Such Stuff
Aug. 8th, 2007 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksI've been suffering bad dreams for a good few days. Not nightmares, but bad, vivid, dreams. A couple of times they've actually woken me up.
I hadn't actually realized the extent that this was affecting me until this morning, when I finally got seven straight hours' sleep and woke up refreshed. I've been bumbling around in some kind of semi-asleep daze for about five days.
++++++++++++++++
Just as you think the Neteller situation cannot get any more farcical, something new crops up. Some brief notes for the recent attendees.
A transfer to my US dollar account ($2,500) disappears into the ether. Six months later I e-mail them for the x-tieth time and am told that the money will be transferred back into my account, but I can't use that US account any more. Please could you arrange for transfers to a UK account, they request.
So, I try to set up a transfer to my Smile account. Neteller e-mails me a week or so later to say that a small amount (the so-called "micro-deposit") had been made. But nothing appears in my Smile account.
Muchos e-mail correspondence follows, with the final result being an e-mail from Neteller informing me that, because Smile is an Internet Bank that uses the Co-operative Bank's name for IBANs, Neteller couldn't cope with it.
Someone else then posted on the blog that they had set up a link to Smile without any problem.
And, lo and behold, checking my account last night, there was the micro-deposit! It had taken four weeks, but there it was.
Just one problem. To "verify" the account, I have to go to Neteller and fill in the amount, in cents, that has been deposited in my account. Unfortunately, the amount that has been deposited is in UK pennies. So there is no way for me to confirm the actual amount that has been transferred! Neteller will not send me cheques in dollars. It refuses to have anything to do with US accounts. It won't let me use the new ATM card in the US, and yet it makes the micro-deposit in US cents! Can ANYONE figure out what is going on at that company?
So I e-mailed them. I'm really looking forward to the reply. At least if I get the system set up, I can find out what exchange rate Neteller hits you with.
++++++++++++
If your company announces planned "savings", the worst thing that you can do is co-operate.
Royal & SunAlliance last year announced £130m in planned "savings" (for which, read, redundancies). It hoped to achieve that by the end of this year, but has instead managed it by the end of July. So, congratulations all round from R&SA to its remaining staff, one would think.
No, not quite. They just announced that they would bash in a further £70m in "savings", costing another £50m in redundancy payments.
Then again, if you really want to be made redundant, I suppose that speeding the whole process up is a good idea.
+++++++++++++
Joyful sub-prime fall-outs. The most humorous one is courtesy of the proprietary investment arm at Swiss Re, which has revealed a SFr500m exposure. This is a drop in the ocean to Swiss Re, but what makes it entertaining is that, last December, Swiss Re's exposure was, er, nil. In its H1 rsults, Swiss Re said that the portfolio was acquired "recently ... to take advantage of attractive prices".
Yes, sometime in Q1, a bright spark decided that the fall in the value of these instruments was overdone, and stepped in as a buyer. Not bright, not bright.
Elsehwere, the big news is that the merger/takeover between MGIC and Radian, the biggest and third-biggest mortgage loan guarantors in the US, could be off (if you are MGIC), or is contractually obliged to go ahead (if you are Radian).
The main reason for MGIC's cold feet is simple -- Radian has a significantly riskier book. But a sideshow here is one Credit-Based Asset Servicing & Securitization (CBASS), which is a joint venture of MGIC and Radian.
What CBASS does to make its money sheds some light on the loan industry. It actually buys up dodgy loans where the borrower is behind on payments. Naturally, it does not pay anywhere near 100 cents on the dollar. In theory, it makes a few phone calls and gets the loans "back on track". It then sells the loan on at less of a discount. If you are a distressed borrower, the chances are that the people to whom you owe the money will change hands several times over the years.
So, CBASS was book-valued at about $1bn a couple of months ago. Today its book value may well approximate to zero. Unsurprising when you consider that the number of defaults (i.e., the loans which, far from getting "back on track", descend into non-existence) has risen to more than half a million this year.
_____________________
I hadn't actually realized the extent that this was affecting me until this morning, when I finally got seven straight hours' sleep and woke up refreshed. I've been bumbling around in some kind of semi-asleep daze for about five days.
++++++++++++++++
Just as you think the Neteller situation cannot get any more farcical, something new crops up. Some brief notes for the recent attendees.
A transfer to my US dollar account ($2,500) disappears into the ether. Six months later I e-mail them for the x-tieth time and am told that the money will be transferred back into my account, but I can't use that US account any more. Please could you arrange for transfers to a UK account, they request.
So, I try to set up a transfer to my Smile account. Neteller e-mails me a week or so later to say that a small amount (the so-called "micro-deposit") had been made. But nothing appears in my Smile account.
Muchos e-mail correspondence follows, with the final result being an e-mail from Neteller informing me that, because Smile is an Internet Bank that uses the Co-operative Bank's name for IBANs, Neteller couldn't cope with it.
Someone else then posted on the blog that they had set up a link to Smile without any problem.
And, lo and behold, checking my account last night, there was the micro-deposit! It had taken four weeks, but there it was.
Just one problem. To "verify" the account, I have to go to Neteller and fill in the amount, in cents, that has been deposited in my account. Unfortunately, the amount that has been deposited is in UK pennies. So there is no way for me to confirm the actual amount that has been transferred! Neteller will not send me cheques in dollars. It refuses to have anything to do with US accounts. It won't let me use the new ATM card in the US, and yet it makes the micro-deposit in US cents! Can ANYONE figure out what is going on at that company?
So I e-mailed them. I'm really looking forward to the reply. At least if I get the system set up, I can find out what exchange rate Neteller hits you with.
++++++++++++
If your company announces planned "savings", the worst thing that you can do is co-operate.
Royal & SunAlliance last year announced £130m in planned "savings" (for which, read, redundancies). It hoped to achieve that by the end of this year, but has instead managed it by the end of July. So, congratulations all round from R&SA to its remaining staff, one would think.
No, not quite. They just announced that they would bash in a further £70m in "savings", costing another £50m in redundancy payments.
Then again, if you really want to be made redundant, I suppose that speeding the whole process up is a good idea.
+++++++++++++
Joyful sub-prime fall-outs. The most humorous one is courtesy of the proprietary investment arm at Swiss Re, which has revealed a SFr500m exposure. This is a drop in the ocean to Swiss Re, but what makes it entertaining is that, last December, Swiss Re's exposure was, er, nil. In its H1 rsults, Swiss Re said that the portfolio was acquired "recently ... to take advantage of attractive prices".
Yes, sometime in Q1, a bright spark decided that the fall in the value of these instruments was overdone, and stepped in as a buyer. Not bright, not bright.
Elsehwere, the big news is that the merger/takeover between MGIC and Radian, the biggest and third-biggest mortgage loan guarantors in the US, could be off (if you are MGIC), or is contractually obliged to go ahead (if you are Radian).
The main reason for MGIC's cold feet is simple -- Radian has a significantly riskier book. But a sideshow here is one Credit-Based Asset Servicing & Securitization (CBASS), which is a joint venture of MGIC and Radian.
What CBASS does to make its money sheds some light on the loan industry. It actually buys up dodgy loans where the borrower is behind on payments. Naturally, it does not pay anywhere near 100 cents on the dollar. In theory, it makes a few phone calls and gets the loans "back on track". It then sells the loan on at less of a discount. If you are a distressed borrower, the chances are that the people to whom you owe the money will change hands several times over the years.
So, CBASS was book-valued at about $1bn a couple of months ago. Today its book value may well approximate to zero. Unsurprising when you consider that the number of defaults (i.e., the loans which, far from getting "back on track", descend into non-existence) has risen to more than half a million this year.
_____________________
