we must have unconflicted and accurate ratings… and the new proposed rules further enshrines competition between raters as a critical market check…
So a tricky question for the SEC was how to allow raters to demonstrate the reliability of their ratings to the markets through reporting of default statistics … especially how to do this in a manner that gives raters with different types of methodologies (qualitative and quantitative) the flexibility to incorporate either a varied symbol set, measurement of different components of default (PD/LGD) or incorporating new performance schemes which haven’t been developed yet…
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