CDS

S.AFRICA GOVERNOR KGANYAGO SAYS NO AMOUNT OF CENTRAL BANK INTERVENTION WOULD STEM MARKET-DRIVEN RAND MOVES.

Forgotten what 2008 was like? What's coming will be far worse.

"This is legal?" Stephanie Ruhle on CDS after watching "The Big Short" (Bloomberg TV) 

As usual, S&P was late, but just over three months after our explicit warning, the rating agency finally came out with the catalyst we have been expecting when moments ago it said that it had "placed its 'BBB-' long-term corporate credit rating on Hong Kong-based supply-chain management service provider Noble Group Ltd. and the  'BBB-' issue rating on the company's senior unsecured notes on CreditWatch  with negative implications." In other words, Asia's Glencore is about to be junked.

This is the REAL picture of the global economy. It isn’t what CNBC and the talking heads tell you. It is economic collapse.

Rolls Royce just delivered a shocker of a profit warning as new CEO Warren East said the company will take a $990 million hit in 2016 attributable to "sharply lower" sales in the corporate jet space. The shares fell as much as 22% and CDS blew out to three-year wides. 

Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb, the investment firm that runs the Sequoia Fund, was Valeant’s largest shareholder as of June 30, with VRX shares growing to 29% of Sequoia’s portfolio at midyear. The latest outflow is a continuation of previous redemptions: "in the first 10 months of 2015, Sequoia Fund’s outflows totaled about $213 million, Bloomberg data show, after investors withdrew more than $500 million in 2014."

As we noted previously, for the first time ever, primary dealers' corporate bond inventories have turned unprecedentedly negative. While in the short-term Goldman believes this inventory drawdown is probably a by-product of strong customer demand, they are far more cautious longer-term, warning that the "usual suspects" are not sufficient to account for the striking magnitude of inventory declines... and are increasingly of the view that "the tide is going out" on corporate bond market liquidity implying wider spreads and thus higher costs of funding to compensate for the reduction is risk-taking capacity.

While ridiculous, Venezuela's decision to liquidate some of its gold is perhaps understandable under the circumstances: Venezulea relies on crude oil for 95% of its export revenue, and with prices refusing to rebound, the only question is when do all those CDS which price in a Venezuela default finally get paid. What is even more understandable is what Venezuela should have done in the first place before dumping a fifth of its gold, but got to do eventually, namely raiding all of the IMF capital held under its name in a special SDR reserve account.

This weekend we saw an important action in the downgrade of Saudi Arabia, highlighting just how far the EM crisis has carried. As Ice Farm Capital's Michael Green notes, in response, Saudi CDS continues to climb, reaching its highest since 2009 (amid both default risk and devaluation concerns). The rising risks in Saudi Arabia are a reminder that growth weakness has its own feedback mechanism – if oil prices stay at these levels for an extended period of time, it appears unlikely that Saudi Arabia will remain the reliable source that the world is currently counting on.

The torrid October, with its historic S&P500 point rally, is finally in the history books, and at least for a select group of hedge funds such as Glenview, Pershing Square and Greenlight and certainly their L.P.s, a very scary Halloween couldn't come fast enough, leading to losses between 15% and 20%. How did everyone else fare? Below, courtesy of Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid, is a summary of what worked in October (and YTD), and what didn't.

At least parts of the Fed all the way back in 1979 appreciated how Greenspan and Bernanke’s “global savings glut” was a joke. Rather than follow that inquiry to a useful line of policy, monetary officials instead just let it all go into the ether of, from their view, trivial history. But the true disaster lies not just in that intentional ignorance but rather how orthodox economists and policymakers were acutely aware there was “something” amiss about money especially by the 1990’s. Because these dots to connect were so close together the only reasonable conclusion for this discrepancy is ideology alone. Economists were so bent upon creating monetary “rules” by which to control the economy that they refused recognition of something so immense because it would disqualify their very effort.

Once more in this new normal in which we 'live', the necessary creative destruction of capitalism is eschewed in favor of saving a zombie company that the CEO admitted was "overwhelmed." The good news for American taxpayers is that it is Canadian taxpayers - via a generous $1.3 billion 'investment' by the Quebec government - that are bailing out private-jet-maker Bombardier. Following aircraft projects plagued by overruns, missed deadlines, and scant interest from airlines, Bombardier posted a $4.9billion loss in Q3. Well never mind that, Quebec taxpayers now own 49.5% of the challenged CSeries program.

Venezuela has two immediate bond payments due this and next week amounting to $3.5 billion. Where did the near-insolvent country obtain the funds needed to make these debt payments? The answer: it has been dumping its gold, which its former ruler Chavez worked hard in 2011 to repatriate from London, and which its current president Maduro, just four short years later, is busy sending back to its creditors.

Who holds the majority of the debt that would be at risk in a Russian default? Not China.  Not Iran.  Not Syria.  No, it’s the exact same nations, and banks and funds within those nations, that are applying the sanctions against Russia. So, if Russia does default, what does it mean in terms of its political relationship with the West? Nothing. But what does it mean to its creditors? Everything... Simply put, if Putin believes that the benefits of a default outweigh the consequences to his country, he won’t hesitate to do it, no matter the international ruckus it might raise.