by Mike ‘Mish’ Shedlock
The Street
Carnival needed money. The Fed became the lender of last resort.
What constitutes “too big to fail” keeps getting smaller and smaller.
It took Fed Intervention to save Carnival.
It was mid-March and the vultures were circling Carnival Corp., the largest cruise-line operator in the world.
That all changed on March 23 when the Federal Reserve defibrillated bond markets with an unprecedented lending program. Within days, Carnival’s investment bankers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. were talking to conventional investors such as AllianceBernstein Holding and Vanguard Group about a deal. By April 1, the company had raised almost $6 billion in bond markets, paying rates far below those executives had discussed just days earlier.