Boston Globe – Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are responding to the credit crisis with a system that uses the market’s view of their own creditworthiness as a basis for lending decisions, the Financial Times reported.
Wall Street’s second-largest investment bank Morgan Stanley is essentially tying its promise to provide financing to hedge fund clients to the price of credit insurance on its own debt, it said.
If the cost of the protection rises to a certain level, that would trigger a reduction in Morgan Stanley’s commitments to hedge funds, the quoted people familiar with the situation as saying.
The message is that "if our firm is in trouble, we would rather fund ourselves than fund you (hedge funds)," the paper quoted a brokerage executive with knowledge of the arrangements as saying.
