Wolf Richter, www.wolfstreet.com
Most of the defaults, debt restructurings, and bankruptcies so far this year and last year were triggered when over-indebted cash-flow negative companies could not make interest payments on their debts.
With the market enjoying its biggest three-day short-squeeze since 2011, one can be forgiven to forget, if only briefly, that nothing has been fixed. Furthermore, if the OPEC meetings of the past two days have demonstrated anything, it is to confirm that not only is OPEC finished as a cartel, but that OPEC has no power over the marginal oil producers in Texas, aside from bankrupting them by pressuring prices lower.
Which is precisely what it will do.
Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
I find it fascinating the mainstream corporate media and Wall Street shysters spend SO MUCH time talking down gold and spending an inordinate amount of electronic ink trying to convince the masses that only nutjobs would buy it. I believe less than 2% of people have gold in their investment portfolio, so why the endless articles bashing it?
As you might have noticed, the Fed made a policy mistake in December.
We could delve deeply into the specifics, but quite frankly it all boils down to this: Yellen hiked right into a recession.
There’s more to it than that obviously, including the fact that EM is circling the drain amid the global commodities rout, meaning excessive USD strength is especially damaging and the fact that the uncertainty swirling around the depth of the ongoing yuan devaluation has markets on edge from Shanghai to London to New York.
Over a decade ago, Henry Blodgett was barred from the securities industry for promoting dot com companies which he personally though were a "piece of crap." And while nothing has changed since then, and sellsiders dutifully pump companies which deserve to be dumped, but refuse to do so over fears of ruining relationships with management - as a reminder, the only function sellside research provides to the buyside community is arranging one on one meetings with CEOs during which material inside information is often disclosed - today for the first time in years, the SEC fined and suspended a n