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The US Department of Justice has started investigating a data provider and dealers in the credit derivatives market for potential violations of the US Sherman Act, which prohibits abuses of monopoly power or other forms of collusion. Demands were sent to more than a dozen dealers for several years’ of detailed information about trading and pricing, according to people who received the letter. The DoJ letter was sent to banks with an equity stake in Markit Group, which provides pricing data on markets including the credit default swaps (CDS). The move comes as the regulatory spotlight shines on the CDS...

American International Group Inc (AIG.N), the insurer rescued by a series of federal bailouts, may have zero equity value due to the risk of more credit default swap losses and the disposal of key assets at low valuations, Citigroup said. Shares of the company fell 22 percent to $10.22 in early trade Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange. The shares have lost more than 90 percent of their value in the last year. Potential markdowns in AIG Financial Product unit's regulatory CDS portfolio may result in collateral calls that would again put pressure on AIG's liquidity, "Such collateral calls...

The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months ago. The results were quite shocking as a lot of the discs simply couldn't be read anymore: Roughly translated from Dutch: The tests showed that a number of CD-Rs had become completely unreadable while others could only be read back partially. Data that was recorded 20 months ago had become unreadable. These included discs of well known and lesser known manufacturers. It is presumed that CD-Rs...