"We will always have defaults, and defaults underscore that credit risk is ubiquitous in the economy," says Sunil Hirani, founder of Creditex, the first firm to offer electronic trading of CDS contacts.
While solicitude for the rights of nonunion public employees certainly predates the Roberts court, the Knox majority's attack on the long-settled default rule for union objectors underscores how profoundly the free-speech polarity is shifting rightward.
Underscoring its challenges, credit default swaps tied to CIT bonds, which reflect the cost of insuring bondholders against the risk that the company will be unable to pay its debts, have risen sharply.
The prospect of eventual defaults among the hundreds of outstanding bonds underscores the risks inherent in forecasting tobacco payments decades down the road.
"This report again underscores that the Department of Education completely defaulted on its responsibilities to protect the nation's student loan programs," Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said in a statement yesterday.
While people involved in the talks described it as a negotiating tactic, the disagreement is a reminder of how wide the gap remains between the two sides, even after months of discussions, and underscores how close Greece is to defaulting on its debt.
Beijing has pressed the United States to take "responsible" measures to boost market confidence in the dollar and U.S. government debt, underscoring investor worries that Washington could default on its debt unless lawmakers raise a $14.3 trillion debt ceiling by an August 2 deadline.
Corinthian's success in maintaining accreditation even as its students sink into default typifies the state of play in the for-profit college industry and underscores both the incentives and the provenance of the people doing the accrediting work: Accrediting agencies receive their funding from fees paid by the very colleges they monitor.
Moody's on Oct. 8 lifted Russia's long-term foreign-currency rating to an investment grade Baa3, underscoring the country's recovery from its $40 billion domestic debt default five years ago.
A default Thursday by a European affiliate of the Carlyle Group on residential mortgage-backed securities underscored the continuing fragility of global finance — six months after the subprime lending crisis prompted the European Central Bank, as well as others, to inject large amounts of capital into the markets.
