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Originally posted by Bravus:
Yeah, the Oz dollar hit 94 cents last night - and with Bernanke indicating more US interest rate cuts are likely, and the virtual certainty of an interest rate rise here next month, parity can't be too far away.

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the company comes out and reports a $29 billion net loss this past quarter, due largely to an enormous value write-down of its Nextel unit. Ouch.

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Originally posted by Mr_Cyberpunk:
Another flaw in capitalism, the capitalists these days don't actually OWN their capital. I think we've established that.

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And now the banks want their money back.

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Earlier this week, the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and other central banks said they would pump $200bn into financial markets to stimulate lending.

As part of their plan, they would allow lenders to put up the problematic mortgage-backed securities as collateral for the new central bank-backed loans they were offering.

However, instead of underpinning the mortgage-backed securities market, it seems to have had the opposite effect, giving lenders an opportunity to dump the risky asset.

"The Fed's new lending emergency lending facility allows the banks to swap mortgage-backed debt for Treasury Bills in a way that Carlyle could not do," said the BBC's business editor.

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Originally posted by Bravus:
The futures have the market tanking massively on open, so I guess we'll see.

You have to wonder: I suspect Morgans is getting a firesale bargain price, since basically the Fed is going to back the bad debt, and Bear Stearns has to still be worth some significant proportion of that 22 billion it was valued at a year ago, so picking it up for something like 1% of that has to be a bargain.