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September 25, 2008
TED Spread
I trust no one is fooled that I know what I'm talking about. I don't. I'm just trying to keep up, kind of.
The TED spread, defined.
The current spread.
The commenter who tipped me to this says that 3.5 (or I guess 350 bps) is when we band together in desert grottoes and begin telling stories about "the video" and "the sonics" and how Captain Walker is going to fly us to Tomorrow-morrow Land on his busted-ass plane.
Nope! The commenter who said that was just pulling a number out of his ass, which I stupidly took (without checking) to be some sort of rule of thumb on Wall Street. It's not. Read nothing into the number 3.5/350 bps.
Well, nothing like a bright line. The higher the number is, however, the more illiquid the markets are and, in all likelihood, the worse the the economy will soon be.
But the 3.5/350 bps has no particular significance.
On the other hand, the previous record was 300 bps, which we got right before Black Monday, and we just passed that again.
And no -- this isn't going to be another Black Monday. Black Monday turned out to be a blip.