Thursday, March 6, 2008

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Lego wants to build business with girls

(Reuters) - Nine-year-old Ida Fraende, who likes to play with Lego bricks, is not so unusual in Scandinavia but globally speaking she is not typical: Jorgen V. Knudstorp hopes to change that.

The Chief Executive of Europe's largest toymaker, who has brought the once-troubled group back to profit and renewed its growth ambitions, has a keen eye on the market where Mattel and Hasbro of the United States are the mom and pop.

Girls are an area where "we'll never stop trying," Knudstorp, who joined the family-owned firm in 2001 from consultancy McKinsey & Company, told Reuters.

"I think there is something that genetically skews us towards boys, but we can do better."

To win girls over Lego -- whose iconic plastic bricks have entertained children and wounded unwary barefoot parents since the late 1940s -- is working to change its mindset, and taking its bid for their custom online.

The firm founded in 1932 by carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen intends next year to launch an online Lego Universe, to tap into a booming market that has created successes such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

The group which started out with wooden toys like ducks and trucks has recovered from a massive 1.9 billion Danish crowns ($388 million) loss in 2004 and managed to build market share in a stagnant global market.
 

Money-Market Rate for Euros Climbs to Seven-Week High

(Bloomberg) -- The cost of borrowing euros for three months rose to the highest level in seven weeks as the coordinated effort by central banks to revive lending falters.

The euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor, for the loans climbed 3 basis points to 4.43 percent today, the highest since Jan. 17, the European Banking Federation said. It was the biggest gain since Jan. 25.

The increase in money-market rates adds to evidence a concerted plan by central banks to promote lending and limit the fallout from the U.S. housing slump isn't working. Banks' asset writedowns and credit losses exceeded $181 billion since the beginning of 2007, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Total writedowns may top $600 billion, UBS said last week.

``This will continue to be the story for all 2008,'' said Nathalie Fillet, a senior interest-rate strategist at BNP Paribas SA in London. ``It's less a pure liquidity squeeze like at the end of last year than a reflection that the global credit crisis will last a while.''

Borrowing costs fell earlier this year after policy makers from the U.S., U.K., euro region, Switzerland and Canada announced plans on Dec. 12 to counter the credit shortage. The ECB injected a record $500 billion into the banking system on Dec. 18. The Federal Reserve provided $160 billion in short-term loans since mid-December in six auctions through the Term Auction Facility.

OIS Spread

The difference between the rate banks charge for one-month dollar loans in London relative to the overnight indexed swap rate, the so-called Libor OIS spread used by the Fed as the minimum bid level at its auctions, suggested a decline in the availability of funds. The spread increased to 54 basis points today, from 30 basis points in the week ended Feb. 22. It averaged 6 basis points in the first half of 2007 and 41 basis points since then.

Overnight indexed swaps are derivatives in which one party agrees to pay a fixed rate in exchange for receiving the average of a floating central bank rate over the life of the swap. For swaps based in U.S. dollars, the floating rate is the daily effective federal funds rate.

The difference, or spread, between the three-month money- market rate and the European Central Bank's benchmark rate was 43 basis points. It averaged 25 basis points in the first half of 2007.

``The leverage crunch is unlikely to disappear over the next few weeks,'' Stuart Thomson, a money manager who helps oversee $46 billion in bonds at Glasgow, Scotland-based Resolution Investment Management Ltd., said in an e-mailed note today.
 

Credit Swaps Thwart Fed's Ease as Debt Costs Surge

(Bloomberg) -- Credit trading models used by Wall Street have gone haywire, raising company borrowing costs even as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke cuts interest rates.

General Electric Co. is one of five U.S. companies rated AAA by both Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service, making its ability to repay debt unquestioned. Yet when the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company sold 2.25 billion euros ($3.35 billion) of five-year bonds last week, its annual interest payment was $17 million higher than on a sale nine months ago.

Borrowers from investor Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. to Germany's HeidelbergCement AG face the same predicament. Yields on $5.12 trillion of corporate bonds tracked by Merrill Lynch & Co. average 2.05 percentage points more than U.S. Treasuries, the most since at least 1997.

The higher costs are an unintended consequence of securities that allow investors to speculate on corporate creditworthiness. So-called correlation models used to value them have become unreliable in the fallout from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. Last month some showed the odds of a default by an investment-grade company spreading to others exceeded 100 percent -- a mathematical impossibility, according to UBS AG.

``The credit-default swap market is completely distorting reality,'' said Henner Boettcher, treasurer of HeidelbergCement in Heidelberg, Germany, the country's biggest cement maker. ``Given what these spreads imply about defaults, we should be in a deep depression, and we are not.''

Hedging Losses

The problem started in the second half of last year when subprime mortgage delinquencies started to rise, causing investors to retreat from complex instruments such as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or packages of credit-default swaps that became hard to value. The swaps are contracts based on bonds and used to speculate on a company's ability to repay debt.

As values of CDOs began to fall, banks that had sold swaps underlying the securities started to buy indexes based on them instead, a method of hedging their losses on portions of the CDOs they owned. The purchases are driving the cost of the contracts higher, raising the perception that company bonds tied to the swaps are suddenly riskier and leading investors to demand higher yields throughout the corporate debt market.

The Markit CDX North America Investment-Grade Index, a gauge of credit-default swaps on 125 companies from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to Walt Disney Co., more than doubled since the start of the year to a record 171 basis points on March 4. The index, which dropped to a low of 29 in February last year, was at 170.5 basis points at 7:10 a.m. in New York, according to Deutsche Bank AG.