GOVERNMENT SPENDING A Trap in Obama’s Spending Plan NYT, 20-Dec-08 By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Public spending, American style, has worked best in good times, when people have jobs and executives are eager to invest. A new public highway is soon lined. A dollar spent by government generates three or four from the private sector... For all the money spent by the Roosevelt administration, public investment was failing to jump-start a key private-sector industry... Like Roosevelt’s dams, Mr. Obama’s expenditures will no doubt generate jobs and wages in the construction phase. But in 1937, Roosevelt, thinking that the private sector could sustain itself, pulled back on public spending. Some historians say this was a big reason the economy sank again.
As the recession deepens, President-elect Barack Obama is gearing up to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on public investment projects, counting on them to lift the economy, as they have in the past ...
Professor Ed Altman of New York University's Stern School of Business expects 11% to 11.5% of U.S. high-yield bonds outstanding at the end of the third quarter to default within a year. His proprietary model suggests average recovery, given that default rate, of about 27 cents on the dollar... Loose covenants and the use of payment-in-kind (PIK) "toggles" exacerbate the problem.... There are two bigger problems for creditors to contend with. One is the higher use recently of senior loans, fueled by demand for collateralized loan obligations. The second problem is scarce debtor-in-possession (DIP) and exit financing: the credit extended to bankrupt firms to help them restructure and emerge from Chapter 11.
Bankrupt debtors used to be thrown in jail. Do that now, and America's prison system would collapse. Rather than seek incarceration, today's creditors are focusing on extracting better recovery rates: the amount they get back on defaulted debt. Unfortunately, excessive leniency during the boom years means not only having to deal with more defaults, but also getting very little back when that happen ...
CREDIT, REAL ESTATE Developers Ask U.S. for Bailout as Massive Debt Looms WSJ, 22-Dec-08
530 billion of commercial mortgages will be coming due for refinancing in the next three years -- with about $160 billion maturing in the next year... Unlike home loans, which borrowers repay after a set period of time, commercial mortgages usually are underwritten for five, seven or 10 years with big payments due at the end. At that point, they typically need to be refinanced. A borrower's inability to refinance could force it to give up the property to the lender.... At the heart of the financing scarcity is the virtual shutdown of the market for CMBS, where Wall Street firms sliced and diced commercial mortgages into bonds.... While commercial real-estate developers restrained themselves during the boom years when it came to speculative development, property investors bid up the prices of office buildings, malls and other projects to record levels assuming rents and occupancies would keep rising. With cash flows now falling, a growing number of developers are having a tough time repaying their debt... Delinquencies on commercial mortgages jumped to 0.96% in November, up from 0.62% in September. Some analysts predict the delinquency rate will leap to 2% by the end of next year. During the real-estate collapse of the early 1990s, the worst-performing commercial mortgages -- those that were made in 1986 -- sustained losses of about 10%.
With a record amount of commercial real-estate debt coming due, some of the country's biggest property developers have become the latest to go hat-in-hand to the government for assistance ...
PHARMA Pharmacies Fight Tough Battle on Generic Prices WSJ, 22-Dec-08
Retail pharmacy generic discount programs have proliferated since Wal-Mart Stores Inc. introduced $4 generic prescriptions for one-month supplies of hundreds of unbranded drugs in 2006, and mass merchandisers and grocery stores responded with their own versions... Walgreen this summer started strongly marketing its Prescription Savings Club, which provides discounts on generics and 5,000 branded medications and rebates on store-brand products... CVS this fall introduced a discount program aimed at the uninsured, offering a 90-day supply of more than 400 generic drugs for $9.99 and a 10% discount at the company's store-based clinics... Rite Aid in late September rolled out nationally a prescription savings card offering hundreds of generic drugs at $8.99 for a 30-day supply or at $15.99 for a 90-day supply, plus discounts on branded drugs and Rite Aid products.
Retail pharmacies are waging what some consider a generic-drug price war that is threatening margins in a typically high-profit area and reflects the intense competition that drug-store chains face in attracting and keeping customers ...
CURRENCY Why didn't the dollar collapse Paul Krugman
