Made up my mind, no buying today. I'll wait for a "whoosh"
What really gets me is how controlled this latest selloff has been. We've dropped 100 S&P points in a month, and most of the down days were really not that spectacularly large. Almost like people are comfortable and agree on the fact that the market should be going down.
Oh yeah and ambac and mbia lost their AAA ratings...why was this not front page news? I thought this was one of the biggest fears out there??? Did we forget?
From karl denninger blog:
MBIA and Ambac lost their last AAA ratings yesterday when Moody's stripped them. That's that. The ugly here is that this is likely to trigger somewhere between 70 and 200 billion more in writedowns and/or forced asset sales. This, of course, has
not been reserved for by the banks:
"The downgrades end more than seven months of speculation about whether the bond insurers would keep their top ratings at all three firms. Five of seven companies lost their top ratings as projections for losses on securities backed by home loans surged and confidence in the companies collapsed, causing municipalities to shun their insurance. The downgrades span more than $2 trillion of debt sold by issuers ranging from school districts and sewer authorities to Wall Street firms."
That's gonna leave a mark (on your balance sheet!)
The true ugly hits if these downgrades continue and sends the insurers below investment grade. Such a downgrade threatens to bankrupt virtually any bank that holds covered assets, as the impact would be a reserve requirement that jumps to more than 100 times what it is for AAA paper. This, obviously, isn't going to be allowed to happen - banks
will unload this paper now rather than take the risk of instantaneous insolvency.
I believe that continued downgrades to below investment grade (if these firms survive at all) are inevitable - as such, it is my view that this is a storm that cannot be avoided, and those who have made investment decisions believing that the "credit crunch" was in the 7th or 8th inning are going to be destroyed.