Tag Archives: finance

NAB takes $830 million hit

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nab, the largest of Australia’s banks saw its share price fall by almost 14% today after they announced an A$830 million (US$795 million) provision on mortgage-backed CDOs (“collateralised debt obligations”).

It has been estimated that the US sub-prime mortgage crisis has resulted in over US$450 billion in write-downs to date and, earlier this year, the IMF suggested that the figure could rise to almost US$1 trillion. Up until now, Australian bank balance sheets had appeared fairly clean compared to their global peers, and they had avoided the large write-downs that have become common-place elsewhere over the last year. So what happened at nab?

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Update on Sydney Petrol Prices

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A little while ago I wrote about the relationship between crude oil prices and the price Sydney motorists are paying for petrol at the pump. The Australian Automobile Association (AAA) has now released their price data for June and, not surprisingly, prices continued to track moves implied by rising crude oil prices. The simple regression model suggested that average prices would be up 8 cents/litre. The AAA data shows a rise of 10 cents/litre in the average Sydney price.

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The Axe Falls at Moody’s

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A month ago, I blogged about news of a bug in a Moody’s structured credit ratings model. The story was originally broken by the Financial Times and now they are reporting that Moody’s is sacking their global head of structured finance, Noel Kirnon. Moody’s have also taken the unusual step of sending a letter to all of their customers outlining the findings of an independent review conducted by the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. Also this review concluded that employees of Moody’s did not change their rating methodology to hide the model error, a suggestion made in the original Financial Times reports, it was concluded that a monitoring committee “engaged in conduct contrary to Moody’s Code of Professional Conduct”.

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Anatomy of a Bubble

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The Joint Economic Committee is a standing committee of the US Congress is charged with reporting on US economic conditions. Needless to say, the Committee is making a close study of the financial turmoil triggered by the collapse in US house prices and rising delinquency rates among “sub-prime” borrowers. Recently Alex J. Pollock gave testimony to the Committee entitled “Regulatory Implications of the Housing and Mortgage Bubble and Bust”. Continue reading →

Moody’s Colossal Bug

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A Financial Times story has been doing the email rounds in the markets over the last couple of days that points to a colossal stuff-up on the part of the financial ratings agency Moody’s. It seems that a programming error in the model they used to rate “Constant Proportion Debt Obligations” (CPDOs) meant that they assigned a rating of AAA to billions of dollars of securities which they should have rated A+, a whole four notches lower! To make matters worse, FT claims that when Moody’s found the error, they tweaked their rating methodology so that they wouldn’t have to lower the ratings. Shortly afterwards, of course, the credit bubble burst and the price of CPDOs collapsed. Whoops!

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Drivers of Australian Inflation

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Inflation in Australia has been running well outside the 2-3% range targeted by the Reserve Bank of Australia—the most recent figure was 4.3% for the 12 months to March 2008—which is why interest rates have been on the rise for the last couple of years. So what has been driving prices up in Australia? One useful way to get a sense of what has been happening is to use a type of chart known as a treemap (sometimes called a “Map of the Market”). These charts tend to be pretty busy, but can be a great way to explore a rich set of data.

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