Ratings Agencies

From EM darling to depression, it's been a rough ride for the "B" in BRICS. As we kick off 2016, analysts are growing increasingly concerned that Brazil's economic downturn could well be deeper and longer than anyone expected. The market's collapsing expectations are summarized in one stunning chart.

For now Noble refuses to throw in the towel, and overnight released the following statement on the Singapore Exchange where its massively beaten down stock trades.

Taken together with the rather steep drop in US industrial production, the risks of a full-blown and perhaps severe recession have undoubtedly grown. Unlike what the FOMC is trying to project via the federal funds rate, a rate that isn’t being fully complemented, either, at this point, visible economic risk is not just rising it is exploding.

Brazil has a new finance minister and the market is not happy. As BofAML puts it, "the focus turns now to the direction of the fiscal policy under the new FinMin, which should affect the recovery in confidence and thus growth. With mounting downside risks to growth that heavily weigh on the government’s revenues and the ongoing challenges in passing fiscal measures in Congress, tangible results over statements will now be needed to improve expectations over primary fiscal results ahead."

"Like most turns in the credit cycle, it is uncertain exactly when the bottom will fall out of corporate credit markets, but the catalyst is likely to be an unexpected major event, perhaps even a single company getting into trouble. While we have been bearish on high yield for over a year now, we didn't think the conditions were yet ripe for a collapse. Now they're ripe."

- Ellington Management

In the real world, any casino (legal or otherwise) which refused to pay when the “house” lost would quickly be driven out of business

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.

After forensically analyzing Morgan Stanley's balance sheet (which is very much like the rest of Wall Street's balance sheet) I can draw direct parallels to that of Lehman and Bear Stearns in 2007. It's a party!

Want further evidence of the misappropriation of taxpayer funds to post-secondary education? Look no further than the Pell grant program.

Imagine that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was a corporation, with its shares owned by the nation's major pharmaceutical companies. How would you feel about the regulation of medications?  Whose interests would this corporation be serving? Or suppose that major oil companies appointed a small committee to periodically announce the price of a barrel of crude in the United States. How would that impact you at the gasoline pump? Such hypotheticals would strike the majority of Americans as completely absurd, but it's exactly how our banking system operates.

Anyone with any sense for global economic trends ought to be worried. The signs are everywhere of a serious deflationary crisis.

"What Europe Wants" - to use global issues as excuses to extend its power:

• environmental issues: increase control over member countries; advance idea of global governance
• terrorism: use excuse for greater control over police and judicial issues; increase extent of surveillance
• global financial crisis: kill two birds (free market; Anglo-Saxon economies) with one stone (Europe-wide regulator; attempts at global financial governance)
• EMU: create a crisis to force introduction of “European economic government”

The fox is guarding the henhouse at America's colleges and universities as accreditors slap a seal of approval on schools with subpar graduation rates, clearing the way for government aid to flow where it shoudln't and further imperiling the US taxpayer in the process.

Is Deustche Bank the next Lehman is likely the wrong question to be asking. Is Lehman the template for European banking may be more to the point. Take it from the guy that called the Lehman debacle 5 months before the fact.

"Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wants to take from the rich in order to make public college tuition-free for everyone else. On Tuesday, the Vermont senator will hold a press conference in the nation's capital at which he will introduce a plan to use a so-called Robin Hood tax on stock transactions to fund tuition at four-year public colleges and universities," Bloomberg reports.