The Oil Drum

Wall Street's ratings agencies are starting to abandon their efforts to hide the real market value of the debts that are ironically still marked as assets in the books of countless institutional investors. To say unpleasant surprises will be revealed would be a tragic understatement. Credit markets are tightening in anticipation, and spreads are set to widen dramatically.

Hedge funds and banks are heavily exposed to the derivatives market, and losses will be colossal and widespread. Increasingly, pension funds look to be the biggest losers of all. The key-word will be 'leverage' - cheap credit borrowed to make 'easy' profits, that will now lead to hard losses.

On the energy scene, Americans are concerned about rising costs, labour constraints and environmental issues in the Alberta oil sands. Combined with increasing Canadian domestic energy demand, this could reduce energy exports to the US just as it was looking to Canada to fill its looming energy supply gap.

Resource ownership and control in Canada continue to be hot issues at the national, provincial, and territorial levels. Alberta looks to carbon trading and Ontario will have to get through a hot summer with a reduced electricity supply.

S&P May Cut $12 Billion of Subprime Mortgage Bonds

Standard & Poor's said it may cut the credit ratings on $12 billion of bonds backed by subprime mortgages, prompting investors to dump the securities....

...."S&P's actions are going to force a lot more people to come to Jesus," said Christopher Whalen, an analyst at Institutional Risk Analytics in Hawthorne, California. "When a ratings agency puts a whole class on watch, it will force all the credit officers to get off their butts and reevaluate everything. This could be one of the triggers we've been waiting for." _{(emphasis added)}

S&P finally says subprime is mostly junk

S&P, one of the three main credit-rating agencies that served as enablers of the subprime-mortgage boom, announced Tuesday that it would lower its ratings on 612 bonds, a small portion of the mortgage-backed securities it had given its seal of approval to.

But the bigger news is that S&P isn't going along with the charade anymore. S&P said it would change its methodology for rating hundreds of billions of dollars in residential-mortgage-backed securities. And it would review its ratings on hundreds of billions of dollars in the more complex collateralized debt obligations based on those subprime loans.
A lot of debt will be downgraded to junk status. A lot of that debt will have to be sold at fire-sale prices. A lot of pension funds and hedge funds that once thrived on the high returns they could get from investing in subprime junk will now lose a lot of money. _{(emphasis added)}