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A New Twist in the Wall Street Panic

There's another disaster just over the horizon in the panicked financial markets. It concerns monoline insurance companies, which guarantee bonds for municipalities. (In other words, they will pay interest on the bonds if towns or cities default.) At the turn of this century, these companies expanded into providing insurance for certain other types of debt instruments, including CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), which can include subprime mortgages.

"Of the $2.4-trillion worth of insurance coverage these companies provide, approximately $125-billion is tied to the faltering home market, according to industry estimates," reports the Globe and Mail. Since the big banks including Citigroup and Merrill Lynch try to shield themselves against subprime exposure through this type of insurance, the financial community is suddenly beginning to think monolines could turn out to be time bombs. As it stands, the banks themselves have written down $100 billion tied to CDOs. Under this kind of pressure, can the monolines hold up? Financial credit analyst Nigel Myer told the paper that even yesterday's rate cut by the Federal Reserve won't "get us out of the mortgage mess" or "solve the monoline problem." And earlier this week, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase's chief executive, told the Financial Times: "If one of these entities doesn't make it...the secondary effect...I think could be pretty terrible."

Posted by James Ridgeway on 01/23/08 at 8:35 AM | Comments (0) | Email | Print

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