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Watching Sivs Assets Decline

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by Yves Smith and Felix Salmon
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Oct 22 2007 12:00am EDT

Watching SIVs' Assets Decline

Sam Jones has a fascinating chart showing the evolution of SIVs' net asset values over the past three months. The best SIVs are doing fine, no problem there at all. The worst are doing atrociously: "Axon Financial, managed by TPC-Axon Capital Management, has a NAV currently at 35-40 per cent," reports Jones.

The most important information is that on Citi's SIVs:

On September 6, Beta’s NAV was 85.3 per cent, Five’s NAV was 81.6 per cent and Sedna’s NAV was 81 per cent. One month later, on October 8, Fitch puts Beta at 75-80 per cent, Five at 70-75 per cent and Sedna at 75-80 per cent. A decline of up to 10 per cent.

There's three scary things here. The first is that Fitch doesn't know what the NAVs of the SIVs it rates are with any more accuracy than a five-percentage-point range. The second is that Citi's SIVs are have NAVs as low as 70 cents on the dollar. And the third is that they suffered a big drop in NAV in September, after the market turmoil of August.

So what are the credit ratings for Citi's SIVs at this point? Does Citi's backstop ensure they're still rated very highly? Or are things really falling apart, here?

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