You have probably never heard of Glencore. Well you have heard of its founder Marc Rich, the man infamously pardoned by President Clinton before he left office. And I suspect that you will soon hear a lot more about the company as well.

Glencore is a metals production and trading company based in Switzerland. It is one of the largest privately-owned companies in the world and a very large employer in Switzerland. The problem is that commodities prices have been absolutely decimated. So, the secretive Swiss company’s credit default swaps are trading at huge premiums, something we alluded to last month.

The obvious question is: why is that? Unfortunately, the answer is: nobody knows. But rumors of financial problems are mounting.

Yves Smith has a good post over at Naked Capitalism that brings attention to the fact that banks are hiding potential losses in Level Three assets. Ultimately, these losses are going to have to be recorded and that means more credit writedowns and a larger bailout for the financial services sector. You have been warned.

The financial services sector has been the hardest hit sector in the credit crisis so far. Banks with large exposures to mortgage-backed securities like Citigroup, UBS and Merrill Lynch have suffered the most. This is largely because the crisis has been in asset prices — chiefly home prices. However, as credit has become severely restricted, the credit crisis has become a global recession and that means the real economy will be impacted. This spells trouble for JPMorgan Chase.

I caught a post today on the Swiss Blog Zeitenwende about Glencore, the Swiss corporate giant, which should reinforce the fact that this credit crisis is far from over. As the original post was in German, I have translated it into English below:
If Charts could speak, what would the following one tell us then? [...]

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was a credit event which triggered a massive liability to participants in the large and potentially dangerous Credit Default Swaps (CDS) market. This is a market that represents the “weapons of financial mass destruction” label which Warren Buffett gave to the derivatives.
Below, I will attempt to explain, with much [...]

This comes via Credit Fixings.
The auction process to settle Credit Default Swap trades on Lehman Brothers bonds put the value of the debt at 9.75 cents on the dollar. That is much lower than one would have expected (12 cents on the dollar was the expected rate according to Market Beat). While this [...]

This morning Chris Whalen made some comments on CNBC that hit the nail on the head regarding the U.S. banking crisis: there is a huge wave of old-fashioned loan losses coming down the pike. The writedowns we have seen to date are largely confined to tradeable securities that must be marked to market.
There [...]

The interesting thing about the Paulson proposal is that it gives the U.S. Treasury carte blanche to buy any of these toxic assets at any price it chooses. This is relevant because of mark to market rules in FAS 157. I have posted a few times on the mark to market rules of [...]

I named my blog “Credit Writedowns” because I anticipated an historic wave of credit writedowns in the global banking system which would lead to a wave of deleveraging, systemic risk, and bank failures — in short, a massive financial and economic bust to rival the Great Depression.
Up until now I have masked this dire [...]

Marshall Auerback here.
Equity investors, perhaps unlike credit investors, don’t get the fundamental insolvency of the financial sector, an artifact of mega-leverage.
This is a culture that responds to visual clues and marketing jingles. Substance is at best a second thought, and seriously, there is not time in these markets for second thoughts. It’s all about maximal [...]