Pre-migration untagged articles

The European Covered Bond Council is to set up a new group combining issuers and market-makers to solve current market-making problems and tackle future crises.

Dollar swap spreads crunched sharply lower after the Federal Reserve came to the rescue of the markets like the Seventh Cavalry, while a sudden wave of new issuance helped levels lower as well.

The European CDS market, much in need of some good news, rallied strongly this week thanks to a series of salutary events, with the result that the credit indices are now trading well through fair value.

Fitch said this week that it did not expect things to get any easier for structured investment vehicles in the near term, while Moody’s put the ratings of a pair of SIVs on review for possible downgrade.

Private placements in both vanilla and structured formats were again hampered by the difficulty of reconciling issuer and investor pricing expectations this week, but enquiry is slowly picking up and several significant deals were priced.

The seemingly unassailable Goldman Sachs yesterday (Thursday), confirmed its ability to make money in any market. The bank reported the third best quarterly profit results in its 138 year history, propelled by its strategy of shorting mortgage-backed securities.

The iTraxx indices rolled into the Series 8 this week and progressed smoothly and without incident, as is now common in these indices, which were launched in May 2004.