Pre-migration untagged articles

The dollar swap market continued to demonstrate extraordinary dislocation and dysfunction at both ends of the curve this week as the global banking crisis entered a yet more dramatic phase.

Moody’s on Wednesday placed on review for possible downgrade the Aaa rating assigned to Dexia Municipal Agency’s obligations foncières, but the explanation for the move caused confusion and surprise among analysts.

Dealers of private EMTNs: Non-syndicated deals for less than $250m excluding financial repackaged SPVs, self-led deals and issues with a term of less than 365 days.

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Up to four of Britain’s biggest banks are likely to tap the UK government’s £50bn recapitalisation scheme over the next few days, in an effort to rebuild their tier one capital ratios up to newly required levels.

Government guarantees have yet to boost the ailing MTN primary market for credit names, with investors worrying about the details and solidity of the guarantees and a secondary market teeming with offers that need to be soaked up before primary issuance looks attractive again.

Spain has announced a Eu30bn to Eu50bn fund to buy "high quality" assets from Spanish banks. The plan seems to be modelled on the US Tarp, but very few details have been revealed.

Standard & Poor’s and Fitch have put Financial Security Assurance’s triple-A rating on review for downgrade. The rating agencies are unsure whether FSA’s parent, Dexia, will continue to support it. S&P said that FSA’s ability to raise capital is strongly linked and limited to Dexia.

Covered bond bankers were able to take some positives away from events this week, despite the the paralysis in the primary bond markets and the European banking industry stumbling from one failure to the next.

The Swiss market showed even higher levels of resilience this week as not only high quality quasi-sovereign issuers came to market, but also the first corporate deal since Lehman Brothers’ collapse.

The figures being bandied around for the UK bank bailout are huge — £250bn in guarantees, £25bn to buy bank shares and another £25bn as a back-stop requirement. How much of this is hard cash and how much will the government have to raise in the Gilts market are the questions at the forefront of market participants’ minds.

Not so mad money