Business

As we wrote first thing this morning, while the fate of Valeant CEO Pearson was largely known (he is now out) and that Ackman will go down with the Valeant ship was largely as expected, what was a complete shock in the copmany's press release was that the decision to throw its former CFO, Howard Schiller who formerly ran Goldman's healthcare group, under the bus and accuse him of cooking the company's books.

By Wolf Richter, WOLF STREET

Companies are still borrowing and spending billions on buying back their own shares – one of the big drivers behind the blistering stock market rally of the past few years. It worked wonderfully and without fail. But suddenly, it’s doing the opposite, and now the shares of the biggest buyback queens are getting hammered. Something broke in the gears of this financially engineered market!

Existing home sales plunged 7.1% MoM in February, massively missing expectations of a 3.0% drop. Absent the regulation-driven drop in November, this is the largest MoM drop since July 2010 as realtors warn that "home prices and rents outpacing wages and anxiety about the health of the economy are holding back a segment of would-be buyers."

Median prices appear to have ended in an airpocket:

As NAR reports,

Back in October, we tried to "tie the Valeant roll-up together: Presenting The Goldman "Missing Link" in which we showed that Howard Schiller, Valeant's CFO from December 2011 to June 2015, previously ran Goldman Sachs’ health-care practice until 2009, when he became the chief operating officer of Goldman’s investment bank. The next year, the bank advised Valeant on its breakout purchase of Biovail Corp.

After last week's ridiculous FOMC announcement which forced even such "party line" commentators as Steve Liesman to ask Yellen if the Fed has lost all credibility after its dots tumbled despite surging core inflation and a mandate low unemployment rate, one can be forgiven if all they laugh at the latest Fed "forecast."