Jeff Gundlach

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious, but the stupid have an answer for everything.” ~Edward Abbey

Jim Cramer - of all people - warned about this in 2007: watch the video inside!

 "The reason the markets aren't going lower is people are holding and hoping." Incidentally, there is a reason why hope is not a strategy: in the end, it always fails.

Forced liquidation... capitulation ... contract roll... or "liquidity provision" gone awry? You decide.

For the first time since March 2009, the front-month WTI crude futures contract has traded with a $41 handle. As it draws ever nearer the 2009 lows, we are reminded of the ominous warnings that DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach issued in January. - "I hope it does not go to $40 because then something is very, very wrong with the world, not just the economy. The geopolitical consequences could be – to put it bluntly – terrifying."

As we hurtle toward the absolutely critical months of September and October, the unraveling of the global financial system is beginning to accelerate.

"We have a problem with this, and that is central bank hubris. They now think that they are omnipotent, because, essentially the government has said we are going to pass over all control of the economy to the central banks, they say to everybody else including financial market participants that “you don’t know, you don’t understand, we have our models and they are right”. And that kind of hubristic approach is when you sow the seeds of your own destruction."

Rates have been so low for so long, that many of the traders who will be on the front lines if and when the Fed ever does decide to start down the long path to normalizing policy have never, in their professional careers, seen a rate hike. “The experience that many investment operations have with rising rates for most of us is very low for some it’s nonexistent," Jeff Gundlach warns.

Puerto Rico is racing the clock ahead of a July 1 deadline to pass a fiscal budget for 2016 and scrape together $360 million due to creditors. Without a budget, the commonwealth will face a partial government shutdown and may be unable to issue $2.9 billion in oil-tax bonds needed to pay The Government Development Bank.

Battered by Bill Gross and Jeff Gundlach, SocGen warns that the current correction in 10Y Bunds remains atypical from a technical perspective and bears the characteristics of a panic selling.

No one stays on top forever, and to be sure, when Bill Gross' long reign at the top of the fixed income universe finally came to a sudden and rather unceremonious end last October, the race to lay claim to the inevitable outflows from PIMCO's Total Return Fund was on. Now, a winner has emerged — and it's not Jeff Gundlach.

10Y German bond yields hit 42.5bps today (almost a 10x move off their 4.9bps lows on April 17th - before Bill Gross and Jeff Gundlach unleashed their bearish theses). While Draghi keeps buying, the move over the last week is 'almost' unprecedented in bond market history. We says 'almost' because we have seen this before - a sovereign issuer with an extremely low yielding bond suddenly see their bond market collapse... Japan 2003 (when Greenspan cut rates less than expected).

As first Bill Gross and then Jeff Gundlach suggest shorting German bonds, so it appears the message has sunk in that at 4.9bps 10 days ago, 10Y Bund yields were the short of a lifetime. Since then they have soared, with a dramatic doubling today from 14bps to over 29bps - the highest yield in 7 weeks. As Commerzbank warns, "a cascade of small events is creating a large splash in a structurally ever-thinner market," which has led to a plunge "similar to US Treasury flash crash of Oct. 15."

The "new" Bond King joins his predecessor on the bond throne in calling German Bunds a compelling short opportunity. Just as we said last week, "when you short negative yielding bonds you have a positive carry," so why not leverage your bet 100X and get paid to wait on rising yields?