Svetska Kriza 2008-....

[iDemo]

Ex-savetnik USofA predsednika najavljuje 'teshko vrijeme': BRZEZINSKI: And if we don?t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there?ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there?s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots!Cujem da je dobar i sa sadashnjim predsednikom, Mr Baglamom??

[hazard]

Simpatican. Problem nikako nije ni u formuli ni u tom tipu vec u ekipi koja je oberucke prihvatila nesto i reshila tim necim da se pokrije (kad bi to uopste bilo moguce)... Krivi su oni koji su 'pustili' da se to dogadja, tipova kao ovaj (i slicnih) ima i oni racunaju a oni sto odobravaju i 'pushtaju' da se stvari rade ovako ili onako - takvih ima mnogo manje - desetke i stotine puta manje. E - oni su reshili da je to sto ova formula pokazuje 'dobro' i 'dovoljno dobro' i 'mi cemo da racunamo risk exposure ili vec sta god tom formulom'... Ostatak je, kao sto to lepo znaju da kazu braca Hrvati, fuckanje... C kao curka.

Pa to je i zakljucak clanka...nije problem u samoj formuli, nego u onima koji nisu znali te rezultate da koriste. Ali tako ti je uvek na relaciji tehnicko osoblje - menadzeri/rukovodioci/donosioci odluka jer su ti koji donose odluke cesto zavrsili BBA pa MBA tako da cu celi zivot ucili samo da "donose odluke" a vrlo malo znaju o materiji. I onda kada nadju nesto sto im pomaze u donosenju odluka uhvate se za to grcevito. A s druge strane, tehnicko osoblje (inzinjeri, matematicari...) cesto zivi u svom svetu brojki i cifara i ne zna kako treba komunicirati sa odlukodonosiocima.

[Isis]

Pa to je i zakljucak clanka...nije problem u samoj formuli, nego u onima koji nisu znali te rezultate da koriste. Ali tako ti je uvek na relaciji tehnicko osoblje - menadzeri/rukovodioci/donosioci odluka jer su ti koji donose odluke cesto zavrsili BBA pa MBA tako da cu celi zivot ucili samo da "donose odluke" a vrlo malo znaju o materiji. I onda kada nadju nesto sto im pomaze u donosenju odluka uhvate se za to grcevito. A s druge strane, tehnicko osoblje (inzinjeri, matematicari...) cesto zivi u svom svetu brojki i cifara i ne zna kako treba komunicirati sa odlukodonosiocima.

ovo apsolutno nema nikakve veze. svi su bili svesni ogranicenja koriscenih modela, pitanje je samo koliko je bilo volje da se ta stvarnost inkorporira u donosenje odluka. realnost je bila takva da su svi svesno zmurili na jedno oko jer je to svima, dok je trajalo, donosilo velike pare. mit o neprilagodjenim tehnickim genijima koje niko nije razumeo kako buncaju iza zatvorenih vrata u podrumu zgrade je BS.

[cedo]

Ha ha ha "quantitative easing", kakav eufemizam. Steta sto Mugabe ne zna za taj izraz, da objasni narodu Zimbabvea sta im se tacno desava...Znaci ode funta u cabar. Ajmo opklade, kada Britanija prelazi na evro i pri kom kursu? Za 2 godine pri kursu 1 pound sterling : 50 eurocenti?

Necu na minijature, ali vrlo lepo.

[Schmeling]

Ex-savetnik USofA predsednika najavljuje 'teshko vrijeme': BRZEZINSKI: And if we don?t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there?ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there?s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots!Cujem da je dobar i sa sadashnjim predsednikom, Mr Baglamom??

Pojavila se negde ta teza da je Obamu uzela pod svoje Trilateralna komisija (Zbig) pocetkom 80tih u Njujorku.

[Budja]

Ha ha ha "quantitative easing", kakav eufemizam. Steta sto Mugabe ne zna za taj izraz, da objasni narodu Zimbabvea sta im se tacno desava...Znaci ode funta u cabar. Ajmo opklade, kada Britanija prelazi na evro i pri kom kursu? Za 2 godine pri kursu 1 pound sterling : 50 eurocenti?

Zanimljivo je da to dolazi od Mervin Kinga koji je pre samo pre godinu dana odbijao da sledi Bernankeov recept otkupljivanja aktive od banaka.Kredibilitet u cabru.Ameri su za sada blago u prednosti posto je traznja za njihovim obveznicama veca, pa mogu da se vade na taj nacin, ali nisam siguran koliko dugo.

[cedo]

Interesantna pricha.Opel - Marka koja toneNekada najveći svjetski proizvođač automobila, američki General Motors, nalazi se u teškoj krizi. S njim je u krizi i jedan od pet velikih njemačkih proizvođača automobila, Opel, koji se nalazi u vlasništvu GM-a.A intresantno je kako se trazhi podrshka u okvirima EU, iako su pre neki dan odjebali nerazvijeniji deo EU.Kako bi spasio njemačkog proizvođača automobila Opel, koji je u teškoj krizi, njemački ministar vanjskih poslova Frank-Walter Steinmeier potaknuo je traženje rješenja na nivou EU. Opel u Njemačkoj zapošljava oko 25.000 ljudi, a potrebno mu je tri milijarde eura gotovine.Nemci insistiraju na izdvajanju opela iz GM-a:Bez odluke o sudbini OpelaSastanak na vrhu predstavnika njemačke vlade i proizvođača automobila Opela i General Motorsa okončan je bez rezultata. Ministar godpodarstva Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg je nakon razgovora izjavio kako treba rasčistiti još puno pitanja. Vlada ustraje na tome da Opel predstavi uvjerljiv i provediv plan za sanaciju tvrtke.

Edited March 7, 2009 by cedo

[Άρης]

Zanimljivo je da to dolazi od Mervin Kinga koji je pre samo pre godinu dana odbijao da sledi Bernankeov recept otkupljivanja aktive od banaka.Kredibilitet u cabru.Ameri su za sada blago u prednosti posto je traznja za njihovim obveznicama veca, pa mogu da se vade na taj nacin, ali nisam siguran koliko dugo.

Pa mozes da imas vecu traznju ako sam od sebe kupujes ima tu i Kineza i drugih ali..

[reg]

Talking BusinessPropping Up a House of CardsNext week, perhaps as early as Monday, the American International Group is going to report the largest quarterly loss in history. Rumors suggest it will be around $60 billion, which will affirm, yet again, A.I.G.?s sorry status as the most crippled of all the nation?s wounded financial institutions. The recent quarterly losses suffered by Merrill Lynch and Citigroup ? ?only? $15.4 billion and $8.3 billion, respectively ? pale by comparison.At the same time A.I.G. reveals its loss, the federal government is also likely to announce ? yet again! ? a new plan to save A.I.G., the third since September. So far the government has thrown $150 billion at the company, in loans, investments and equity injections, to keep it afloat. It has softened the terms it set for the original $85 billion loan it made back in September. To ease the pressure even more, the Federal Reserve actually runs a facility that buys toxic assets that A.I.G. had insured. A.I.G. effectively has been nationalized, with the government owning a hair under 80 percent of the stock. Not that it?s worth very much; A.I.G. shares closed Friday at 42 cents.Donn Vickrey, who runs the independent research firm Gradient Analytics, predicts that A.I.G. is going to cost taxpayers at least $100 billion more before it finally stabilizes, by which time the company will almost surely have been broken into pieces, with the government owning large chunks of it. A quarter of a trillion dollars, if it comes to that, is an astounding amount of money to hand over to one company to prevent it from going bust. Yet the government feels it has no choice: because of A.I.G.?s dubious business practices during the housing bubble it pretty much has the world?s financial system by the throat.If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks ?will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect.? A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners ? which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.I don?t doubt this bit of conventional wisdom; after the calamity that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers, which was far less enmeshed in the global financial system than A.I.G., who would dare allow the world?s biggest insurer to fail? Who would want to take that risk? But that doesn?t mean we should feel resigned about what is happening at A.I.G. In fact, we should be furious. More than even Citi or Merrill, A.I.G. is ground zero for the practices that led the financial system to ruin. ?They were the worst of them all,? said Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a derivatives expert. Mr. Vickrey of Gradient Analytics said, ?It was extreme hubris, fueled by greed.? Other firms used many of the same shady techniques as A.I.G., but none did them on such a broad scale and with such utter recklessness. And yet ? and this is the part that should make your blood boil ? the company is being kept alive precisely because it behaved so badly.?When you start asking around about how A.I.G. made money during the housing bubble, you hear the same two phrases again and again: ?regulatory arbitrage? and ?ratings arbitrage.? The word ?arbitrage? usually means taking advantage of a price differential between two securities ? a bond and stock of the same company, for instance ? that are related in some way. When the word is used to describe A.I.G.?s actions, however, it means something entirely different. It means taking advantage of a loophole in the rules. A less polite but perhaps more accurate term would be ?scam.?As a huge multinational insurance company, with a storied history and a reputation for being extremely well run, A.I.G. had one of the most precious prizes in all of business: an AAA rating, held by no more than a dozen or so companies in the United States. That meant ratings agencies believed its chance of defaulting was just about zero. It also meant it could borrow more cheaply than other companies with lower ratings.To be sure, most of A.I.G. operated the way it always had, like a normal, regulated insurance company. (Its insurance divisions remain profitable today.) But one division, its ?financial practices? unit in London, was filled with go-go financial wizards who devised new and clever ways of taking advantage of Wall Street?s insatiable appetite for mortgage-backed securities. Unlike many of the Wall Street investment banks, A.I.G. didn?t specialize in pooling subprime mortgages into securities. Instead, it sold credit-default swaps. These exotic instruments acted as a form of insurance for the securities. In effect, A.I.G. was saying if, by some remote chance (ha!) those mortgage-backed securities suffered losses, the company would be on the hook for the losses. And because A.I.G. had that AAA rating, when it sprinkled its holy water over those mortgage-backed securities, suddenly they had AAA ratings too. That was the ratings arbitrage. ?It was a way to exploit the triple A rating,? said Robert J. Arvanitis, a former A.I.G. executive who has since become a leading A.I.G. critic.Why would Wall Street and the banks go for this? Because it shifted the risk of default from themselves to A.I.G., and the AAA rating made the securities much easier to market. What was in it for A.I.G.? Lucrative fees, naturally. But it also saw the fees as risk-free money; surely it would never have to actually pay up. Like everyone else on Wall Street, A.I.G. operated on the belief that the underlying assets ? housing ? could only go up in price.That foolhardy belief, in turn, led A.I.G. to commit several other stupid mistakes. When a company insures against, say, floods or earthquakes, it has to put money in reserve in case a flood happens. That?s why, as a rule, insurance companies are usually overcapitalized, with low debt ratios. But because credit-default swaps were not regulated, and were not even categorized as a traditional insurance product, A.I.G. didn?t have to put anything aside for losses. And it didn?t. Its leverage was more akin to an investment bank than an insurance company. So when housing prices started falling, and losses started piling up, it had no way to pay them off. Not understanding the real risk, the company grievously mispriced it.Second, in many of its derivative contracts, A.I.G. included a provision that has since come back to haunt it. It agreed to something called ?collateral triggers,? meaning that if certain events took place, like a ratings downgrade for either A.I.G. or the securities it was insuring, it would have to put up collateral against those securities. Again, the reasons it agreed to the collateral triggers was pure greed: it could get higher fees by including them. And again, it assumed that the triggers would never actually kick in and the provisions were therefore meaningless. Those collateral triggers have since cost A.I.G. many, many billions of dollars. Or, rather, they?ve cost American taxpayers billions.The regulatory arbitrage was even seamier. A huge part of the company?s credit-default swap business was devised, quite simply, to allow banks to make their balance sheets look safer than they really were. Under a misguided set of international rules that took hold toward the end of the 1990s, banks were allowed use their own internal risk measurements to set their capital requirements. The less risky the assets, obviously, the lower the regulatory capital requirement. How did banks get their risk measures low? It certainly wasn?t by owning less risky assets. Instead, they simply bought A.I.G.?s credit-default swaps. The swaps meant that the risk of loss was transferred to A.I.G., and the collateral triggers made the bank portfolios look absolutely risk-free. Which meant minimal capital requirements, which the banks all wanted so they could increase their leverage and buy yet more ?risk-free? assets. This practice became especially rampant in Europe. That lack of capital is one of the reasons the European banks have been in such trouble since the crisis began.?At its peak, the A.I.G. credit-default business had a ?notional value? of $450 billion, and as recently as September, it was still over $300 billion. (Notional value is the amount A.I.G. would owe if every one of its bets went to zero.) And unlike most Wall Street firms, it didn?t hedge its credit-default swaps; it bore the risk, which is what insurance companies do.It?s not as if this was some Enron-esque secret, either. Everybody knew the capital requirements were being gamed, including the regulators. Indeed, A.I.G. openly labeled that part of the business as ?regulatory capital.? That is how they, and their customers, thought of it.There?s more, believe it or not. A.I.G. sold something called 2a-7 puts, which allowed money market funds to invest in risky bonds even though they are supposed to be holding only the safest commercial paper. How could they do this? A.I.G. agreed to buy back the bonds if they went bad. (Incredibly, the Securities and Exchange Commission went along with this.) A.I.G. had a securities lending program, in which it would lend securities to investors, like short-sellers, in return for cash collateral. What did it do with the money it received? Incredibly, it bought mortgage-backed securities. When the firms wanted their collateral back, it had sunk in value, thanks to A.I.G.?s foolish investment strategy. The practice has cost A.I.G. ? oops, I mean American taxpayers ? billions.Here?s what is most infuriating: Here we are now, fully aware of how these scams worked. Yet for all practical purposes, the government has to keep them going. Indeed, that may be the single most important reason it can?t let A.I.G. fail. If the company defaulted, hundreds of billions of dollars? worth of credit-default swaps would ?blow up,? and all those European banks whose toxic assets are supposedly insured by A.I.G. would suddenly be sitting on immense losses. Their already shaky capital structures would be destroyed. A.I.G. helped create the illusion of regulatory capital with its swaps, and now the government has to actually back up those contracts with taxpayer money to keep the banks from collapsing. It would be funny if it weren?t so awful.I asked Mr. Arvanitis, the former A.I.G. executive, if the company viewed what it had done during the bubble as a form of gaming the system. ?Oh no,? he said, ?they never thought of it as abuse. They thought of themselves as satisfying their customers.?That?s either a remarkable example of the power of rationalization, or they were lying to themselves, figuring that when the house of cards finally fell, somebody else would have to clean it up. That would be us, the taxpayers.

Here?s what is most infuriating: Here we are now, fully aware of how these scams worked. Yet for all practical purposes, the government has to keep them going. Indeed, that may be the single most important reason it can?t let A.I.G. fail. If the company defaulted, hundreds of billions of dollars? worth of credit-default swaps would ?blow up,? and all those European banks whose toxic assets are supposedly insured by A.I.G. would suddenly be sitting on immense losses. Their already shaky capital structures would be destroyed. A.I.G. helped create the illusion of regulatory capital with its swaps, and now the government has to actually back up those contracts with taxpayer money to keep the banks from collapsing. It would be funny if it weren?t so awful.Da li je tacno da evropske banke u ovolikoj meri zavise od sudbine AIG?

[Άρης]

AIG u Evropi preko CDS 300 milijardi, samo AIG u Evropi. Pukne AIG pukne CDS preko kojeg su se osiguravali i dobijes gubitak u bankama od 300 milijardi dolara samo AIG u Evropi inace CDS se vrti u brojkama od 12 nula u kompletu. Jako je puno koriscen jer osiguravao investitora.

[hazard]

Interesantna pricha.Opel - Marka koja tone

Problem sa Opelom je taj da je GM vlasnik sve intelektualne svojine (patenti, celokupan dizajn svih modela) a ne njegova cerka-firma Opel, isto tako GM je vlasnik svih fabrika kako sam shvatio a ne cerka-firma Opel (koja je u vlasnistvu GMa 100%). Tako da Nemci nisu ludi da daju pare Amerikancima i porucili su im da je bankrot/restrukturiranje (insolvenz) Opela ono sto je pozeljno. Tako je GM isto pokusao da od Svedske uzme neke pare za Saab (takodje 100% u vlasnistvu GMa) ali kada je svedska vlada shvatila da je od Saaba ostala samo znacka i fabrika u Trolhatanu (inace se veci deo Saabove proizvodi u Ruslehajmu u Opelovoj fabrici, a Saabovi su danas samo "nasminkani" Opeli) odbili su da daju pare a Saab usao u stecaj.Paradoks je taj medjutim da je Opel samo po sebi relativno uspesan i verovatno jedan od najprofitabilnijih delova GMa (drugi profitabilan deo je GM-DAT, bivsi Daewoo) i u cabru je zbog situacije GMa u sev. americi.

[hazard]

ovo apsolutno nema nikakve veze. svi su bili svesni ogranicenja koriscenih modela, pitanje je samo koliko je bilo volje da se ta stvarnost inkorporira u donosenje odluka. realnost je bila takva da su svi svesno zmurili na jedno oko jer je to svima, dok je trajalo, donosilo velike pare. mit o neprilagodjenim tehnickim genijima koje niko nije razumeo kako buncaju iza zatvorenih vrata u podrumu zgrade je BS.

Naravno da se sve ne svodi na slabo razumevanje na relaciji matematicari-menadzeri, ali i ima i toga. Neki menadzeri su skloni da uzimaju zdravo za gotovo sve sto "izlazi iz kompjutera". A narocito ako donosi velike pare, kao sto kazes.

[Schmeling]

Samo da preporuchim sada vec legendary Stjuartovo brisanje poda sa CNBC "strucnjacima". http://www.alternet.org/blogs/mediaculture...ramer_and_cnbc/

[Schmeling]

Reakcija iz Gardijana...First came the imperial marching music and a fiery explosion. "You've watched snippets of them for days, or meant to after your friends sent you the link," a voice boomed with mock gravity. "Tonight, the week-long feud of the century comes to a head."It was a comically absurd drumroll for what, on the surface, was merely a squabble between TV presenters. In one corner, Jim Cramer, the closest thing to a celebrity in American financial journalism. In the opposite corner, Jon Stewart, the satirist and host of the fake news programme The Daily Show on Comedy Central. But unlike many a big fight, this one more than surpassed the hype. Nothing less than financial reporting itself was put on trial ? and found severely wanting.Cramer, who dispenses raucous advice to investors on the Mad Money show on the business channel CNBC, was eviscerated by a serious and genuinely angry Stewart. Meek and contrite, Cramer was pummelled like a rope-a-dope over his profession's failure to be an effective watchdog of Wall Street. There was no cornerman to throw in the towel.The interview was one of those classic television moments that crystallised the public mood in the credit crisis. Stewart articulated the anger and bewilderment of millions of Americans who now feel ripped off and afraid. He framed the question everyone wanted asked: how were the financial masters of the universe allowed to pursue their ruinous behaviour unchallenged for so long?It caught the attention of the White House, prompted a frenzy among bloggers and soul-searching in the media, which failed to spot the biggest story of a lifetime or warn the public until it was too late. Indeed, CNBC and other supposedly objective journalists stood accused of complicity with big business, belonging to a cosy coterie that egged on company chief executives and fanned the flames of excess.The interview has also burnished Stewart's reputation as the last best hope in the media when it comes to, in the earnest phrase of news network CNN, "keeping them honest". It was this comedian who, like a court jester, told uncomfortable truths about the Iraq war when the mainstream media was playing cheerleader. Now, as the financial apocalypse unfolds, it is Stewart again who is scything through the herd mentality and culture of deference.James Moore, a former TV news correspondent and co-author of the bestseller Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W Bush Presidential, blogged on the Huffington Post: "I am inclined to wonder if there is a line somewhere in the Book of Revelation that proclaims 'And a comic shall lead them'. Jon Stewart has set new standards for both comedy and journalism on television."Oddly, he was originally supposed to just make us laugh on Comedy Central. He's done that, quite proficiently, but Stewart has also figured out that some jokes are sad as well as too important not to tell. But he's not supposed to be doing the job of reporters."For years Stewart has been building a reputation as the one-man antidote to what many regard as bland and talk-heavy US news channels. As Barack Obama, John McCain and other politicians queued up to appear on The Daily Show, a headline in the New York Times asked: "Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?"His assault on Wall Street began in earnest with a classic Daily Show technique: a series of juxtaposed clips revealing incompetence and hypocrisy. First there was Rick Santelli, a CNBC reporter who tried to strike a populist chord by launching a sudden rant on a trading floor. Stewart, unimpressed, forensically dissected the channel's past mistakes, in which it made exuberantly bullish statements about the market and various investment banks shortly before they collapsed. Stewart added: "If I only followed CNBC's advice. I'd have a million dollars today ? provided I'd started with $100m."Such is his influence, in the next days ratings for Mad Money went down 10 per cent in the 25-to-54 demographic. But Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, is not one to take barbs lying down. He declared war with the sarcastic riposte: "Oh, oh, a comedian is attacking me! Wow! He runs a variety show!"Stewart aired still more clips of Cra?mer advising his viewers to pile into Bear Stearns shares in the weeks before the bank collapsed, rendering them worthless. As the media stoked up the row, the date was set for a "facedown" last Thursday. Stewart showed the attack-dog interviewing instincts of a Humphrys or Paxman. He charged that people at CNBC knew what was going on behind the scenes on Wall Street but failed to tell the public. He accused CNBC hosts and pundits of abandoning their journalistic duties and acting like cheerleaders for the market.Cramer proffered feeble mea culpas and acknowledged that they could do better. But the merciless Stewart produced damning footage of a 2006 interview with TheStreet.com, in which Cra?mer described, in a positive way, certain barely legal things a hedge fund manager might do to work the market to his advantage. Stewart pressed: "I understand you want to make finance entertaining. But it's not a game. And when I watch that, I can't tell you how angry that makes me."He launched an eloquent assault that struck at the very foundations of American financial press and television. "You knew what the banks were doing, yet were touting it for months and months ? the entire network was," he said. "For now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best, and criminal at worst."The interview became an online sensation that reached the White House. Press secretary Robert Gibbs said he has spoken to President Obama about watching the Stewart-Cramer showdown. "Despite, even as Mr Stewart said, that it may have been uncomfortable to conduct and uncomfortable to watch - I thought somebody asked a lot of tough questions," the spokesman said.Insiders at CNBC have acknowledged the episode was a public relations disaster. A day after his public thrashing, Cramer declared that, "although I was clearly outside of my safety zone, I have the utmost respect for thisperson and the work that they do, no matter how uncomfortable it was".Now the media has finally been forced into introspection. Andrew Leckey, a former CNBC host and now president of the Donald W Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University, said: "In a tremendous boom period, they covered the boom and people wanted to believe in the boom. They didn't uncover the lies that were told to them. Nobody did. But they should be held to a higher responsibility."Britain has had its own satirical news in the shape of the The Day Today and the long-running Have I Got News for You, but nothing that has the impact of The Daily Show.However, Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, denied that a British Stewart was necessary. "Cramer has been attacked by Jon Stewart for being too optimistic after the crisis started in the summer of 2007," he said yesterday. "The allegation against him and CNBC is that they were taking too rose-tinted a view of what was subsequently going on at various institutions. That is simply not a criticism that I think can be levelled at most UK financial journalists."If Stewart tried to do that over here, I think he'd look like an idiot because I don't think there's evidence for falling down on the job in remotely the same way. I don't think it's possible to do it because the evidence isn't there of a complacent, or self-satisfied, or lazy, or unduly optimistic media."

[hazard]

Posle Engleske i u Americi je pocelo "quantitative easing" iliti stampanje para na ne tako perfidan nacin:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...id=a_NeT82vza6o

The Federal Reserve bought $7.5 billion of Treasuries in the first outright purchase of U.S. government debt by the central bank to keep consumer borrowing costs low since the 1960s. It is the first step in a six-month program to buy up to $300 billion in Treasuries.The Fed joins central banks in the U.K. and Japan in extraordinary purchases of government debt, broadening efforts to unfreeze credit and end the recession after cutting the benchmark interest rate close to zero. Policy makers announced the decision to buy the debt last week along with a plan to more than double purchases of housing debt to $1.45 trillion, hoping to reduce rates on home loans.The largest purchase today was $2.8 billion of the so-called on-the-run seven-year note, or the 2.625 percent coupon note maturing on Feb. 29, 2016.The central bank?s latest efforts may help swell its balance sheet to more than $4 trillion this year. The last time the Fed had a targeted program of purchasing longer-dated Treasuries was in the 1960s, in a joint initiative with the Treasury called Operation Twist, which attempted to narrow the gap in yields between short- and long-term debt.Central bankers and the Treasury haven?t been able to meet Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke?s goal of reducing consumer interest rates along with the borrowing costs paid by banks. The difference between rates on 30-year fixed mortgages and 10-year Treasuries was 2.24 percentage points, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That?s up from an average of 1.75 percentage points in the decade before the subprime mortgage market collapsed.?If the Fed is to accomplish $300 billon of purchases over the next 6 months, it will need to buy approximately $12 billion per week -- with $4 to $6 billion per coupon pass,? George Goncalves, Treasury and agency strategist in New York at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients yesterday.The Fed will target Treasuries maturing from August 2026 to February 2039 on March 30, longer maturities than traders expected. Fed?s Open Market Committee announced on March 18 that Treasury purchases would be concentrated in the two- to 10-year maturity area as well as including Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, or so-called TIPS.

Stampaj, udri!