Meaningless Side News: High Yield Default Rate Hits 6 Year Highs, Defaults Expected to Worsen

I am very sorry to burden you with this drek. But it’s important that I inform the 0.0001% of you, who are still interested in these meaningless addendums to the boolish narrative, of this news.

Speculative high yield manure defaults surged to 5.1% in Q2, up from 4.4%, according to Moody’s–thanks in large part of overleveraged asshole energy companies.

These jackasses are missing debt payments, left and right, mainly because their core product, CRUDE, is crushed to pieces. Don’t tell Wall Street, however, as oil stocks are all the fucking rage these days, soaring by triple figures, applying figure four leg locks onto idiot short sellers–who clamor for blood.

Meanwhile, $50 billion in defaults have been surpassed, thus far, neatly surpassing last year’s hiccup of just $48.3. At this pace, markets will surge towards 20k and defaults will rise, in kind, to upwards of 90-fucking-billion by the end of 2016–according to some bitches at Fitch.

“Defaults are still on the rise,” Sharon Ou, senior credit officer at Moody’s, said in a phone interview. “The commodity-related sectors are still under distress.”

Fuck off, Sharon.

The worst has been priced in, apparently. Blue skies from here.

No criminal charges were filed against the good folks over at HSBC, after UK officials, led by G. Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, sent a letter to Dr. Benjamin Bernanke, requesting that enforcement against the British bank be suspended, indefinitely.

In the letter, Osborn warned that such a charge of money laundering against HSBC would imperil the world and they’d have “very serious implications for financial and economic stability, particularly in Europe and Asia”.

A mouth piece for our Justice Department said they weighed a series of meaningless things, when deciding to let the criminals at HSBC walk away, scot-free, including, but not exclusive to, ‘adverse consequences for innocent third parties, such as employees, customers, investors, pension holders and the public’.

In a Congressional report released today, it accused former US attorney general, Eric Holder, of lying to congress about the DOJ decision to let these horrible criminals be let off the hook. Holder declined to press charges due to HSBC’s ‘systematic importance’ to financial markets. Indeud.

“Rather than lacking adequate evidence to prove HSBC’s criminal conduct, internal Treasury documents show that DOJ [Department of Justice] leadership declined to pursue [the] recommendation to prosecute HSBC because senior DOJ leaders were concerned that prosecuting the bank ‘could result in a global financial disaster’,” the report said.

The 2012 settlement with HSBC detailed how the bank violated US sanctions by conducting business for customers in Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. HSBC accounts were also used by the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico and Norte del Valle cartel in Colombia to launder $881m.

HSBC was fined $1.92b for their sins and all of the execs were given blow jobs by interns at the DOJ.

Robert Peck, long time bear on Netsuite, is out talking shit this afternoon–trying to ruin the party for everyone else. It’s quite sad, really. Peck and his soured grapes, dropping banana peels in the way of true entrepreneurs who are merely trying to profit from baseless rumors regarding a takeover of the company.

The stock, for lack of a better phrase, gives zero fucks what R. Peck has to say.

You’re quite the bear, Mr. Peck.

Dismiss the fate of the soon to be walled nation of Mexico at your own peril. If you’re not watching the peso-dollar cross, you’re committing grave and heinous injury to the risk management apparatus of your bullshit portfolios.

Although meaningless, the peso is the single best barometer of risk in EM, due to the liquidity of the Mexican currency. When things are deranged and the world plunges into a Mr. Hyde world, pesos are cast aside and kicked into sewers.

Today, on the joyous celebration of man, pesos are 0.85% higher v the dollar.

Truth be told, I am actively seeking chinks in the armor of this rally and can find none. Perhaps that’s the chink, the turning of bears into idle and docile market participants, ceding to the will of crazy fucking faced bulls.

In the interim, enjoy the fajitas. They’re being served hot today.

Copper has joined the league of shadows and has surged, now up more than 3%. The poster child for all things risk and copper, FCX, is following suit, now higher by a staggering 9%. BHP, RIO and SCCO are also doing well, but nothing compared to good olde leveraged Freeport.

On the other side of the mine, gold is getting hammered, now down 1.7%.

The pound is higher by more than 2.2% now and the yen weaker by 2%.

Crude continues to squeeze, now higher by 4.4%.

Considering markets have rallied for the past 8 days in a row, I’d say today’s run has the feel of a belligerent short squeeze being applied by cocaine addled junior fund managers getting the ok by their senior PMs, who are also coked out on a beach in St. Barts.

The conditions for an extended run higher have never been better, in my opinion. I only make these observations due to the large forex, bond and commodity moves, all of which are very bullish for stocks.

Leading the fray, the bedraggled price of crude. It’s off the 2 mo lows and sprinting higher, now up more than 3.5%.

This fervor has spilled over into an already strong oil sector, which is up greater than 6% today.

Should we bother to make sense of it all? Probably not. I’ve found that the more I think abount these things, the greater my head aches. I’d rather not have to worry about any of these things and just watch them unfold.

I’m in a 63% cash position, cowering from the sidelines, so all of this is theatre to me, frankly.

What’s amazing to me is that no one seems upset, or concerned, about Europe’s most indebted nation needing a bank bailout by the EU. Not even a belch from the media about this huge event looming.

Italian banks, like Unicredit, have been hammered this year, down 2/3rds. This FTSE MIB is off by 25% in 2016, yet no one bats so much as an eyelash at these harrowing events unfolding.

At any rate, one man screaming in the wilderness, Jim Millstein, former restructuring chief at the U.S. Treasury is warning of contagion.

There’s a risk of “potential financial contagion” under rules designed to limit taxpayer bailout costs by inflicting losses on investors when banks fall short on capital, Millstein, who now runs his own firm, said Tuesday in a Bloomberg Television interview.

“There’s a safety valve for state aid,” he said. “So you could see the EU fashioning what we would call open bank assistance, which is, in effect, what we did with TARP,” a reference to the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008 in which the U.S. took stakes in the largest U.S. lenders.

The big hold up now is who will eat the losses for Italy’s enormous $400 billion bad loans. Naturally, the banksters want public funds to paper over it and help them avoid hard losses. The Italian Prime Minister is siding with the banksters.

“This would be one of the first big bail-ins done in the new regime, and the thought was that would avoid contagion by foisting losses on bondholders and shareholders,” Millstein said. However, because the banks’ bonds were sold to depositors, “You’re inflicting damage to the people who would otherwise be spending money in your economy.”

Italy’s $400b bad loan portfolio represents a third of the EU’s total.

I really like these deals.

The problem with Twitter has always been keeping the layman, the sloth, interested in the platform long enough to understand how great it is. With these teevee deals, Twitter stands to lure people back to the platform, which is bullish for the stock.

Twitter will stream Bloomberg West, What’d You Miss? and With All Due Respect. What an absurd name.

Twitter will enjoy a 70/30 revenue split, similar to the one inked with the NFL.

Add Bloomberg to the mounting list of live streaming partners, which includes the NFL and CBS for the DNC and RNC conventions.

In the coming months, I’m sure we’ll see some more deals cuts with sports organizations. The stock price likes this news.

Really? I get how depression is something of a big deal in this day and age of overly emotional self entitled narcissists. But I never knew there was a massive market for debilitating depression for women, post child birth.

According to the sages on Wall Street, apparently there is.

In a small trial of 21 patients, the treatment met its main goal of a significant reduction in the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, or HAM-D, a questionnaire used by psychiatrists to measure the level of depression, compared with placebo. After 30 days, seven of the 10 patients taking the drug, Sage-547, and two of the 11 in the placebo group were in remission, Sage said Tuesday in a statement.

Sage-547 was generally well-tolerated, with no serious adverse events reported during the treatment and follow-up periods, the biotech company said. A greater number of adverse events were reported in the placebo group than in the treatment arm of the trial. There are no approved therapies specifically for postpartum depression and therapeutic options in severe cases are limited, Sage said.

Not a fan of behavioral drugs, whatsoever. In many cases, psychotropics cause more damage than good. As a society, our answer to every problem seems to be papering over it, dull out the senses so that life can continue. Sometimes, people need to be smacked around and kicked into a garbage sewer.

Eighteenth century cannon are being fired upon the ark this morning. But in the big scheme of things, it’s just grape shot. The ark is impervious to cannon fire and will float past this nonsense into the sunset of mankind itself.

On the other hand, German bunds are getting shattered, rightly so. Yields are up an impressive 6bps, placing the vastly overpriced bund at around -0.10%.

In comparison to the bund, our 10yr looks like a steal.

Today’s big story is in forex. The dollar is surging against the yen, which is great for Japan, not so great for our exporters. But who gives a shit about American jobs anyway?

With Theresa May about to become Britain’s PM, it’s very likely she’ll delay or even derail the process for the UK to exit the EU. She was part of the BREMAIN camp. I believe markets are pricing in this eventuality now.

The Dow is at new record highs.