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Anleger zahlen dabei einen festen Betrag in einen gut verzinsten Lebensversicherungsvertrag ein, den sie kurzfristig und ohne Verluste kündigen dürfen. Diese Kapitalanlagen sind selbst in der Branche umstritten. Für die Versicherer sind sie entscheidend, um mehr Neukunden zu gewinnen. Kritiker monieren, dass damit die Gewinne der Bestandskunden sinken. Nur so könnten Versicherer höhere Zinsen als Banken anbieten. Bei einer langen Niedrigzinsphase könnten Versicherer nicht alle Zusagen erfüllen.

Die BaFin befürchtet offenbar, dass einige Anbieter bei lang anhaltenden niedrigen Erträgen aus den Kapitalanlagen kaum in der Lage wären, diese Garantien dauerhaft zu bedienen. Dann käme mancher Lebensversicherer in eine Schieflage. In Japan führten Deflation und Niedrigzinsen in den 1990er-Jahren zu einer Reihe spektakulärer Zusammenbrüche von Lebensversicherern.

More than 1,300 single detached homes were sold in greater Vancouver last month, for a whopping total of $1.35 billion.
[...]
The $1-million average includes high-end homes. But the average price for a single, standard detached home in the city reached $800,341, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver said Tuesday. That's up from $650,000 a year ago.

The ministry sold 15.81 billion yuan ($2.3 billion) of 273- day bills compared with the planned amount of 20 billion yuan and issued 14.25 billion yuan of the 91-day bills versus the target of 15 billion yuan, according to the traders at Bank of China Ltd. and BOC International Holdings Ltd., who declined to be identified before an official announcement.

Today, it joins 310 reservoirs, 580 rivers and 3,600 pools that have been baked dry by a once-in-a-century drought that is evaporating drinking supplies, devastating crops and stirring up political tensions over dam construction, monoculture plantations and cross-border water management in south-east Asia. Linking specific weather events to human-caused climate change is impossible, but the drought is consistent with what climate scientists expect to see more of in future.

With its mighty rivers and steep gorges, south-west China is the world's biggest hydro-electric powerhouse, but reservoir levels have fallen so low this year that 60% of dams report a decline in electricity output. This forces industrial estates and cities to burn more coal and emit more carbon to make up the shortfall.

The report, made public yesterday, adds another twist to a 17-year-old case brought on behalf of indigenous peoples for polluting the Ecuadorean jungle near where they live. Damages could be as much as $27 billion, and a ruling on the case from the court in Ecuador is due this year. The original defendant in the case, Texaco, merged with Chevron in 2001.

Diego Borja, one of the two men who secretly videotaped an Ecuadorean judge in the case during a discussion of bribes, now receives a monthly sum from Chevron and lives near its headquarters in San Ramon, California, according to Santiago Escobar, who says he has known Borja for 15 years.

The figure represents 7.5pc of a Bloxham Stockbrokers estimate of a total of €533bn of lending outstanding by the six state-guaranteed banks and the country's five main foreign-owned lenders.

The Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Ltd (SNGPL) has initially scrutinised a list of about 6,000 domestic consumers who are ‘illegally’ using gas for standby power generation. The authorities will start checking of illegal gas-powered generators during house-to-house search and will cut connection on the spot. The SNGPL has warned that users of gas generators should register with gas authorities if they want to avoid action.

With the start of the year 2010, the Pepco authorities again started claiming that loadshedding would end soon by the induction of 1,500-2,000MW power but that too did not happen. By the end of March 2010, the Engro Power (225MW) was inducted in the national grid but it was just peanuts vis-a-vis the current demand of around 16,000MW. Moreover, with the induction of Engro, there was not at all any decrease in loadshedding duration; rather it crossed the duration of 12 hours a day.

The shortfall between the demand and supply of Pepco’s national grid was still standing around 5,000MW on Saturday evening and loadshedding of over 12 hours was still being observed in Lahore negating the Pepco officials’ claims of nine and 11 hours of loadshedding in the urban and rural areas of the City.

A damning report by the Confederation of British Industry calls on ministers to tackle the huge bill to look after millions of state employees in old age, which works out at a staggering £40,400 for every household in the UK.

Why focus on non-investment grade?

Because Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was very clear in April 2008, in his testimony to the US Congress, that the assets taken from Bear Stearns to collateralise the Fed’s $29bn loan were “entirely investment grade, entirely current and performing.” Taxpayers were not getting junk.

After a brief glance at a few bonds, we now know that’s not true.

Based on ratings data for the 1,000-or-so CUSIPS, we’ve found 10 bonds that were sub-investment grade when Bernanke made that statement. Admittedly, it’s not a lot out of 1,000, but it also means Bernanke’s statement wasn’t true. It either was all investment grade, or it wasn’t. Clearly, it wasn’t.

Year 	Principal $K 	Percentage
2000  	     503 	 0.0%
2001 	   1,657 	 0.0%
2002 	     690 	 0.0%
2003 	 112,273 	 0.3%
2004 	 747,871 	 2.2%
2005   5,630,124 	16.3%
2006  17,635,093 	51.0%
2007  10,251,954 	29.7%
2009     168,547 	 0.5%
Total 34,548,712

The average vintage is mid-2006, which is lousy for any debt portfolio on residential real estate in the US. I would expect bad performance from a portfolio with these characteristics.

Compared to ML III, ML II has better collateral, but worse vintage years. Both are messes. I am not saying that the Fed will necessarily lose money on either one, but I question the valuations on the assets.

• The average rating on the bonds in the portfolio is B-, with 61% rated CCC or lower. (Composite rating of Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch.)
  
• 98.3% of the portfolios are some type of CDO.
  
• On average, the deals owned were originated in 2006, with 73% between 2005 and 2007, and 96% between 2004 and 2008.

This suggests the long post-Volcker period of declining yields has finally ended. [...] And, as the Greeks are discovering, rising bond yields add to the problems of a government with a weak economy and huge deficit.

The Planta Centro power plant, which has total generating capacity of 2,000 megawatts, has been completely offline for three days, the national grid operator said today on its Web site. The plant is conducting maintenance work and will restart a 350-megawatt turbine tomorrow morning, with another turbine coming online April 15, Electricity Minister Ali Rodriguez said.

Chavez declared an electricity crisis in February and ordered companies and residences to cut power use by 20 percent to avert a collapse of the grid after a drought drained water from hydroelectric reservoirs. Venezuela depends on hydropower for more than two-thirds of its energy needs.

“We’re going to extend the presidential electricity emergency decree, probably for another six months,” Rodriguez said today at a press conference in Caracas. “We’ll progressively reduce rationing, but I can’t say when.”

In the fourth quarter of 2009, the price of the Venezuelan oil basket averaged USD 70.20, thus leaving far behind a decline due the global financial crisis. However, the Gross Domestic Product fell by 5.8 percent.

The statistics show that in the fourth quarter of 2009, private consumption declined 6.7 percent, investment plummeted 19.6 percent, government spending slightly increased by 2.1 percent, although it was the smallest increase in the past seven years. The only positive data was the surge of Venezuelan oil exports (56.2 percent), due to the rebound in oil prices.