Dexia to the shark

Dexia's CDS spreads have widened out alarmingly for some time. The sub debt has signaled major distress for quite a while and the pile-up finally got to the retail public who overloaded the bank's telephone helpline. The shares were plummeting last week and then suspended on Thursday. Now Belgium, France and Luxembourg have agreed on a rescue deal to bail it out. As with the sovereign peripherals in Europe, contagion is the issue and focus will now shift to other threatened Eurobanks like SocGen. The Eurozone story continues to play out as a fire flares up and is extinguished, only for another to flare up somewhere else. The markets continue to wait for a 'bazooka' solution but it isn't visible yet albeit that a number of ideas are zinging about. In the meantime, Cape Town is boiling but the locals will only put toes into the water in False Bay because of the shark attack at Clovelly. The shark-spotters are running the red flag up on the beaches which is supposed to indicate that a great white was spotted within the past few hours. But actually they are not spotting them right now. They are just putting up the flags because everyone is so flipped out by the attack. There are also a bunch of whales in the bay so there is no shortage of action. Some surfers went out anyway at Muizenberg with a light northwester making a good shape. I popped in for an hour this afternoon. The QSL is from Radio Trafic in Houdeng, Belgium, heard on AM in Otford, Kent in 2001.