Morgan Stanley

· ECB rate decision and press conference is set to take place on Thursday, with participants looking for indications as to if and how the central bank’s QE programme may be expanded

· US earning season continues next week, with high profile names including IBM, Alphabet, Amazon.com, Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York Mellon all scheduled to report

Since inception in June 1998, UBS' Managed High Yield Plus Fund survived through the dot-com (and Telco) collapse and the post-Lehman credit carnage but, based on the press release today, has been felled by the current credit cycle's crash. After 3 years of trading at an increasingly large discount to NAV, and plunging to its worst levels since the peak of the financial crisis, the board of the Fund has approved a proposal to liquidate the Fund. While timing is unclear, this is the worst case for an increasingly fragile cash bond market as BWICs galore are set to hit with "liquidty thin to zero."

Despite The Fed's best efforts to crush the business cycle, the crucial credit-cycle has reared its ugly head as releveraging firms (gotta fund those buybacks) and deflationary pressures (liabilities fixed, assets tumble) have led to a soaring market cost of capital and surge in downgrades. In fact, in the latest quarter, the ratio of upgrades-to-downgrades is its weakest since the peak of the financial crisis in 2009. “We’re seeing more widespread weakness across more industry sectors in the U.S... It’s become broader than just the commodity story.”

Just when you thought the M&A boom is over after a surge in bond yields that Goldman has repeatedly dubbed as "recessionary", and which will make the debt cost of any funding so high that there is barely any room for execution error, moments ago as had been extensively leaked previously, private Dell announced it would acquire tech giant EMC in a deal valued roughly $67 billion, while maintaining VMWare as a publicly-traded corporation. Good luck with raising the tens of billions in debt the deal will require: our best wish to Barclays, BofA, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, RBC who will all be underwriting the required debt financing to Dell.

"We believe that the path of least resistance would be to effectively ban capitalism and by-pass banking and capital markets altogether. We gave this policy change several names (such as “Cuba alternative”, “British Leyland”) but the essence of the new form of QE would be using central banks and public instrumentalities to directly inject “heroin into blood stream” rather than relying on system of incentives to drive investor behaviour."

As more and more "reputable" analysts realize that the 30 Year bull market in Treasury isn't going anywhere, another firm jumped on the "more easing" bandwagon overnight, when HSBC's Steven Major slashed his target yield on 10Y Treasurys for 2015 and 2016, from 2.4% and 2.8% to 2.1% and 1.5% respectively. The reason: more easing of course, or rather expectations for further ECB monetary easing which will help U.S. curve to perform.

It was supposed to be the day China's triumphantly returned to the markets from its Golden Holiday week off, and with global stocks soaring over 5% in the past 7 days, hopes were that the Shanghai Composite would close at least that much higher and then some, especially with the "National Team" cheerleading on the side and arresting any sellers. Sure enough, in early trading Chinese futures did seem willing to go with the script, and then everything fell apart when a weak Shanghai Composite open tried to stage a feeble rebound into mid-session, and then closed near the day lows even as the PBOC injected another CNY120 bn via reverse repo earlier.

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"As you know, the environment for global macro fundamentals-based trading continues to be challenging. That factor, combined with the lack of certainty over when a recovery will take hold, led us to conclude that the time was right to return capital to you."

The best headline to summarize what happened in the early part of the overnight session was the following from Bloomberg: "Asian stocks extend global rally on stimulus bets." And following the abysmal data releases from the past three days confirming that the latest centrally-planned attempt to kickstart the global economy has failed, overnight we got even more bad data, first in the form of Australia's trade deficit, and then Germany's factory orders which bombed, and which as Goldman said "seems to reflect genuine weakness in China and emerging markets in general and this will weigh on the German manufacturing sector."

Of all sectors the one which may pose the biggest surprise to investors is financials: it is here that Q3 (and Q4) earnings estimates have hardly budged, and as of September 30 are expected to rise by 10% compared to Q3 2014. This may prove to be a stretch according to Morgan Stanley whose Huw van Steenis is seeing nothing short of a bloodbath in banking revenues, with the traditionally strongest performer, Fixed Income, Currency and Commodity set for a tumble as much as 25%, to wit: "we think FICC may be down 10- 25% YoY (FX up, Rates sluggish, Credit soft), Equities marginally up but IBD also down 10-20%."

Despite the arguably undemocratic, obfuscating nature of our nation’s campaign finance laws and the blatant corporatist agenda mandated by the Supreme Court, let’s attempt to break down the major sources of political spending so far in the 2016 presidential election. You may be surprised to find out who is donating money to your candidate — and how that contribution may affect future policy positions.

With the Federal Reserve still hinting at raising interest rates, but trapped by weak economic growth, will the next big move by the Fed be another form of monetary accommodation instead? Or, are the underlying dynamics of the economy and market really strong enough to shake off the recent weakness and continue its bullish ascent?

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