State Default Risk Rising

The original post/source comes from Bespoke:

Below we highlight a Bloomberg chart of 5-year CDS (credit default swap) prices for the four states that seem to be at most risk of default — California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.  (Make sure to take note that the four prices are all on a different axis.)  As shown, all four have spiked significantly recently, but just one — Illinois — has blown out to new highs versus the late 2008 spike.  Illinois also has the highest risk of default of all four states, which is probably surprising to most.  The fact that these are anywhere close to their 2008 highs is not a good sign considering things have supposedly gotten better since then.

Read the rest of the post (at Bespoke) and you’ll see that the four states are now more likely to default than most countries! Take a look again at the above chart….its not looking good for these states. The CDS looks to head much higher by the end of the year.