cryptogon.com

The US mortgage-backed bond fund will collapse if, as expected, its lenders liquidate the fund to take possession of its remaining assets.

CCC is the latest casualty of the declining US housing market.

Its shares were suspended last week after some lenders forced it to sell assets to get their cash back.

“Almost within the blink of an eye, a business that had borrowed $21bn from the world’s biggest banks to invest in high-quality mortgage-backed securities will be gone, liquidated, kaput,” said BBC business editor Robert Peston.

“Such is the whirlwind blowing through global financial markets.”

CCC’s collapse will lose its clients some $600m, according to Simon Denham, managing director at Capital Spreads.

‘This is a market that is focused on risk more than return and sentiment remains significantly negative that the market is wary about taking on board excessive risk,’ said Divyang Shah at Commonwealth Bank.

The dollar dipped briefly below the 100 yen level for the first time since November 1995 to reach a low of 99.75. Speculation that the Bank of Japan could step in to intervene at these levels meant it failed to hold below 100, however, and at 8.57 am GMT it was trading at 100.08 yen.

The Bank of England, the key European central banks, and the Bank of Canada all joined in a co-ordinated move with a mix of policies to halt the dowward spiral in the credit markets, expanding on the “shock and awe” tactics used late last year.

The Fed’s dramatic step came after an emergency conference call by governors on Monday night. It followed the melt-down of the US chartered agencies — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other lenders — which together guarantee 60pc of the entire US home loan market. Fannie Mae’s share price fell 19pc in panic trading on Monday after Barron’s magazine said it may need a rescue package.

“The agency crisis was a Tsunami event,” said Tim Bond, global strategist at Barclays Capital.

In January, France’s second-biggest listed bank SocGen unveiled 4.9 billion euros ($7.53 billion) of losses which it blamed on rogue deals carried out by Jerome Kerviel, a 31-year old junior trader at the bank.

The losses have made SocGen a possible bid target.

The Paris prosecutor’s office identified the latest person being held as a trader from a subsidiary of SocGen.

A source close to the matter said the person being held works for SG Securities, the bank’s share brokerage arm.

SocGen declined to identify the person or the division.

A spokeswoman for the bank said police had searched SocGen’s trading room at its glass-fronted headquarters in the Le Defense financial district on Wednesday.

She confirmed one person was being held for questioning.

Kerviel has been placed under investigation for breach of trust, computer abuse and falsification. He is being held in a Paris prison after a decision to grant bail was overturned.

The cuts are being made across all divisions and regions, and employees affected are being notified on Monday, the person said.

Lehman employed about 28,600 people as of Nov. 30, 2007, according to the company’s most recent annual report.

The bank declined to comment.

An index tracking the dollar against six major currencies fell close to a record low as traders bet the Fed will cut rates by as much as three quarters of a percentage point next week to avert a recession, while the European Central Bank keeps borrowing costs unchanged. The yen advanced against the dollar and the South African rand after a government report showed Japan’s economy grew faster than forecast in the fourth quarter.

…

A boost in corn production will worsen the Gulf’s so-called “dead zone,” an area with so little oxygen that sealife suffocates, said Simon Donner, a geographer at the University of British Columbia in Western Canada.

“Most organisms are not able to survive without enough oxygen,” Donner told AFP. “All the bottom-dwelling organisms that can’t move away are probably going to die, while fish will migrate if they can.”

Donner and Chris Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin used computer models to conclude that growing enough corn to meet US biofuel goals set for 2022 would cause a boost of 10 to 34 percent in nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, which run into the Gulf of Mexico.

In turn, the study said, there will be more than a 95 percent probability of failure in American targets to reduce the Gulf dead zone.

The study is published Monday in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Journal of Sciences.

The Gulf’s dead zone, first measured about three decades ago, has grown to cover an area as large as 20,000 square kilometers (12,400 square miles) each summer in the Gulf, which is ringed by the southern United States, Mexico and Cuba.

The zone is caused indirectly by nitrogen fertilizers used on cornfields in states like Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin. Excess nitrogen runs into the Mississippi River, becomes nitrate, and feeds algae growth. When the algae eventually dies it sinks to the bottom and rots, a process that sucks oxygen out of the water and kills all other life forms.

Donner noted the continental United States already produces about half of the world’s corn, in part for human consumption but mostly to feed livestock or make ethanol.

The women were protesting what they saw as environmental damage by the crops.

They trashed the plants within 30 minutes and left before police arrived at the site in the southern state of Sao Paulo, a member of the Landless Workers’ Movement, Igor Foride, told AFP.

The Brazilian government had “caved in to pressure from agrobusinesses” by recently allowing tinkered crops to be grown in the country, he said.

In Brasilia, a protest by another 400 women from an umbrella group, Via Campesina (the Rural Way), was held in front of the Swiss embassy against Syngenta, a Swiss company that is selling genetically modified seeds in Brazil.

The demonstrators called attention to an October 2007 incident in which private guards working for Syngenta killed a protester taking part in an occupation of land owned by the company.

Via Campesina said in a statement that “no scientific studies exist that guarantee that genetically modified crops won’t have negative effects on human health and on nature.”