Der USA Bären-Thread
Bezeichnend auch, dass der krasse Absturz letzte Woche als "zunehmende Volatilität" bezeichnet wird.
Paulson: Feeling good about U.S. economy
U.S. Treasury chief says he doesn't see the country slipping into recession.
March 4 2007: 2:52 PM EST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Sunday said he feels good about the U.S. economy and does not see the country slipping into recession.
In an interview with ABC's "This Week," Paulson offered some soothing words for financial markets after a week of volatility following some remarks by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan that a recession was possible this year. Paulson acknowledged that an economic slowdown is possible, but said he saw a rosier outlook.
"Clearly, no one's got a crystal ball. So there's always a possibility that there will be a downturn, always a possibility," Paulson said. "But I don't see it. I think we have a healthy economy in the U.S."
He listed the positives for the U.S. economy, saying U.S. exports and consumer spending were strong, and some 7.4 million jobs have been created in the last few years. Real income is up and inflation is contained, he said.
"So I'm feeling good about the U.S. economy," Paulson said.
Last week Wall Street suffered its worst weekly decline in stock prices since January 2003, in a volatile week that rattled investors and raised questions about the U.S. economy and government borrowing from countries like China.
Paulson, who headed the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs (Charts) before joining President George W. Bush's administration, said debt to other countries should not be viewed as a sign of weakness but as a sign of strength.
"As I look at the demand for ... U.S. treasuries, I'm very pleased to see demand from all around the world - from governments, from individuals - it's a positive, that foreign investors want to own our treasuries," Paulson said. "Interest rates are lower, it's helping our economic growth in this country."
Huge U.S. trade deficits and mounting debt held by foreigners have come under fire from Democrats who control Congress. Paulson heads to Asia this week to talk about trade. He plans to meet with Japanese officials on Monday and also visit South Korea and China.
Paulson said the U.S. relationship with China is important and has many dimensions.
"I don't believe we need to make China an enemy," Paulson said.
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Aber vorher wie die Hölle pushen. Kopfschüttel.
Warum nicht 1 mal in Dausend Jahren ex ante ?
wann dürfen wir mit Interventionen (und welchen) rechnen.
Bisher lassen sie ja freien Lauf. Aber ich denke, die Japaner dürften als erste die Nerven verlieren; die Frage ist wann (bei welchem $Yen bzw. EURYen Kurs) und wie qwird dann interveniert?
Das dürfte dann einen (kurzfristigen) Rebound an den Aktienmärkten auslösen.
Bitte um Meinungen
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So gesehen glaube ich kaum, dass die Japaner gegen diese Lawine von rückabzuwickelnden Carry-Trades (Volumen: 1 Billion Dollar) antizyklisch dagegenhalten. Das hieße sonst Geld verbrennen und den Carry-Tradern unter die Arme greifen. Unter USD/JPY = 110 wird da wohl nichts passieren.
In USA könnte es, wenn die Märkte weiter steil fallen, eine überraschende außerplanmäßige Zinssenkung der Fed geben. Dies geschah auch 1997, 1998 (Asien-/Russlandkrise) und 2001 (Attentate) - allerdings auch erst, NACHDEM die Märkte stark gefallen waren.
Ich glaube, alle Interventionen und auch marktstützende Zinssenkungen erfolgen eher prozyklisch.
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Dass momentan, bei sinkenden Kursen, viele die Welt schwärzer sehen ist normal. Die Kurse machen die Nachrichten und sie dienen der Interpretation der Nachrichten. Hat mit der realen Welt momentan noch nichts zu tun. Ein sich allgemein ausbreitender Pessimismus würde die Konjunktur allerdings stark schädigen.
wird sich ausdehnen, zumindest in den USA. Ich erinnere mich noch, als während wir den Vermögensverlust duch die Housingkrise thematisiert haben, die Bullen auf die Vermögensgewinne durch den steigenden Aktienmarkt hingewiesen haben.
Jetzt haben wir Vermögensverluste auf beiden Gebieten.
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Was ich damit zum Audruck bringen will ?
Da die die Herren entweder beamtet sind oder auf gutdotierten Verträgen sitzen,
jucken sie kollabierende Wirtschaften -resp. Börsen- herzlich wenig.
Ps. Nach mir die Sintflut meine Herren. In dem Sinne !!!!
Sein Lachen [# 376) ist allerdings ähnlich verzerrt wie seine schönredende Botschaft, dass "alles im Lot" sei.
nachdem man in den letzten Tagen ja wirklich viel Geld verdienen konnte juckt es ja doch in den Fingern, damit nicht aufzuhören.
Dummerweise ist nächste Woche Hexensabatt. War das nicht der 15.3.?
Wie positioniert ihr euch für die Verfallstermine?
regards
Fred
New Century ist der zweitgrößte Subprime-Hypothekenverleiher in USA.
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New Century Financial Corp. may be active. The second- biggest originator of subprime mortgages in the U.S. said the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California is running a criminal inquiry ``in connection with trading in the company's securities, as well as accounting errors regarding the company's allowance for repurchase losses.'' The shares didn't trade in Europe.
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NEW YORK TIMES
March 5, 2007
Mortgage Crisis Spirals, and Casualties Mount
By JULIE CRESWELL and VIKAS BAJAJ
Even in affluent Orange County, Calif., the growing wealth of executives and brokers in the booming mortgage industry was hard to miss.
For Kal Elsayed, a former executive at New Century Financial, a large lender based in Irvine, driving a red convertible Ferrari to work at a company that provided home loans to people with low incomes and weak credit might have appeared ostentatious [angeberhaft], he now acknowledges. But, he says, that was nothing compared with the private jets that executives at other companies had.
“You just lost touch with reality after a while because that’s just how people were living,” said Mr. Elsayed, 42, who spent nine years at New Century before leaving to start his own mortgage firm in 2005. “We made so much money you couldn’t believe it. And you didn’t have to do anything. You just had to show up.”
Just as the technology boom of the late 1990s turned twenty-something programmers into dot-com billionaires, and leveraged buyouts a decade earlier turned Wall Street bankers into Masters of the Universe, the explosive growth in subprime lending turned mortgage bankers and brokers into multimillionaires seemingly overnight.
Now an escalating crisis in the market, which seemed to reach a new crescendo late last week, is threatening a wide band of people. Foremost are the poor and minority homeowners who used easy credit to buy houses that are turning out to be too expensive for them now that mortgage rates are going up, but the pain is also being felt widely throughout the business world.
Large companies that bought subprime lenders during the boom, like H&R Block and HSBC, are now scrambling to sell them or scale back their exposure. Many investors are also likely to suffer: Wall Street firms made billions in fees, commissions and trading revenue from packaging and selling subprime mortgages to them as bonds.
New Century has emerged as a poster child for the lenders that rode that boom to the top and are now in free fall. The company disclosed on Friday that federal prosecutors and securities regulators were investigating stock sales and accounting errors. The latter could jeopardize billions of dollars in financing for the company, which issued $39.4 billion in subprime loans in the first nine months of last year.
Weakening home prices and rising default rates have rocked the subprime business. But for those who cashed out before the market turned, the ride up was particularly sweet. The three founders of New Century, for example, together made more than $40.5 million in profits from selling shares in the company from 2004 to 2006, according to an analysis by Thomson Financial. They collected millions of dollars more in dividends, salaries, bonuses and perks.
The company said in a statement yesterday that the founders were “still significant shareholders,” noting that they collectively owned about 7 percent of the company at the end of last year.
New Century’s stock price, which seemed to mirror the trajectory of the subprime business, peaked at nearly $66 a share in December of 2004 and traded in the $40s most of last year; on Friday, it was trading at $11 a share after the market closed. In a series of sales from August to November, two of the company’s founders sold shares for an average price of about $40 a share, for a total profit of $21.4 million.
It is not known whether the stock sales by the founders are among the sales being examined by federal investigators. Some of them had been part of scheduled stock sales that are often used by executives to diversify their portfolios. But some of the sales occurred on the same day that the executives entered the plans. A New Century spokeswoman, Laura Oberhelman, said that executives declined further comment.
The founders’ stock also rose in the social circles of southern California, the epicenter of the boom in subprime. Five of the 10 biggest providers of subprime mortgages last year had their headquarters in the region.
Robert K. Cole, 60, a co-founder who retired as chairman and chief executive last year, lives in a 6,100-square-foot oceanfront home in Laguna Beach that is valued at tens of millions of dollars and was once owned by the chief executive of Pimco Advisors, the giant bond trading and management firm. Edward F. Gotschall, 52, another co-founder who is vice chairman of the board, donated $3 million for an expanded trauma center at Mission Hospital that will be named for him and his wife Susan.
The executives from New Century are by no means alone in cashing in on the bonanza, and they do not appear to have scored the biggest profits. That title may be claimed by Angelo R. Mozilo, the chief executive of Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest stand-alone mortgage company and one of the largest subprime lenders last year. He reaped more than $270 million in profits from sales of stock and the exercise of stock options from 2004 to the start of this year, according to the Thompson analysis.
Of course, most of the 500,000 people who work in the mortgage industry did not cash in so grandly. The wealth was concentrated among executives, loan officers and brokers, because the greatest rewards were meted out in the form of commissions, bonuses and stock awards.
“In the hot times, it was not unusual to see a broker make a million bucks,” said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication. “You can carry that up further to people who ran the companies. The whole business revolves around personal compensation.”
The hot times are clearly over.
New Century’s disclosure of the federal investigations on Friday was the most serious in a string of shocks to have rocked the industry in the last three months.
A handful of lenders have sought bankruptcy protection, several have been acquired and a few have been shut down. Also on Friday, Fremont General, a top-five lender, said it planned to leave the business.
Industry officials say they are seeing an exodus of executives and salespeople as companies fold, cut jobs and push out early leaders.
“Everyone has run for the hills,” said William D. Dallas, whose company, Ownit Mortgage, filed for bankruptcy protection in December after it lost financing from Merrill Lynch and other banks.
For the borrowers of these mortgages, it may become more difficult to refinance if lending standards are tightened significantly. Many are already facing the prospect of payment shock when low, fixed-interest mortgage rates adjust to higher, variable rates.
On Wall Street, big investment banks could lose a significant source of revenue if the appetite for bonds backed by mortgages dries up.
In the last two years many skeptics began warning that the red-hot housing market and adjustable-rate loans would blend into a toxic brew. Last year, subprime loans totaled $600 billion, or about 20 percent of all mortgages, up from $120 billion and 5 percent in 2001, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. More than half of subprime loans have adjustable rates.
Many of the problems that have surfaced thus far are not tied to the resetting of rates. Rather, they stem from a sharp and early spike in the default rates among loans issued last year.
For example, about 13.8 percent of the loans in a group of mortgages New Century sold to investors in April were behind in payments or in foreclosure by January. By comparison, only 6 percent of loans in a pool sold to investors in March 2005 had met that same fate by January 2006.
Investors and regulators fear that the problems will only worsen as so many borrowers have fallen behind so quickly, especially at a time when the overall economy is healthy. The phenomenon suggests that lending standards were significantly weakened last year and that lenders were not as watchful for fraudulent transactions.
For New Century, the early payment defaults pose significant financial problems. In the first nine months of last year, Wall Street banks and investors that it does business with forced it to buy back $469 million in loans it had sold to them, up from $240 million for the same period in 2005.
The company was able to sell back about half of those loans at a discount of 26.5 percent. How it handled the remainder — about $227 million — is now under scrutiny. According to accounting rules the company should have valued the loans on its books for what they were worth today, not their previous face value. But it did not.
If it had, the company would have seen its earnings fall by about $60 million before taxes, wiping out most of its profit in the third quarter, according to Zach Gast, an analyst at the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, a forensic accounting firm.
This is important, because the company’s financing agreements require that it not lose money for any rolling six-month period. On Friday, New Century said it did not expect to make a profit in the six months that ended in December and that it was negotiating with lenders to waive the requirement but has only secured six of 11 waivers it needs.
“They had losses sitting on their balance sheets,” Mr. Gast said.
In August, the company’s chief financial officer, Patti M. Dodge, announced she was stepping down from her post to oversee investor relations, a department that typically reports to the chief financial officer. Taj S. Bindra, a former executive at Washington Mutual, replaced her in November.
For the second time in a decade, New Century finds itself fighting to survive. The firm’s roots were planted at Plaza Home Mortgage Bank where the three founders of New Century — Mr. Cole, a longtime mortgage executive; Mr. Gotschall; and a lawyer named Bradley A. Morrice — worked together. The three formed New Century in 1995 after Plaza was sold to Fleet Mortgage Group, now a part of Washington Mutual.
In the late 1990s, New Century narrowly survived accounting concerns and a scare in the bond market after Russia’ s default in 1998. It pulled through thanks to an investment by U.S. Bancorp, a bank based in Minneapolis.
With interest rates at historic lows, it quickly grabbed a big share of the fast-growing subprime market during the housing boom.
“They walked into a niche industry at a time when everything was lining up perfectly for what they did,” said W. Scott Simon, a managing director at Pimco Advisors. “In 2001, 2002 and 2003 the subprime business was just phenomenally profitable. Home prices kept appreciating and it seemed that no loans ever went bad.”
(Wenns crasht hab ich Pech gehabt)
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Alan Farley
What's That Smell?
3/5/2007 8:44 AM EST
This day already smells funny. Globex index futures bottomed out more than 8 hours ago and keep getting supported at 1370/1705. Not a typical Monday or Globex pattern. Hidden hands are at work. Looks like low of day may already be on the books.
THE RATINGS GAME
Analysts warn New Century may not survive
'Death spiral' envisioned as possibility for subprime lender
By Greg Morcroft, MarketWatch
Last Update: 9:02 AM ET Mar 5, 2007
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Several analysts agreed Monday that New Century Financial Corp., one of the nation's largest subprime mortgage lenders, likely faces liquidation or bankruptcy following revelations that it's under criminal investigation and in violation of debt covenants with several lenders.
"New Century is more likely to enter the death spiral we had feared, as filing delays, financial difficulties, likely restricted liquidity and regulatory/criminal investigations could conspire to limit its options outside of bankruptcy," Merrill Lynch analysts wrote early Monday.
As troubles continue to roil the market for subprime mortgages, New Century (NEW) disclosed late Friday that it's technically in default with several lenders and that federal regulators have begun an investigation.
New Century shares fell 56.7%, plummeting $8.31 in premarket action, after dropping in Friday's session as well.
Subprime mortgages are offered to homebuyers who fail to meet the strictest lending standards. Lenders specializing in such loans, like New Century, rely in part on big banks to finance their operations. Known as warehouse lenders, these institutions require that subprime lenders meet certain minimum financial targets or they otherwise have the right to end the business relationship.
Analysts at Jefferies & Co. also said the company has moved into worst-case scenario territory with its Friday filing. They cut their rating on the shares to underperform from hold.
New Century said it had received waivers for being out of compliance with debt covenants from six of 11 lenders, but deals with others remain uncertain.
"New Century's situation is not unlike the 'Prisoners Dilemma.' If the majority of lenders stand pat, they can mitigate losses. However, if they believe that other lenders will pull their lines, those first to act will be best served," Jefferies analysts told clients.
The analysts said that while it's possible New Century would get more waivers, "it is impossible for us to reasonably predict the behavior of more than a dozen different financial institutions."
Analysts agreed that the chances of bankruptcy have increased as the firm's share fell sharply and passed what might have been seen as a reasonable liquidation value. Bear Stearns analysts noted this in their Monday research report, saying that they reduced their estimated liquidation value to $8 to $9 a share, down from $10 to $11 previously. They "expect the stock to trade toward this level as the odds of bankruptcy appear to have increased."
At the same time, analysts noted the possibility that New Century shares could see some upside in Monday trading as there is a large short position -- shares that were borrowed and then sold in the hopes they could be bought back cheaper later -- but said the bias remained strongly to the downside.
Indeed, Morgan Stanley advised caution for those investors tempted to buy on weakness to "take into account the full spectrum of potential outcomes."
Greg Morcroft is MarketWatch's financial editor in New York.
hat eineGewinnwarnung für das erste Quartal abgegeben. Die unternehmenseigene
Umsatzprognose in Höhe von 1,6 bis 1,7 Milliarden US-Dollar werde
voraussichtlich verfehlt, teilte das Unternehmen am Montag in San Francisco mit.
AMD-Chef Hector Ruiz werde diese Nachricht an diesem Montag auch bei der Morgan
Stanley Technologiy Conference bekannt geben. Im Preiskampf mit dem Rivalen
Intel
hatte AMD für das vierte Quartal 2006 bereits rote Zahlen gemeldet. DerUmsatz war leicht zurückgegangen./stw/zb
By Greg Robb
Last Update: 10:03 AM ET Mar 5, 2007
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Nonmanufacturing sectors of the U.S. economy expanded at a slower pace during February, the Institute for Supply Management reported Monday. The ISM nonmanufacturing index fell to 54.3% from 59% in January. The decline was more than expected. Economists were looking the index to dip to 57.5%. The headline index is not a weighted average of the survey's other key components so the details are important. New orders fell to 54.8% from 55.4%. The employment index rose to 52.2% from 51.7%. Inflation pressures eased a bit. The price index slipped to 53.8% from 55.2% in the previous month.
Dies nur als Warnung für die KGV/Dividenden-Ritter.
Hätte Novastar eine Überlebungs-Chance, wäre die Aktie mit KGV von 2,53 und Dividenden-Rentite von 108,63 % der Wahnsinn schlechthin. Da Novastar aber höchstwahrscheinlich pleite geht, wäre der KAUF der Wahnsinn schlechthin. Heute ging es mal wieder 28 % runter mit dem Kurs.
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