BofA/Merrill: BUY CORPORATE BONDS (please?)

With over $500 billion in maturities due this year, you are going to be barraged with solicitations from advisors and will read lots of reports, such as the shit BofA touched upon today in an interview.

If you’re bullish on markets, I suppose bonds are a great buy. Otherwise, you’re entering a clownish world filled with ridiculous people. Naturally, the best credits are attractive, up to a point. But if the global economy is set to grind lower, buying corporate bonds now is not ideal.

The extra yield that investors demand to hold U.S. investment-grade bonds over Treasuries, or spread, may drop to 150 basis points by the end of the year from 211 on Feb. 26, said Hans Mikkelsen, head of U.S. investment-grade credit research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The measure last touched that level in July.

While issuers stepped to the sidelines this year because of increased volatility, more positive sentiment since mid-February is helping spur sales and tighter yield premiums, Mikkelsen said in an interview.

“There is a general sense among our investors that corporate balance sheets are late cycle and that leverage ratios are sort of getting to the peaks we have seen historically,” Mikkelsen said. “I just take the opposite view of that.”

Banks need their bonuses and their bread buttered. Buy bonds.

ADP, aka the least reliable data provider on earth, said 214k jobs were added over the past month, well ahead of expectations. Recent market success has indeed made you slothful and craven for more Federal Reserve induced pain.

What the fuck am I talking about?

First, let me just remind you that markets found a bid after market conditions wrecked portfolios and caused the very best propagandists on Wall Street to lobby the Fed to chill out. Since then, the Fed has eased up on their rhetoric, which has permitted stocks to rally.

And now all of the chatter on Twitter is pointing to a singular theme, which is ‘if the economy is doing so good, then the Fed must hike in March.’

Some of these people actually believe it’d be a good thing, since it worked out so grand the first time.

‘It’s not gonna be so bad. The economy can handle it.’

The fuck it can.

You will rue the day you clamored for that crazy woman, Yellen, to enter back into rate hike discussions. Be grateful for the respite you’ve enjoyed in recent weeks. Rest assured in knowing that the second rate hikes are back on the table, all of your degenerate gains will David Copperfield right out the fucking door in what will be a bidless market.

The truth will be laid bare in forex markets.

So what the Chinese gov’t have squandered an astounding $762 billion in forex reserves over the past year. Chinese stocks are moving higher this evening, up more than 4%–dispatching Moody’s downgrade with ease.

Without credible and efficient reforms, China’s GDP growth would slow more markedly as a high debt burden dampens business investment and demographics turn increasingly unfavorable. Government debt would increase more sharply than we currently expect,” Moody’s said.

The agency said its rating committee had discussed China’s status at a meeting on Feb. 9, during which the country’s institutional and fiscal strength, as well as its susceptibility to event risk, were reviewed.

The agency said the downgrade was driven by expectations that China’s fiscal strength will continue to decline, as well as the fall in its foreign exchange reserves which have shrunk by $762 billion over the last 18 months.

It also said that policymakers’ credibility was at risk of being undermined by incomplete implementation or partial reversals of some reforms.

“Interventions in the equity and foreign exchange markets over the past year suggest that ensuring financial and economic stability is also an objective, but there is considerably uncertainty about policy priorities,” Moody’s said.
Moody’s, however, retained China’s Aa3 rating, noting the country’s sizeable reserves gave it time to implement reforms and gradually address economic imbalances.

Eventually all chickens will come home to roost. But for now, the monster has been put back into the closet. War is being raged against fear. The very survival of the status quo depends upon the stability of world equity markets.

I suppose the orient are celebrating Donald Trump’s pledge to make America great again, through aggressive and debilitating trade wars that will completely fuck all of Asia.

Both Japan and China are celebrating their own demise, in earnest, with their broader indices almost 4% to the good.

Dow futures are marginally higher, by 42. Both gold and oil are mildly lower.

The Angelo Mozillo of the natural gas sector, the guy who revolutionized fracking and laid waste to CHK by over leveraging it, has been indicted for being a malefactor and also fixing bids.

I am not suprised in the least.

McClendon is accused of orchestrating a scheme between two “large oil and gas companies” to not bid against each other for leases in northwest Oklahoma from December 2007 to March 2012, the Justice Department said Tuesday in a statement. The charge is “wrong and unprecedented,” McClendon said in a separate statement.

The conspirators allegedly decided ahead of time who would win the leases and the winning bidder would then allocate an interest in the leases to the other company, the government said. The companies, which aren’t defendants in the case, are identified in the indictment as Company A and Company B. Mark Abueg, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment on their identities.

“The Justice Department has taken business practices well-known in the Oklahoma and American energy industries that were intended to, and did in fact, enhance competition and lower energy costs and twisted these business practices to allege an antitrust violation that did not occur,” McLendon’s lead lawyers, Abbe Lowell of Chadbourne & Parke LLP and Williams & Connolly LLP’s Emmet Flood, said in a statement. “We will show that this prosecutorial overreach was completely unjustified.”

According to the indictment, McClendon was the chief executive officer, president and a director of Company A until at least March 2012. Company B was a corporation with its principal place of business in Oklahoma City, according to the charging document. The Justice Department provided a copy of the filing, which couldn’t immediately be confirmed in court records.

Prosecutors said McClendon contacted an unnamed co-conspirator at Company B in 2007 and proposed they stop competing on bids to purchase leases.

The antitrust law McClendon is accused of violating, the Sherman Act, carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a $1 million fine for individuals, according to the Justice Department statement.

“I have been singled out as the only person in the oil and gas industry in over 110 years since the Sherman Act became law to have been accused of this crime in relation to joint bidding on leasehold,” McClendon said in a statement. “I will fight to prove my innocence and to clear my name.”

This has no bearing on CHK, whatsoever. It’s amazing to me that this man was entrusted with $10 billion in financing after being ousted from Chesapeake.

Donald Trump laid into Rubio and Hillary Clinton in his winners speech, equating her to being an incompetent hack, while Rubio is persona non-grata, a major party controlled lightweight.

Look, he’s gonna build a giant 1,000-mile long wall and have the Mexicans pay for the damned thing. If China could build a 13,000 mile wall using donkeys and wheelbarrows, we can handle a 1,000-mile wall with Caterpillar tractors.

It’s gonna be fantastic. The best ever.

This is just part 1 of 3. My god damned laptop is crashing out on me and I am literally seconds away from smashing to pieces this $4,000 apple piece of shit. I’ll throw parts 2 and 3 up when I can. They were supremely entertaining.

The whole set up was great theatre, from an uber confident Trump to an imposing Governor Christie in the background with the poker face.

Here is part II.

These two clowns just won a few redneck states. Bear in mind, no country would ever elect either Sanders or Cruz. Nevertheless, the carnivale continues.

Clinton just made her speech and she sounded competitive vs Trump. I cannot wait to see those two tee off one another.

UPDATE: Ted Cruz takes OK too.

First of all, who in the hell would vote for Rubio? He’s like a Cuban Obama. Have any of you seen this complete ridiculousness that embodies the very essence of who this man-child is, in the debate vs Christie?

Trump just took Virginia and will take all of the state, except Texas–which is leaning towards Cruz.

Virginia has gone to Trump, which was claimed as sacred ground for the assclown in chief, big ear’d Marco Rubio.

On the democratic side, the evil bitch, H. Clinton, looks to make roadkill out of Bern. The whole “Bernie Sander is gonna beat Hillary” charade was faux drama, concocted by the Clinton machine.

Don’t concern yourselves with this news, lads. It was only a build of 9.9 million barrels of crude being added into inventory for the fucking week.

Place that atop of the 7.7 million from last week and we could fill a swimming pool, or two, with the oil and light cigars inside of it, while playing with matches.

That was a hard racked recession. It lasted all but 8 weeks; but it was the hardest and most arduous 8 weeks of my entire life. Lads were swimming about the frigid waters of Princeton, NJ in search of fish to feed their families. Local townspeople were strewn out across the Small World Coffee outpost, with broken brokerage statements in one hand, a pink slip from their Bakken oil field operations in the other.

I, as an onlooker, was powerless to effect change. I took to the internets, like a modern day Robinhood, to take from billionaires, like Broadway Bill Ackman, placing sums of coin into the pockets of my readers, so that they might buy themselves a luxury or two. A soda pop here, a bag of popped corn there.

All that in mind, markets soared today, in magnificent fashion, higher by 348. Gains were abundant everywhere, even for Pershing Square. The late date reversal we all bore witness to in VRX, going from $59 to $65, was nothing short of a miracle, equal to that of Moses parting the red sea. If, by chance, you were a devil atheist before today, you should be convinced hitherto now that there is a supreme being watching over us.

The internet agrees: the bottom is, inexorably, in.

The Bubble Basket inside of Exodus moved higher by 3.65% today. And, the GARP portfolio, which is a semi-annual actively managed portfolio by yours truly was +1.9% to the good.

Rejoice and pop champagne corks into the faces of the most vicious of bears. They can do nothing other than sit back and watch you pour the liquids of success over their childish heads.