The fallout in liquidity and funding markets (subscription required) has been mostly suggested at the junk bond bubble. Prices have fallen, and many precipitously, while yields have risen. But those are not the only negative factors being exhibited. If the issuance figures are anywhere close to correct, then increasingly junk obligors are being totally shut out at any price. Worse [...]
There are a few correlations that I find particularly compelling. The first is Chinese RMB (or CNY) next to WTI crude oil, as both are proxies in their own way of multi-dimensional crosscurrents between global “dollar” finance and real economy function. Since March, that correlation has come into renewed and tight focus. In the past few days, the CNY has [...]
There isn’t much commentary needed here, as the prices and yields indicate everything relevant and important. I would only add that seeing August 24, October 15 and now the change (in acceleration) in December all add up to something different than the FOMC’s whatever influence. There is no monetary policy reason for the August 24 global liquidations to show up [...]
If there is a shift in the credit scheme of the junk bond bubble of late, the reduced volume in issuance would suggest why. While issuance, including high yield and leveraged loans, has been volatile the past few years it had never been so persistently beaten down as it is now. In other words, there had been “slow” periods in [...]
This belongs with the last post on the highly “disturbed dollar” but I felt it deserved its own separate piece to feature downstream of funding. Given the liquidity backdrop describing a broad range of extraordinarily disconcerting prices and liquidity rates, the selloff picking up pace in junk is anticipated. Even still, the nature of the crash and that it is [...]
The problem with exchange rates is that they don’t always tell us anything about what everyone seems to think. In fact, the more wholesale financial exhibitions in a particular currency, the less traditional interpretations conform. In many ways, this is very much like transitioning between classical physics in the Newtonian, deterministic paradigm into quantum physics’ often strange and seemingly incoherent [...]
Now that Kinder Morgan has come out with a massive dividend cut, I think it will get harder to ignore that this isn’t just about crude oil prices and the death of “transitory.” There is a financial element here that is perhaps even more important. Kinder Morgan Inc., the biggest North American oil pipeline operator, cut its 2016 dividend by [...]
The fact that there is almost universal recognition of a “manufacturing recession” not just here but spreading across the world is a significant change. After resisting and ignoring as much as possible for more than a year, economic weakness is now no longer unthinkable. This is, however, no mere academic exercise as there are very real consequences as the former [...]
Crude oil prices are exhibiting all the signs of an increasingly difficult funding environment. The front end of the futures curve is being bent dramatically in relation to even close maturities just outside the next few months. Such contango is the obvious imprint of finance, though that is not to say that economic expectations are neutral in the curve. Far [...]
There isn’t much as far as confirmation, but it increasingly appears as if “something” just hit the triple hooks (CCC) in the junk bond bubble. At least as far as one view of it, Bank of America ML’s CCC implied yield, there was a huge selloff that brought the yield to a new cycle high (low in price) above even [...]
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