Meltdown

With oil prices pushing cycle lows and Shale firms as loaded with debt as they have ever been, the spike in energy sector credit risk should come as no surprise as the hopes of the last few months are destroyed. At 1076bps, credit risk for the energy sector has never been higher. As UBS recently warned, more defaults are looming and, as we discussed this week, private equity is waiting to pick up the heavily discounted pieces.

Given the carnage unfolding across EM currencies and the myriad headwinds the world's emerging economies face going forward, it should come as no surprise that sentiment has turned decisively negative. Is it time to be a contrarian? BofAML thinks so.

This is precisely what has happened in Spain during the 2012 banking crisis. Since then it’s also happened in Cyprus, Greece…and it is now perfectly legal in the US courtesy of a clause in the Dodd-Frank bill.

What does China's "surprise" move to devalue the yuan mean for "broken" EM currencies? Nothing good, Morgan Stanley says. In short, the path ahead is riddled with exported deflation and decreased trade competitiveness against a backdrop of declining global growth and trade.

What happens when we roll back into the next official recession, unemployment soars, and consumers really stop spending? What is revealed when you look under the hood of this economic recovery is that it is a complete and utter fraud. The recovery is nothing but smoke and mirrors, buoyed by subprime auto debt, really subprime student loan debt, corporate stock buybacks, and Fed financed bubbles in stocks, real estate, and bonds. The four retailers listed below are nothing but zombies, kept alive by the Fed’s ZIRP and QE, as they stumble towards their ultimate deaths. The coming recession will be the knife through their skulls, putting them out of their misery.

Anyone with any sense for global economic trends ought to be worried. The signs are everywhere of a serious deflationary crisis.

Chinese authorities ordered the evacuation of residents within a 3km radius of the Tianjin blast site “over fears of chemical contamination” according to BBC. According to a tweet by The People's Daily, anti-chemical warfare troops have entered the site to handle highly toxic sodium cyanide which had been found there.

In case last week’s deadly chemical explosion in the Chinese port of Tianjin wasn’t enough to satisfy your thirst for black swan-ish disasters that could serve to accelerate the ongoing global currency wars, Japan is now warning that Sakurajima, one of the country’s most active volcanos which sits just 50 kilometers from a recently restarted nuclear reactor, is poised for a "larger than usual" eruption.

There is an economic and financial trainwreck rumbling through the world economy. Namely, the Great China Ponzi. In all of economic history there has never been anything like it. It is only a matter of time before it ends in a spectacular collapse, leaving the global financial bubble of the last two decades in shambles. The resulting deflationary spiral will suck the global economy into its vortex. And Wall Street will go down for the count because this time the Fed will be utterly powerless to reverse the tide.

When China went the "nuclear" devaluation route earlier this week, everyone knew things were about to get a whole lot worse for an EM currency basket that was already reeling from plunging commodity prices, slumping Chinese demand, and the threat of an imminent Fed hike. With some Asian currencies already falling to levels last seen 17 years ago, some analysts fear that an Asian Financial Crisis 2.0 may be just around the corner. That rather dire prediction may have been validated on Friday when Malaysia’s ringgit registered its largest one-day loss in almost two decades, as stocks plunged and bond yields rose.

"It’s not how I want my epitaph to read, but it’s not a shameful thing helping people finance themselves. It’s not a bad thing."

In "historic step," Norway may be forced to tap into its $875 billion sovereign wealth fund to help make ends meet in the face of persistently low crude prices.

A Japanese citizens’ judicial committee has overruled government prosecutors and forced them to bring three former executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) to trial on charges of criminal negligence for their inability to prevent the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

"It's all noise," squeaks Laszlo Birinyi, deflecting concerns about revenues, earnings, Europe, China, commodities, and rates as he unleashes his latest extrapolation. "If we continue to grow at 11bps per day, the S&P will be at 3,200 within 2 years," he warbles as he hopes his ruler - which missed its 2013 projection by 1100 points - is forecasting better this time.