‘splain
I guess this means the owners of what were Lehman’s assets are not getting a big return.
Bummer for them, but perhaps the next time assets are insured the PRIVATE CORPORATIONS providing that service will make sure things are on the up and up.
The loss is 90%; the good news as cited in the article is that exposure is less than expected.
Hope this is true.
Nine cents. Ouch.
I don’t think it’s all that significant. I suspect uncertainty over implementation of the bailout plan is behind the lack of buying interest. Presumably the Lehman trustee in bankruptcy will be able to participate in the Treasury auctions, which could significantly increase the value of Lehman’s debt claims. But no one knows what the bailout will look like because Treasury hasn’t gotten on with it yet.
It’s like a bunch of boats in a harbor have holes in them and are slowly sinking. The harbormaster has gone out and bought a whole bunch of buckets and hired a whole bunch of bailers to bail out the boats, and is now neatly arranging the buckets on shore. He’s telling boaters to go ahead and get back on the sinking boats. Yet it’s not apparent when he is going to get around to doing the actual bailing out, or, when he does, which boats he will bail out first and how exactly he will go about the bailing.
So many people are whining about the “bailout didn’t work” when there hasn’t even been any bailing yet.
My question is how Lehman bonds only get 9 cents on the dollar. I know most of Lehman’s assets probably went to the secured creditors, but at least nominally Lehman had equity of almost $20 billion when it declared bankruptcy and (I think) unsecured creditors were owed about $150 billion. So we’d have to be talking about $155 billion in losses on its assets to leave only $15 billion for the unsecured creditors—and it’s hard to imagine there was anything close to that.