Gannett's Profit Falls 9% but Tops Forecast After an Exchange of Newspapers in Detroit The Gannett Company, the nation's largest newspaper publisher, reported a 9percentt decline in fourth-quarter earnings yesterday, partly as a result of expenses from its swap of newspapers in Detroit and the absence of election-year advertising.
AIG, the bailed-out insurer whose derivatives activities brought the company to the brink of collapse in 2008, ran most of its swaps business out of London.
Earlier this month, it boasted that its Swap Force line-up of Skylanders characters were outselling Hasbro's Transformers and Star Wars toys as well as all other ranges of action figures in North America.
Argentina has been mulling a plan to replace some of its foreign bonds with locally issued ones ever since a New York court ruled in 2012 that it could not pay creditors who accepted its debt swaps of 2005 and 2010 without fully compensating "holdouts" who jibbed at the deal.
In November the company worked out a relief package with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in which the most toxic of its swap contracts were put into a kind of quarantine, so they could no longer hurt its balance sheet.
A.I.G. was for a while exempt from posting margin on many of its swaps, which is one reason it became a systemic risk.
The U.S. ratings agencies began a wholesale downgrade of mortgage-backed securities, triggering demands that A.I.G. provide ever-larger amounts of collateral to buyers of its swaps.
In September it swapped $300 million of its stock for Moorman Manufacturing Co., a $1.2 billion (sales) soybean processor in Quincy, Ill.
Credit-default swaps have functioned well for big bankruptcies, but they were also a big source of systemic weakness in 2008, when the American International Group nearly collapsed because it could not make payments on its side of its swaps contracts.
Termination fees also kick in when a municipal issuer wants out of its swap agreement.
