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You can see from this graph documenting Heritage Financial's (HBOS) Market Cap out on loan to short investors (%MCOL), that short positions were covered in the U.K. Bank between Tuesday and Wednesday this week, with the MCOL falling from 2.96% to 2.75% . This percentage is nowhere near the HBOS high of 18% MCOL in July, and to put it into context - Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) at some stages peaked to 40%.

Si hace unos días nos hacíamos eco de la operación de compra de Banco Santander (SAN) a Alliance & Leicester (A&L) (ver post), esta semana la comenzábamos con la noticia de que SAN ha decidido desprenderse de dos de sus negocios: el asegurador y la gestora de fondos de inversión.

A priori podríamos pensar que es simplemente una operación para hacer caja, no obstante, yo creo que es la filosofía que se va a imponer en el futuro, por varias razones:

The cost of insuring debt on some U.S. banks is higher than the cost of doing same for many third-world countries. Consider the spread on bank credit-default swaps, with Lehman currently more expensive to insure than Nigerian debt.

But that's not all:

In credit derivative swaps markets, Turkey was trading at the same level as British bank HBOS , while healthy Brazil with credit derivatives swaps at 191/197 basis points was roughly level with Royal Bank of Scotland, BB Securities said.

Filed under: Before the bell, Microsoft (MSFT), Apple Inc (AAPL), PepsiCo (PEP), Citigroup Inc. (C), Goldman Sachs Group (GS), Barclays plc ADS (BCS), Lehman Br Holdings (LEH)