Sunday, March 18, 2007

Some Ramblings, etc.

I noticed that yields on medium grade bonds have upticked while Treasury yields have downticked [weekly changes from Barron's]. This needs to be watched. Per my post a few days ago I pointed out how the subprime residential problems can be passed to corporates & commercial mortgage securities and other debt via the CDO/CLO/CBO markets. Barron's has a few mentions of this possibility [Barron's 3/19/2007, pages 27 and M10], basically giving more detail. The WSJ had a minor blurb, too, a couple days ago. Glad I could get that to you first :-)

We are freezing this morning - we got about 10 inches of snow the past 48 hours and it's 15F now. I had a warning about this cold wave, but it's a little worse than predicted. The first day of Spring is March 21 - three days away :-(

This Presidential election campaign is going to get really tiring soon. They are starting very early, due to the front-loaded primaries & the need to raise mega-$$$ for TV ads. I don't know who I will support, yet. I'm trying to ignore it for awhile.

China raised interest rates over the weekend. That might give the bears some motivation to push the markets lower Monday.

The WSJ had an article about how ETF trading is dominated by beefers & how intraday prices can get way out of whack, even for US only ETFs. They gave an example how the IWM was about 1% off vs. the underlying stocks in the recent swoon. That is very troubling. More market maker looting, I guess. The greed of the Street is without limit.

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