Meltdown

Momentum traders - relying on the 'trend is your friend' theme - may have a rude awakening soon as momentum stocks trade at a stunning 50% premium to the market (vs an average 20%). As BofAML notes, high growth, high multiple names that have been leading the market over the past year are showing some signs suggest we are close to a tipping point. The growth-to-value spread is at its highest since the peak of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and, as Subramanian ominously notes, when momentum ends, it ends badly - with an average loss of 25% over the next 12 months.

The robo machines pushed their snouts through 2100 on the S&P index again yesterday. This was the 13th time since, well, February 13th that this line has been re-penetrated from below. But don’t call it an omen of bad luck; its more like monetary rigor mortis. The bull market is dead, but the robo-machines and talking heads of bubble vision just don’t know it yet.

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.