Category Credit crisis

The damage from the frozen auction rate security market is spreading to municipal bonds in general. Hedge funds were borrowing short-term to go long-term and now that short term money is frozen or available. Hello margin calls and forced selling,…

The DOW was down 322, most of the other major indexes were sharply down too. The stock market has been whistling in the dark for about a month now, pretending all is well while the credit markets screamed “warning, warning,…

Variable-rate demand notes are long-term debt where the interest rate fluctuates on a short-term, sometimes weekly basis. Like their cousins before them; subprime, CDOs, SIEs, SIVs, and the rest of the toxic alphabet soup, these notes have just done a…

Yet mortgage rates are going back up again. I guess their plan didn’t work. Although cynics among might say the rate cuts were to save the investment banks and hedge funds, not homeowners. Meanwhile, a group of hospitals is screaming…