LBO

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious, but the stupid have an answer for everything.” ~Edward Abbey

Yellen and her cohort have no clue, however, that all of their massive money printing never really left the canyons of Wall Street, but instead inflated the mother of all financial bubbles. So they are fixing to blow-up the joint for the third time this century. That was plain as day when our Keynesian school marm insisted that the Third Avenue credit fund failure this past week was a one-off event - a lone rotten apple in the barrel. Now that is the ultimate in cluelessness.

The goods-based economy swoons.

After Tuesday’s dividend massacre, it’s plain as day that Kinder Morgan wasn’t the greatest thing since slice bread after all. That is, a “growth” business paying rich dividends out of rock solid profit margins and flourishing cash flow. In fact, it was just a momo stock on a borrowing spree.

"The hardest questions we are trying to reconcile here are how is that possible to see all these signs of weakness under the surface being balanced by very strong equity markets and upbeat employment picture. One of these sides has to be wrong..."

If this weekend's gruesome terrorist attack on Paris ended up being hugely bullish for stocks, then two subsequent events, a stadium-evacuation scare in Hannover (where Angela Merkel was supposed to be present) and a raid in north Paris which left several dead in the ongoing manhunt against the alleged ISIS mastermind, appear to have but some question into if not stocks then algos whether a rising wave of terrorist hatred across Europe is truly what central bankers need to unleash more QE. That said, we expect the current weakness to last only until the traditional USDJPY carry ramp pushes stocks traditionally higher.

Ten years after Symantec paid $13.5bn for Veritas, Carlyle Group agreed in August to buy the data-storage business for just $8 billion (the biggest LBO of the year). Of course, the buyout deal made sense when the cost of funding was negligible and The Fed had your back but, as Bloomberg reports, amid soaring borrowing costs, banks have pulled the $5.5 billion debt offering for Veritas signaling a clear end to the reach-for-yield, nothing is a problem, bond market's risk appetite.. and if 'growthy' deals like this are being killed, what does that say for distressed bets on Energy M&A deals?

Washington’s capacity to foster crony capitalist larceny and corruption never ceases to amaze. But as we recently noted, Wall Street’s shameless thievery from US taxpayers is about to get a whole new definition.

"Sluggish activity will spur firms to repurchase shares in an effort to boost EPS growth" - Goldman Sachs

It is more evident than ever that the world economy is heading into a deflationary conflagration, but today’s generation of house trained bulls wouldn’t recognize a warning if it slapped them upside their horns. They refused once again last week to exit the casino because they got another signal from Hilsenramp that the Fed is on “hold” until at least next March. Call it Ostrich Economics. But do it quick. Those side-effects are coming to the casino some day real soon.

Just 4 short months ago, Avon stock soared after a fake private equity offer from a fake entity appeared. With a 20% short base, the stock exploded higher. Today, with 17.4% of the stocks' float short, The Wall Street Journal sparks some panic-buying...

*AVON HALTED; DISCUSSES STAKE SALE WITH PE FIRMS, WSJ REPORTS

Avon has now been halted twice and is trading up 12% (before re-opening). It appears our observation that AVP has a Debt-to-Ebitda of a stunning 3.7x that has blown away hope/hype of the LBO copming to fruition... AVP is fading fast.

"We take issue with the widespread notion that the problem is solely due to regulators having raised the cost of dealer balance sheet, and could be ameliorated if only there were greater investment in e-trading or a rise in non-dealer-to-non dealer activity... illiquidity is a growing concern even in markets like equities and FX, which use barely any balance sheet at all, and where e-trading is the already the norm rather than the exception."

Wendy's just took buyback mania to the next level when, earlier today, it announced it would buyback $1.4 billion of its shares, which amounts to just under 50% of its entire float!

Since yesterday's fake AVP tender offer was nothing but a targeted attempt to force a short squeeze in one of the market's most shorted stocks, the best way to be positioned for future such criminal activity is to go long precisely the most shorted stocks, the names which in any other universe would be the first to crash, burn and file bankruptcy, but in this parallel centrally-planned universe may just be the biggest winners.

How do you make what had been a very good couple of years for tens of thousands of Avon Products shorts into an absolute nightmare of a day? By doing what PTG Partners just did when moments ago it announced that, out of the blue, it would like to purchase AVP for a price of $18.75 or nearly three times higher than the Avon stock price moments before the announcement. Because why pay double when triple would do.