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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Credit Crisis Indicators: Mostly Unchanged

by Calculated Risk on 11/26/2008 01:08:00 PM

  • The three month LIBOR decreased slightly to 2.18% from 2.20%. The three-month LIBOR rate peaked (for this cycle) at 4.81875% on Oct. 10. (unchanged)

    TED Spread
  • The TED spread: 2.14. (unchanged)

    The TED spread is stuck above 2.0, and still too high. The peak was 4.63 on Oct 10th. I'd like to see the spread move back down to 1.0 or lower. A normal spread is around 0.5.

  • The yield on 3 month treasuries is 0.04%. (bad). Essentially zero!

    The 10-Year Treasury Note yield is just below 3.0%. The rush to treasuries of all durations is still stunning!

    The effective Fed Funds rate has risen slightly to 0.62% (target rate is 1.0%), so that is a small piece of positive news.

    A2P2 Spread
  • The A2P2 spread increased to 4.25 after briefly being below 4. The record for this cycle is 4.83% worse).

    This is the spread between high and low quality 30 day nonfinancial commercial paper. If the credit crisis eases, I'd expect a significant decline in this spread - and the graph makes it clear this indicator is still in crisis.

  • The two year swap spread from Bloomberg: 101.25 up slightly after breaking below 100 yesteday(unchanged). This spread peaked at near 165 in early October, so there has been significant progress, but in more normal times this is below 50.

    The LIBOR, the TED spread, and the two-year swap have seen clear progress - but now appear mostly stuck with a long ways to go. For the A2P2 spread (and all treasury yields), the markets are still in crisis.

    The exception is the mortgage market with rates falling sharply.