Agreed, not so upbeat title for an Economist story with no hemal touch. But as an opener, it isn’t entirely out of place either. The metaphor fits in water tight. Excerpts -
"That was the unappealing choice facing UBS, a Swiss bank which has been badly hurt by the carnage in America’s mortgage market. Today, the bank opted for the latter. First it opened the wound, by announcing a hefty $10 billion write-down on its exposure to subprime infected debt. UBS now expects a loss for the fourth quarter, which ends this month. It may end up in the red for the entire year. Then came the hot iron: news of a series of measures to shore up the bank’s capital base, among them investments from sovereign-wealth funds in Singapore and the Middle East."
[It started with Merryl Lynch, then Morgan Stanley and Citi Group bringing up the rear.] "Why then did this new batch of red ink still come as a shock? The answer lies not in the scale of the overall loss, more in UBS’s decision to take the hit in one go. The bank’s mark-to-model approach to valuing its subprime-related holdings had been based on payments data from the underlying mortgage loans. Although these data show a worsening in credit quality, the deterioration is slower than mark-to-market valuations, which have the effect of instantly crystallising all expected future losses."
Will this bloodbath end, ever…? Loss of reputation for a conservative bank like UBS is deep enough cut. What is worse is the impact that has exposed the fluidity of its capital adequacy ratios at the tier 1 level. Of course, it has rich friends ready to pitch in. The white knights include sovereign-wealth funds (GIC, Singapore) and rich middle east investors that have pledged support to shore up its bottomline by infusing SFr 19.4 billion. Marrying bigger-than-expected write-downs with bigger-than-expected boosts to capital looks like the right treatment in this environment. But UBS still cannot be sure that its problems are over.
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