Sovereign debt in Dubai is seen as riskier now than it was last November, during the Nakheel crisis. The cost of insuring Dubai debt is now 6.62 per cent*, meaning it costs $662,000 to insure $10m Dubai sovereign debt against default. A month ago today, it cost $415,000. But current rates are some way off their highs a year ago, when it cost $940,000.
Markets are pricing in more risk after news emerged that creditors of Dubai World might receive just 60 per cent of their investment back. The rising cost of insurance is not due to illiquid trading: Dubai CDS volumes are high and increasing (see chart). Read more
The Gulf is so much more exciting. Abu Dhabi today announced a $10bn injection to a fund for younger brother Dubai. The first action for the fund will be a $4.1bn payment of Nakheel sukuk obligations due today. No carefully timed, carefully worded press releases to minimise market shock: a slam dunk, last minute rescue. Phew!
Stocks around the world have risen, but S&P said it was unlikely they would raise ratings of the six government-related entities downgraded on December 2 (Bloomberg).
A summary of the support from Abu Dhabi and the UAE central bank: Read more
Weber treads carefully
Last night Axel Weber, Bundesbank president, showed mastery of the art of central banking at a dinner hosted for Frankfurt’s business journalists. That is a polite way of saying that he was charming, happy to discuss issues at length – but circumspect.
On Greece’s rating downgrades, Mr Weber pointed out the urgency of Athens exerting greater fiscal discipline. But despite lots of questions - highlighting growing German concern about Greece - he was not explicit on whether the ECB would ever actually exclude Greek assets from its liquidity-providing operations (which would be a risk if the ECB returned to pre-crisis minimum rating standards after 2010).
Mr Weber was soothing on Dubai, pointing out that Read more
Competitive devaluations threaten trade wars, says Michael Pettis, citing the Vietnamese devaluation. The theory is that countries unable to devalue will be forced to raise tariffs. This comes as North Korea strikes two zeros off its currency, the won. But the picture is more complex than that. Chris Giles agrees that competitive devaluations could lead to currency trade wars, but argues the devaluation of the dong – still under pressure – is not the trigger. Neither is the won.
Creditors of Dubai World, including hedge funds and banks, have formed a group. It seems that investors in $3.5bn of Nakheel’s bonds will form 25 per cent of the issue, meaning they can block bond restructuring plans. Read more
$172bn is too big a number to ignore. Marla Singer has trawled through footnotes and found that the Fed may be exposed to European banks via swap agreements made by the banks with failed insurance giant AIG. It’s not definite, but it’s big if it’s true.
The argument runs as follows: (1) European banks arranged swaps with AIG Read more
“Investors view this as shockingly bad news”: one assessment of Dubai’s request for a freeze on all financing to Dubai World, the government’s heavily indebted flagship holding company. The requested freeze would last till May 30, and would cover DW’s troubled property unit Nakheel, which is due to pay back $4bn on an Islamic bond on December 14. Dubai sovereign CDS spreads rose 130bps from an overnight level of 318 and LSE shares fell – the exchange has a 20 per cent stake in Borse Dubai.
Meanwhile the “gold up, dollar down” trends continue. Sri Lanka has bought 10 tonnes of gold from the IMF Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
