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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (48505)	12/30/2005 7:18:38 PM
From: russwinter	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

The most bearish reading on the 10 year COT I've seen in years. Large speculators (hedge funds) are offside long. Also very bearish COT on stock market indexes. USD looks a bit more neutral.

To: mishedlo who wrote (48505)	12/30/2005 11:13:39 PM
From: Kailash	Respond to of 110194

Pensions collapse? The explicit or implicit public guarantee may be creating its own variant of moral hazard. [In the last few years,] "many of the nation's steel companies and some of its biggest airlines declared bankruptcy and dumped their pension obligations on the government. Among them: Miller-managed Bethlehem Steel, whose retirement promises will cost the pension agency $3.7 billion. Suddenly, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.'s $9.7-billion surplus in 2000 became a $22.8-billion deficit, and some analysts suggest that this was just the beginning of the trouble. Seizing on the agency's estimate of a $450-billion mismatch between the assets and liabilities of all of the nation's private pension plans, these analysts say that a financial crisis of the magnitude of the savings-and-loan fiasco of the 1980s is in the offing. Others say that a second, similar-sized crisis is on the way for state and local government pensions, which the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. does not insure, but which carry a kind of implicit public guarantee. Coming atop President Bush's concerns about the solvency of Social Security, the new warnings seem to suggest that America has over-promised; that even if current and near retirees like Montgomery and Seibert get their pensions, younger workers won't get - or even be offered - anything similar; that the era of defined benefit protection is coming to a crashing close. So what sort of shape is the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. really in? Asked last week, Executive Director Bradley D. Belt said, "Clearly, the agency is facing the largest set of challenges in its 31-year history." But Belt said that some of the most negative assessments were overstated." latimes.com