America Looks On, As Europe Gets Jackhammered into Oblivion

Okay, so I’m exaggerating a little. One could be cautiously pessimistic, no?

European markets are swimming lower. The blood is flowing and Count Dracula has transformed into a bat, en route for Paris.

Crude oil isn’t so cool anymore.

Lastly, America is Marco Rubioing lower, denigrating itself for all the world to see.

Note: there are a few seats left on the ark, next to this wonderful family of mongoose and herd of llama.

Oust its CEO first. In spite of the non-negotiable facts that Starboard is making demands of a King while owning a peasants 0.75% position in YHOO, their plan has extreme merits.

Marissa Mayer is the worst CEO since Jack Dorsey. She basically reduced Yahoo to the fucking ashtray of the internet, buying up web-popsicle refugee companies and driving them further into the ground until all value had been lost. Hell, the entire worth of Yahoo is NEGATIVE after taking into account their gigantic step in shit that is the BABA stake. What is that thing worth now, 30,40, 60 billion dollars?

If we asked D. Trump to assess the situation at Yahoo, he’d say ‘they’re all losers who don’t know how to win. They don’t know how to win and it’s really a sad, sad thing. Someone should make Yahoo great again. Anyone could do a better job than Marissa Mayer. Even my son Barron, whose still a baby, could do better for the Yahoo shareholders.”

Yahoo could be a great company. They have fantastic assets that are being squandered. Needless to say, Starboard agrees and one day before good Friday, they’re taking the fucking knives out and firing catapult missiles into Mayer’s pretty little castle.

Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP, which is leading an investor revolt against Yahoo Inc’s management team, is seeking to remove the entire board of the struggling Internet company, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The activist investor, which owns about 0.75 percent of Yahoo, plans to announce Thursday morning that it will nominate nine directors to Yahoo’s board, the Journal said, citing a Starboard letter.
“The board and management have continually failed to live up to their own promises and shouldn’t be trusted with the decision on whether Yahoo should remain an independent company,” the paper reported, citing the letter.

Carl Icahn usually asks for 3 board seats. These fuckers want 9, the entire company. I am certain Mayer will accept this letter, urinate on it, then go try on a new dress or something.

This press release by Starboard is designed to make inroads into ousting Marissa. Let’s see where the wind is blowing for her, east or west?

Give recession a chance. That’s all I’m asking from you.

Earnings are in freefall, fucked faces. BEHOLD.

Pre-tax earnings probably fell 9.5 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, after dropping 5.1 percent in the third, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. That would be the biggest decline since the 31 percent free fall in the closing months of 2008 during the height of the financial crisis.

Profits last quarter probably were unusually depressed by a $20.8 billion penalty payment by BP Plc to settle claims over the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But even after stripping out that one-time charge, earnings likely still fell about 5 percent, by JPMorgan’s reckoning.

According to the eggheads at JP Morgan, an earnings downturn of this magnitude has led to a recession in 90% of the times, inside of 3 years. Moreover, the problems are more systemic than the media would lead you to believe. The weakness isn’t just isolated to the bedraggled energy sectors. As a point in fact, wages have been increasing at the same time productivity has decreasing–compressing margins like batter in a waffle press.

“With wages picking up but productivity growing in slow motion, margins are likely to continue their declines, which have historically signaled an expansion near its end,” JPMorgan economist Jesse Edgerton wrote in a March 21 research note.

Build a wall. Arm the borders. Defend your countries you cowards.

Western nations are on a suicidal path towards oblivion. The liberal policies that afford the benefit of the doubt to people who want to behead their men and enslave their women will lead to more deaths, destruction, and denigrate an otherwise enlightened peaceful way of life.

Turkey arrested one of the ‘attackers’ in 2015, on the border of Syria. They knew he was a fuckhead. They warned the Belgian government of this fact and they, in turn, did nothing. The pole smokers in Brussels said they couldn’t tie him to a terrorist organization, so they let him go.

Really?

Erdogan told a news conference that Bakraoui was detained in the southern Turkish province of Gaziantep near the Syrian border and was later deported to the Netherlands. Turkey also notified Dutch authorities, Erdogan said.

A Dutch government official said Erdogan’s comments were “being carefully looked into,” but that they could not yet say if El Bakraoui had been in the Netherlands.

“One of the attackers in Brussels is an individual we detained in Gaziantep in June 2015 and deported. We reported the deportation to the Belgian Embassy in Ankara on July 14, 2015, but he was later set free,” Erdogan said.

“Belgium ignored our warning that this person is a foreign fighter.”

Turkey insists that they provided the carpet eaters in Brussels with ample evidence to detain Ibrahim El Bakraoui; but they opted to for the multiculturally correct path–which in turn led to 34 dead and 250 injured.

RIP Phife Dawg from a Tribe Called Quest. Growing up in the sewers of Brooklyn, this was one of my favorite groups in the late 80s to early 90s. A little later on I got into the gangster rap varietal and was entreated to the melodies of Onyx, DMX, Wu-Tang clan and many others. Phife died today and had been dealing with a variety of health concerns, diabetes being one of them, for over a decade. I believe he received a kidney transplant in 2008 and was on record saying he was addicted to sugar.

It might taste sweet, but sugar is an insidious poison that should be avoided, whenever necessary.

Today’s big story was the breakdown in commodity related stocks, like VALE and FCX. They represent the pseudo reflation trade that was promoted by all of Wall Street’s finest sophists. Just yesterday, James Cramer went onto the teevee to declare a bottom in the commodity trade and even suggested significant upside lied ahead, in spite of the indelible facts on the ground stating otherwise. A reasonable sequitur to all of this outward promotion is the presence of invective money changers wholly interested in getting liquid on you.

I really do believe there is a media conspiracy designed to take advantage of the layman, which is why iBankCoin enjoys its unbridled popularity amongst the unwashed masses.

My char-wallah greatly appreciates my candor and I am sure you do as well.

In closing, I remain long TLT with 25% of my assets and short XLE with another 50%. For the time being, the rest is idled in cash. I am as bearish as a bear can be and pine for the days of ominous clouds shrouding the horizon.

Spiraling bond yields and the toxic status of high yield has Grandpa pissed off, in search for yield. The traditional destination for old men looking for a little yield action, worldwide, are the utilities.

Its been like this since the beginning time, old cavemen crushing in the skulls of their neighbors for their utility common stock certificates.

Year to date, diversified utilities are up 14%, by far the best performing sector in the market.

Con Edison is in style, for christ’s sake.

Things are about to get real colorful around here. Both the Dow and NASDAQ are knifing lower now, off 89 and 50, respectively. Losses are most abundant in the commodity space, with gigantic slides in tankers (-6%), aluminum (-5.8%), gold (-4.4%) and copper (-4.4%).

Essentially, all of the perversion that was jacking worthless assets higher over the past 5 weeks are being corrected and checked.

A wise man once said ‘the market takes the stairs up and the elevator down.’

I say it’s gonna skip the elevator and jump out the fucking window.

It’s a low volume meltdown and Arthur Cashin doesn’t care for the Fed’s renewed interest in disseminating all of that smoke into their hall of limitless mirrors.

Stocks are inexorably lower today, in spite of the nonsense that is the Dow 30 flaunting minor losses.

The crazy people at the BOJ are intent on buying over $100 billion worth of their bonds, per month, and their yield curve has inverted because of it.

“We hold a lot, and we’re not selling,” said Yoshiyuki Suzuki, the head of fixed income in Tokyo at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, which has $59 billion in assets. “We can get interest income. If we sell, there are no good alternatives.”

Demand for their longer duration, 30 and 40 year, bonds have been met with woeful demand of the record breaking varietal. Moreover, the BOJ now represent more than a third of the entire JGB market, a number that will increase as their QE continues.

Demand for JGBs has increased so much since the start of negative-rate policy that it’s flipped the market for repurchase agreements on its head: Dealers who in normal circumstances would pay to borrow overnight cash in the repo market — offering debt as surety of repayment — are instead willing to pay to get access to the collateral.

In summary:

“How can the BOJ head for the exit?” Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Loomis Sayles & Co., said at an event in Tokyo last week. “If they open the exit door, there’s a fire on the other side.”