ratings

Non-bombasitc overview of the investment climate.  No, the sky is not falling.  This is not the end of days.  

The Fed is truly cornered. If it fails to hike rates it will have no ammo for when the next crisis hits the US. But it if hikes rates now while the economy is so weak (more on this in a moment), it’s likely to kick off or deepen a recession.

Citing "continuing weakness in the medium-term growth outlook," Moody's has downgraded France:

*FRANCE CUT TO Aa2 FROM Aa1 BY MOODY'S, OUTLOOK TO STABLE

Apearing to blame The EU's "institutional and political constraints," Moody's expects French growth to be at most 1.5% and does not expect the debt burden to be materially reduced this decade.

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Who would have thought that decades of ZIRP, an aborted attempt to hike rates over a decade ago, and the annual monetization of well over 10% of sovereign debt would lead to a toxic debt spiral, regardless of how many "Abenomics" arrows one throws at it? Apparently Standard and Poors just had its a-ha subprime flashbulb moment and moments ago, a little over 4 years after it downgraded the US from its legendary AAA-rating which led to angry phone calls from Tim Geithner and a painful US government lawsuit, downgraded Japan from AA- to A+.  The reason: rising doubt Abenomics is working.

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"The story that (Aylan's father) told is untrue. I don't know what made him lie, maybe fear. He was the one driving the boat right from the start. When they set off five minutes in he was looking left and right, worried, then he was speeding. Even his wife was screaming at him to slow down." Iraq-based Zainab Abbas, via her Sydney-based cousin Lara Tahseen, told Ten News she paid $10,000 for the voyage.

So far, it’s a different type of crisis – market tumult in the face of global QE, in the face of ultra-low interest rates and the perception of a concerted global central bank liquidity backstop. It’s the kind of crisis that’s so far been able to achieve a decent head of steam without causing much angst. And it’s difficult to interpret this bullishly. If Brazil goes into a tailspin, it will likely pull down Latin American neighbors, along with vulnerable Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and others. And then a full-fledged “risk off” de-risking/de-leveraging would have far-reaching ramifications, perhaps even dislocation and a collapse of the currency peg in China. China does have a number of major trading partners in trouble. Hard for me to believe the sophisticated players aren’t planning on slashing risk.

Remember June - when everything was (apparently) awesome in BRIC-land and somehow a large group of duration-seeking greater-fools used Other-People's-Money to buy Petrobras bonds that mature in 100 years! Well those bonds are now trading less than 70c on the dollar (with yields pushing 10%) as Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras, which slashed its five-year spending plan by 40% in June, admits that plan is already obsolete (two company sources told Reuters on Thursday). Petrobras will likely cut back further as growing debt costs, falling oil prices and a weak currency are the perfect storm for the company.

Some have started to ask: what happens if Glencore were to fail? Well, since Glencore is not just a miner, but probably the world's largest commodity trading desk, and is a key commodity counterparty for everyone, the answer is simple: Lehman... only this time in the commodity space.

Perhaps after intervening every single day in the past week (remember that FT piece saying the PBOC would no longer directly buy stocks... good times) in either the stock or the FX (both on and offshore) market, China needed a day off; perhaps even the algos got tired of constantly spoofing the E-mini and inciting momentum ignition, but for whatever reason the overnight session has been oddly uneventful, with no ES halts so far, few USDJPY surges (then again those come just before the US open), and even less violent CNY or CNH moves, leading to virtually unchanged markets in Japan (small red) and China (small green). And while the initial tone in Europe has been modestly "risk off", it is nothing in comparison to the massive gyrations that have become a stape in the past few weeks.

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Brazil, whose economy officially slid into recession in Q2 - a quarter during which Brazilians suffered through the worst inflation-growth outcome (i.e. stagflation) in over a decade - and whose efforts to plug a yawning budget gap are complicated by political infighting and a growing public outcry against embattled President Dilma Rousseff, has been cut to junk by S&P.

Ironic, because it is precisely CNBC's constant cheerleading of what little viewers it had left that pushed the market to such nosebleed levels that on August 24 it suffered its second flash crash in just five years. It is even more ironic, because instead of a rational, objective coverage of the newsflow, the constant stream of cherry-picked, double seasonally adjusted good news is precisely why viewers had left the Comcast cable station in droves realizing the disconnect between the economy and stocks is simply too gargantuan to stomach, and that they are being lied to.  As a result, it wasn't until the much dreaded market crash that viewers finally came back. At least some of them.

Liar loans are back from the dead which means that if you look under the hood, you might just have a shoddy credit or two hiding in the collateral pool of your triple-A mortgage-backed paper. Meanwhile, in a further sign that we've learned nothing since the crisis, non-Agency RMBS is set to stage a comeback.