Pre-migration untagged articles

--Elliot Ganz, general counsel for the Loan Syndications and Trading Association, regarding investors pulling out of their primary commitments after a deal has allocated but has not yet closed.

The following charts show the top five advancers and decliners in terms of % moves in the loan, bond and credit default swap markets for the previous week.

A conference call between banks yesterday (Thursday) to revise jumbo marketmaking standards narrowly averted a complete breakdown of trading in covered bonds.

The implications of market-wide repricing of credit started to sink in for MTN market participants this week as some issuers began posting wider levels and many dealers reported increased inquiry for buybacks.

The next few days are crucial for the European commercial paper market as, of the $22bn of asset backed CP maturing on Monday, only $5bn had been placed by yesterday afternoon (Thursday), leaving the market in a race against time to avoid up to $17bn of liquidity draws.

The European Commission this week revealed that it would conduct an investigation into credit rating agencies as a result of the problems in subprime mortgage backed securities and collateralised debt obligations. On Wednesday French president Nicholas Sarkozy urged German chancellor Angela Merkel and other G7 leaders in a letter to investigate the rating agencies and to improve monitoring of financial markets.

The shockwaves set off by the US subprime crisis shook the pillars of the equity and fixed income markets yesterday (Thursday) and threatened to bring the architecture of the financial markets tumbling down.

We have been asked who harpooned Simon Bunce, the totally decent head of the UBS Investment Bank’s fixed income group. One minute, Buncey was up there and looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world and the next he was flapping on Neptune’s trident. Who said that this was going to be a quiet summer?

Icelandic bank Kaupthing made its biggest acquisition to date when it agreed to buy Dutch merchant bank NIBC for close to Eu3bn on Wednesday. The move comes just a week after Moody’s downgraded NIBC after it revealed losses of Eu137m on securities exposed to the US subprime mortgage market.

Morgan Stanley sets up so-called ‘Carbon Bank’

Who today remembers the NatWest Three lower-middle managers, who played rewarding games with Enron (very RIP) and its disgraced chief financial officer, Andy Fastow?