US Treasury 10-yr CDS hits record high
By Emelia Sithole-Matarise
Dec 1, 2008 6:19am EST
LONDON (Reuters) - The spread or risk premium on 10-year U.S. Treasury credit default swaps hit a record high on Monday, extending a recent trend as market participants continued to fret about the scale of the government's financial rescue programmes.
Ten-year U.S. Treasury CDS widened to 68.4 basis points from Friday's close of 60 basis points, according to credit data company CMA DataVision.
Five-year Treasury CDS widened to 52.5 basis points from 46 basis points at Friday's close, it said.
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel, Mass Murder and Genocide, 1994