Contrarian Player Constructs Three-Legged Bullish Spread on Sprint Nextel Corp.
by Option Review - November 4th, 2010 5:55 am
Today’s tickers: S, WFC, LAMR, MGM, AMR, CASY & AIG
S - Sprint Nextel Corp. – A sizeable long-term bullish transaction involving 30,000 option contracts on Sprint Nextel Corp. indicates one optimistic player expects shares in the telecommunications company to rebound ahead of February 2011 expiration. Since reporting third-quarter earnings the morning of October 27, 2010, Sprint’s shares have fallen as much as 20.4% from a high of $4.85 on October 26 to today’s lowest value of $3.86. It looks like the 20% correction in the price of the underlying stock has made conditions favorable enough for this contrarian strategist to establish a relatively cheap bullish stance on Sprint. The trader enacted a three-legged bullish position, selling a chunk of put options in order to partially finance the purchase of a debit call spread. Sprint’s shares have recovered off their intraday low of $3.86 and are currently down 2.2% to stance at $4.01 as of 2:55 pm. The investor sold 10,000 puts at the February 2011 $3.5 strike for a premium of $0.21 each, purchased 10,000 now in-the-money calls at the February 2011 $4.0 strike at a premium of $0.43 per contract, and sold 10,000 calls at the February 2011 $5.0 strike for a premium of $0.16 apiece. Net premium paid to initiate the three-legged spread amounts to $0.06 per contract. The investor responsible for the transaction makes money if Sprint’s shares rally 1.25% over the current price of $4.01 to surpass the effective breakeven point at $4.06 by expiration day in February. The bullish trader will walk away with maximum potential profits of $0.94 per contract if Sprint’s shares surge 24.7% and trade above $5.00 ahead of expiration next year. The short stance in Feb. 2011 $3.5 strike puts implies the investor sees shares trading above $3.50, but also indicates his willingness to have 1 million shares of the underlying put to him at that price if the puts should land in-the-money by expiration. Interestingly, Sprint is scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings…
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DiggSIGTARP Calls Out Tim Geithner On Various Violations Including Data Manipulation, Lack Of Transparency, “Cruel” Cynicism, And Gross Incompetence
by ilene - October 26th, 2010 1:53 am
SIGTARP Calls Out Tim Geithner On Various Violations Including Data Manipulation, Lack Of Transparency, "Cruel" Cynicism, And Gross Incompetence
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
SigTarp Neil Barofsky has just released the most scathing critique of all the idiots in the administration, with a particular soft spot for Tim Geithner.
On the failure of TARP to increase lending:
As these quarterly reports to congress have well chronicled and as Treasury itself recently conceded in its acknowledgement that "banks continue to report falling loan balances," TARP has failed to "increase lending" with small businesses in particular unable to secured badly needed credit. Indeed, even now, overall lending continues to contract, despite the hundreds of billions of TARP dollars provided to banks with the express purpose to increase lending.
On TARP’s sole success of boosting Wall Street bonuses:
While large bonuses are returning to Wall Street, the nation’s poverty rate increased from 13.2% in 2008 to 14.3% in 2009, and for far too many, the recession has ended in name only.
On TARP’s failure in general:
Finally, the most specific of TARP’s Main Street goals, "preserving homeownership" has so far fallen woefully short, with TARP’s portion of the Administration’s mortgage modification program yielding only approximately 207,000 ongoing permanent modifications since TARP’s inception, a number that stands in stark contrast to the 5.5 million homes receiving foreclosure filings and more than 1.7 million homes that have been lost to foreclosure since January 2009.
On the Treasury’s scam in minimizing publicized AIG losses, and on Geithner as a Wall Street puppet whose actions are increasingly destroying public faith in the government:
While SIGTARP offers no opinion on the appropriateness or accuracy of the valuation contained in the Retrospective, we believe that the Retrospective fails to meet basic transparency standards by failing to disclose: (1) that the new lower estimate followed a change in the methodology that Treasury previously used to calculate expected losses on its AIG investment; and (2) that Treasury would be required by its auditors to use the older, and presumably less favorable, methodology in the official audited financials statements. To avoid potential confusion, Treasury should have disclosed that it had changed its valuation methodology and should have published a side-by-side comparison of its new numbers with what the projected losses would be under the auditor-approved methodology that Treasury had used previously and will
…
Which Way Wednesday – So Long Summers!
by Phil - September 22nd, 2010 8:06 am
Larry Summers is out!
Hopefully this portends a shake-up of the Administration’s economic policy but that will very much depend on who is appointed to replace him. It is, once again, the economy stupid and Larry’s stint as Director of the National Economics Council has given us far too much of the same at a time where we really needed — change. As Barry Rhitholtz points out:
He was one of the chief architects of the crisis. In addition to believing all of the usual foolishness about efficient markets, he bought into the radical deregulation arguments pushed by the free market absolutists.
Summers was Treasury Secretary when Glass Steagall was repealed. Instead of speaking out against the irresponsible Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999), he actively supported it. Instead of explaining to the public how Glass Steagall prevented Wall Street crises from spilling over into Main Street for 65 years, he rolled over for Citibank. The repeal of Glass Steagall was not a cause of the crisis, but it allowed the net damage to be far, far worse than it would have otherwise been. And it was emblematic of the corporate takeover of the legislative process. For a fee (campaign donation) you could write your own regulations. How could that ever go wrong?
Even more ruinously, Summers oversaw the passage of Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that exempted financial derivatives from all regulatory oversight. The CFMA made the AIG collapse not only possible, but likely. It helped to set up both Lehman and Bear Stearns. CFMA allowed AIG FP to write over $3 trillion in derivatives, reserving precisely zero dollars in case an underwritten derivative needed to be paid.
Conservatives should not be celebrating the departure of Larry Summers, he was a guy who "played ball" with Big Business and it is very likely that his replacement will have a less friendly stance towards our Corporate Citizens, who made 60% of the income in this country in 2009 but paid just 6% of the taxes ($138Bn).
Larry has to get out of town before the Administration goes after his meal-ticket and begins asking Big Business to pay their fair share, an issue that is very likely to shape the next election cycle. The chart on the left is a measure of taxes paid in relation to GDP and you’ll notice that corporations…
Goldman Sachs: Bullies on the Block
by ilene - September 14th, 2010 3:25 pm
Goldman Sachs: Bullies on the Block
Courtesy of Janet Tavakoli, President, Tavakoli Structured Finance
Originally published in Huffington Post
Arianna Huffington’s new book, Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream
For most Americans, the Great Recession never ended, and for many of the 14.9 million unemployed Americans, it’s a 21st century Depression. Yet in December 2009, Larry Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, told ABC news: "Today, everybody agrees that the recession is over, and the question is what the pace of the expansion is going to be."
The recession was over for bailed-out banks paying billions in bonuses. Taxpayers fund Wall Street with nearly zero-cost loans, and Congress changed accounting rules in April 2009 so that Wall Street firms could hide losses to create the illusion of "big profits," as they try to fill the gaping holes in their balance sheets.
Money Cartel’s Yes Men
The money cartel is as dangerous as the Mexican drug cartel. Its weapons of choice are taxpayer subsidized funds for swarms of Washington lobbyists, "money jobs" for politically connected yes men, and lucrative positions for former regulators and the law firms that hire them. Wall Street is winning the class war, and taxpayers supplied the arms.
[White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel famously declared, "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go
…
SOME BAILOUT QUESTIONS FED CZAR ‘BERNANKE THE MAGNIFICENT’ STILL HASN’T ANSWERED (BEATDOWN)
by ilene - September 12th, 2010 3:23 pm
MUST READ: Some Bailout Questions FED Czar ‘Bernanke The Magnificent’ STILL Hasn’t Answered (Beatdown)
Courtesy of The Daily Bail
Why were bank bondholders made whole, while taxpayers got shafted? That’s the most important question of all, yet no one has ever asked him.
—
Two exceptional editorials from the WSJ earlier this week. Reprinted with permission.
On the key facts behind the bailouts of 2008, regulators have stonewalled the public, the press and even the inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. On Wednesday, we’ll find out if they can also stonewall the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Chairman Phil Angelides and his panel will begin two days of hearings on the subject of "Too Big to Fail," featuring testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Sheila Bair. Across bailouts from Bear Stearns to AIG, the government has refused to release its analysis of the "systemic risks" that compelled it to mount unprecedented interventions into the financial system with taxpayer money. Two years after the crisis, Mr. Angelides and his colleagues should finally let the sun shine on this critical period of our economic history.
A year ago we told you about former FDIC official Vern McKinley, who has made a series of Freedom of Information Act requests. He wanted to know what Fed governors meant when they said a Bear Stearns failure would cause a "contagion." This term was used in the minutes of the Fed meeting at which the central bank discussed plans by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to finance Bear’s sale to J.P. Morgan Chase. The minutes contained no detail on how exactly the fall of Bear would destroy America.
He also requested minutes of the FDIC board meeting at which regulators approved financing for a Citigroup takeover of Wachovia. To provide this assistance, the board had to invoke the "systemic risk" exception in the Federal Deposit Insurance Act, and it therefore had to assert that such assistance was necessary for the health of the financial system. Yet days later, Wachovia cut a better deal to sell itself to Wells Fargo, instead of Citi. So how necessary was the assistance?
The regulators have been giving Mr. McKinley the Heisman, but two weeks ago federal Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle made the FDIC show her the Wachovia documents. She is still…
Jobless Thursday – America’s Infrastructure Crisis
by Phil - September 9th, 2010 8:13 am
What a disaster!
Not only are our students failing to keep up with the rest of the World but America is close to getting a failing grade in Infrastructure. That’s right, what was once the World’s mightiest and proudest economy, this once great nation of builders has been given an overall grade of D in the American Society of Civil Engineers report on our Infrastructure.
The 2009 Grades include: Aviation (D), Bridges (C), Dams (D), Drinking Water (D-), Energy (D+), Hazardous Waste (D), Inland Waterways (D-), Levees (D-), Public Parks and Recreation (C-), Rail (C-), Roads (D-), Schools (D), Solid Waste (C+), Transit (D), and Wastewater (D-). Awful? Shameful? How about DANGEROUS? Deadly even…
For one thing, The number of high hazard dams—dams that, should they fail, pose a significant risk to human life—has increased by more than 3,000 just since 2007, when there were "just" 1,000 dams at risk and 3,000 to pro actively maintain but the administration refused to fund the project, now the costs have tripled as the situation deteriorates but that’s nothing compared to what happens if just a few of them break completely. 1,819 dams are now in the "high hazard" category and, with the current budget, for every one damn that is reparied, two more become an emergency.
In urban areas, roadway congestion tops 40 percent. According to the report, decades of underfunding and inattention have jeopardized the ability of our nation’s infrastructure to support our economy and facilitate our way of life. At risk of catastrophic failure besides the dams (including levees) are things like our drinking water, sewage systems, bridges, waterways, rail lines, airports, roadways (especially elevated ones) and, of course, our entire electrical grid. Additionally, 7 Billion gallons of clean drinking water is lost every day through leaking pipes – that’s 23 gallons per citizen per day WASTED for want of $11Bn in repairs – don’t bother worrying about it, the last Administration wouldn’t fund it in 2001 or 2006 so why bother now – 10 Trillion gallons later?
The ASCE calculates a 5-year $2.2Tn investment is needed to address the situation, that’s $500Bn (25%) more than it was 5-years ago, when they released their last report and nothing was done by the previous administration. So, rather than having invested in America, putting people to work and improving EVERYONE’s way of life, we spent over $1Tn fighting a war, another $600Bn a year on our regular military operations and gave over $1Tn worth of taxe breaks…
AIG: Res Ipsa Loquitur
by ilene - September 4th, 2010 9:49 pm
AIG: Res Ipsa Loquitur
Courtesy of Roddy Boyd, The Financial Investigator
Editor’s Note: A graf was added describing the signal contribution of The Wall Street Journal’s Serena Ng and Liam Pleven in explaining the Securities Lending unit in a February 5, 2009 article. Rather than fold it into the graf where I describe how Miles Weiss and Andrew Ross Sorkin advanced the story, I chose to break it out seperately. Accountability and transparency, to say nothing of accuracy, is central to enterprise reporting and when I fall short, I seek to immediately remedy the situation.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s document release last Wednesday doesn’t offer the curious an answer to a question that hasn’t received much play since AIG’s collapse in September 2008.
The question is: “How Did AIG really collapse?”
Not: “How did they get in trouble?” Or: “Who is to Blame?”
But rather, what led to a firm that had a AA- rating, around $160-billion in market cap and $14-billion in profits–with real cash generation capacity to boot– in fiscal 2006 effectively go out of business in September 2008?
The answer is not Goldman Sachs.
It would be exceptionally easy–for no one more so than me since as I am in the process of writing a book on the collapse of AIG called Fatal Risk–if it had though.
The picture painted of Goldman Sachs, especially from legislators in Washington D.C. and the media–nowhere more so than the business desk of the New York Times–centers largely on the now infamous series of swaps that one of Goldman’s proprietary trading desks entered into with AIG as central to its collapse. In this view, Goldman’s meticulous enforcement of so-called credit support agreements and the billions of dollars in collateral calls forced upon AIG’s Financial Products unit is seen as fatal.
Yet months of investigation into the matter suggest a different answer: What killed AIG was much more likely the financial and managerial collapse within AIG Global Investment Corporation’s securities lending program.
The management of the unit, under Win Neuger, took a portfolio that had been throwing off about four basis points of profit since inception in the 1990s and in 2005 began imposing a 30-basis point profit target. Outside of the sheer impossibility of improving margins 7.5 times, the practical hurdles to obtaining creditworthiness and liquidity were formidable. So daunting, in fact, that creditworthiness and liquidity were tossed out and a…
Does Our Economy Really Have to Run on Fraud?
by ilene - September 3rd, 2010 5:04 pm
Does Our Economy Really Have to Run on Fraud?
Courtesy of MICHAEL HUDSON, writing at CounterPunch
What is the difference between today’s economy and Lehman Brothers just before it collapsed in September 2008? Should Lehman, the economy, Wall Street – or none of the above – be bailed out of bad mortgage debt? How did the Fed and Treasury decide which Wall Street firms to save – and how do they decide whether or not to save U.S. companies, personal mortgage debtors, states and cities from bankruptcy and insolvency today? Why did it start by saving the richest financial institutions, leaving the “real” economy locked in debt deflation?
Stated another way, why was Lehman the only Wall Street firm permitted to go under? How does the logic that Washington used in its case compare to how it is treating the economy at large? Why bail out Wall Street – whose managers are rich enough not to need to spend their gains – and not the quarter of U.S. homeowners unfortunate enough also to suffer “negative equity” but not qualify for the help that the officials they elect gave to Wall Street’s winners by enabling Bear Stearns, A.I.G., Countrywide Financial and other gamblers to pay their bad debts?
There was disagreement last Wednesday at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission now plodding along through its post mortem hearings on the causes of Wall Street’s autumn 2008 collapse and ensuing bailout. Federal Reserve economists argue that the economy – and Wall Street firms apart from Lehman – merely had a liquidity problem, a temporary failure to find buyers for its junk mortgages. By contrast, Lehman had a more deep-seated “balance sheet” problem: negative equity. A taxpayer bailout would have been an utter waste, not recoverable.
Lehman CEO Dick Fuld is bitter. He claims that Lehman was unfairly singled out. After all, the Fed lent $29 billion to help JPMorgan Chase buy out Bear Stearns the preceding spring. In the wake of Lehman’s failure it seemed to gain the courage to say, “Never again,” and avoided new collapses by bailing out A.I.G. – saving all its counterparties from having to take a loss.
Was this not a giveaway? Fuld implied. Why couldn’t the Fed and Treasury do for Lehman what they did with other Wall Street investment firms and stock brokers: let it reclassify itself as a bank so it could pawn off…
The Horrific Derivatives Bubble That Could One Day Destroy The Entire World Financial System
by ilene - August 15th, 2010 2:12 pm
The Horrific Derivatives Bubble That Could One Day Destroy The Entire World Financial System
Courtesy of Michael Snyder at Economic Collapse
Today there is a horrific derivatives bubble that threatens to destroy not only the U.S. economy but the entire world financial system as well, but unfortunately the vast majority of people do not understand it. When you say the word "derivatives" to most Americans, they have no idea what you are talking about. In fact, even most members of the U.S. Congress don’t really seem to understand them. But you don’t have to get into all the technicalities to understand the bigger picture.
Basically, derivatives are financial instruments whose value depends upon or is derived from the price of something else. A derivative has no underlying value of its own. It is essentially a side bet. Originally, derivatives were mostly used to hedge risk and to offset the possibility of taking losses. But today it has gone way, way beyond that. Today the world financial system has become a gigantic casino where insanely large bets are made on anything and everything that you can possibly imagine.
The derivatives market is almost entirely unregulated and in recent years it has ballooned to such enormous proportions that it is almost hard to believe. Today, the worldwide derivatives market is approximately 20 times the size of the entire global economy.
Because derivatives are so unregulated, nobody knows for certain exactly what the total value of all the derivatives worldwide is, but low estimates put it around 600 trillion dollars and high estimates put it at around 1.5 quadrillion dollars.
Do you know how large one quadrillion is?
Counting at one dollar per second, it would take 32 million years to count to one quadrillion.…
Report: Bailout Money Ended Up in Foreign Hands
by ilene - August 12th, 2010 1:02 pm
Report: Bailout Money Ended Up in Foreign Hands
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
The Congressional Oversight Panel has found (!) some disturbing new information surrounding 2008′s most not excellent bailout programs, among them, details on where exactly AIG’s cash infusions went. Here’s a hint: it wasn’t back into the system.
WaPo:
Members of the Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report due out Thursday, note that America’s broad financial rescues had more impact internationally than the narrower bailout programs of other countries had on U.S. firms.
They cite as a case study the bailout of insurance giant American International Group. While the Treasury committed up to $70 billion to AIG through its Troubled Assets Relief Program, the report states, much of that money ended up in the coffers of foreign trading partners in France, Germany and other countries. The cash that the United States poured into AIG alone equaled twice what France spent on its total capital injection program, and half what Germany spent.
"The point we make forcefully in this report is that there were no data about where this money was going, no information about where this money was going," said panel chair Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor. "Without that information, no one could make a deliberate policy choice" about whether to ask foreign governments to contribute to the financial rescues.
Isn’t that why Warren has a job? To figure that out?
And yet for all her pristine carrying on over who got what, it appears as though someone forgot to turn off the spigot. But now instead of the banks and the auto companies, the bailouts are being pumped out to homedebtors, college students, whoever the hell is stupid enough to have a stake in Fannie and Freddie and of course broke ass state and local governments who can’t pay their bills.
The outrage over the bailouts of late 2008 and most of 2009 is obvious but where is the oversight committee to say enough is e-f*&king-nough already and cut it off?!
Reports. Meh.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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