"...And You Thought Recession Risk Was A Thing Of The Past..."

Rabbit Season! Duck Season! Rabbit Season! Duck Season!

As the third-quarter earnings season comes to a close with a -2.3% showing on EPS, analysts are more bearish going into the fourth quarter; the weakness looks to spread to six sectors vs. five in the third quarter indicating the industrial slowdown has spread to services

Third quarter revenue growth has slowed to levels not seen since 2016’s third quarter while expectations are that the year’s final three months slow further; as with earnings, the quarter-on-quarter weakness is expected to broaden to health care and consumer discretionary

In the short-run, companies will likely endeavor to cut costs, including labor, to draw a line under earnings as revenues deteriorate; given revenues are a demand proxy, a concurrent slowing in GDP is also foreseeable

Rabbit Fire was a 1951 Looney Tunes cartoon starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. The Warner Bros. short was the first to feature the classic feud between Bugs and Daffy. In it, Daffy lures Elmer to Bugs’ burrow, calls down to him, then watches as Elmer shoots at the emerged Bugs, parting his ears. As Elmer aims again, Bugs informs him that it’s not rabbit season, but rather duck season. Daffy storms in irate and attempts to convince Elmer that Bugs is lying. Their conversation breaks down into Bugs engaging Daffy in the verbal play illustrated in today’s title. Of course, Daffy fumbles into saying “duck season” and Elmer fires away.


Whether you are a fan of Bugs or Daffy, there’s another season in the financial market world that’s about to come to a close – earnings season.

Ninety-two percent of S&P 500 companies have reported third-quarter earnings results. Last Friday, FactSet reported that earnings per share (EPS) had declined 2.3% versus a year ago. Industry performance was mixed with five sectors – Energy, Materials, Information Technology, Financials and Consumer Discretionary – reporting year-over-year declines and the other six – Utilities, Health Care, Real Estate, Consumer Staples, Industrials and Communication Services – posting year-over-year gains.

Analysts’ fourth-quarter guidance is more bearish for earnings compared to the third quarter. It’s anticipated that six sectors will decline including Energy, Materials, Industrials, Information Technology, Consumer Discretionary and Consumer Staples. This widened breadth carries a broader cyclical narrative beyond the sectors more closely affected by trade war; it bleeds into the entire consumer space. Implicit are hints of contagion from manufacturing to services that introduce broader labor market risks. And you thought recession risk was a thing of the past just because the yield curve un-inverted.

Cue Bugs and Daffy for an encore with a twist: “Earnings season! Revenue season! Earnings season! Revenue season!” The bottom line (earnings) gets all the attention each quarter. But the top line (revenue) should never be overlooked. For cycle chasers and equity strategists alike, revenue growth is the heartbeat of U.S. economic activity. It proxies Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

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U.S. Shale Braces For Brutal Earnings Season

The timing comes as the shale sector is facing somewhat of a reckoning. After years of price volatility – with more downs than ups – oil prices have failed to return even remotely close to pre-2014 levels. For several years, shale E&Ps took on debt and issued new equity, promising investors that they would profit both from a rebound in prices and from rapid production growth.

They delivered on gains to output, but not on profits. At some point in the last year, investors really began to lose faith. Oil stocks have been the worst performers in the S&P 500 this year.

The latest release of earnings will probably do little to quell unease from big investors. Oil and natural gas prices have dropped this year, by about 17 percent and 31 percent, respectively. Job cuts have returned and bankruptcies are on the rise again.

The oil majors are pressing forward with their aggressive shale development plans. That may prevent a noticeable decline in production. But their earnings – many of the majors report this week – are expected to be down roughly 40 percent from a year ago, which will raise some tough questions.

Some of the largest banks have slashed their credit lines to smaller shale E&Ps. According to Reuters, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and the Royal Bank of Canada are among some of the lenders that have reduced the amount of credit they are offering to drillers.

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Whistleblower Alleges GE Commits Almost $40 Billion In Accounting Fraud

General Electric (GE) shares fell Thursday following Bernard Madoff whistleblower, Harry Markopolos, targeting the company in a report alleging the corporation covered up a massive amount of losses in financial documents, according to the Washington Post.

A forensic accountant, Markopolos posted a 175-page report, which is being circulated on a website called GEFraud.com. The reporting alleges that GE is committing $38 billion in accounting fraud. He calls this a “bigger fraud than Enron,” and declares GE is using similar fraud tactics. After the release of the report, GE stock dropped 4.3% in premarket trading, according to Reuters. 

“[I]t’s the biggest, bigger than Enron and WorldCom combined,” the report goes on to say. “In fact, GE’s $38 Billion in accounting fraud amounts to over 40% of GE’s market capitalization, making it far more serious than either the Enron or WorldCom accounting frauds.”

Markopolos and his team published the allegations after a year’s worth of research.

“My team has spent the past 7 months analyzing GE’s accounting and we believe the $38 Billion in fraud we’ve come across is merely the tip of the iceberg,” Markopolos stated in the 175-page report.

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Chinese Drugmaker Discloses $4.4 Billion Accounting Fraud

It looks like China's unstoppable default tsunami is about to claim its latest corporate victim...and thanks to lax oversight that allowed the company to get away with what appears to be a staggering accounting fraud, thousands of unsuspecting investors might be left holding the bag.

According to Bloomberg, Kangmei Pharmaceutical Co., one of China’s largest listed drugmakers, revealed on Tuesday that it had overstated its cash holdings by $4.4 billion. Unsurprisingly, the revelation, which immediately exposed the company to be teetering on the brink of insolvency, sent its shares and bonds tumbling. Its shares, which are a constituent of MSCI's global index, plunged by the 10% daily limit. Its 2.4 billion yuan ($356 million) notes due in 2022 dropped by as much as 60 yuan (about $9).

It's just the latest example of why investors must be wary of Chinese companies due to lax regulations, even as its equity and bond markets are becoming increasingly internationalized. The company's revelation came four months after it revealed that Chinese authorities had launched an investigation into the company.

One of BBG's sources said the restatement is 'unprecedented' in the history of Chinese security markets.

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Insider Selling Soars: Fastest Pace Of September Sales In Past Decade

One month ago, we reported that insider selling reached $450 million daily in August, the highest level this year; on a monthly basis, insiders sold more than $10 billion of their stock, the most of any month this year and near the most on record.

"As corporate buying is at least taking a breather, corporate insiders are ramping up share selling as the major U.S. stock market averages are at or near record highs," TrimTabs wrote in a note.

One month later, TrimTabs is out with a follow up monthly report which finds even more of the same: according to the investment research company, the "best-informed market participants" are selling their own stocks at the fastest pace in September in the past decade, even as stock buyback announcements have hit record levels.

Corporate insiders have sold an average of $400 million daily in September through Friday, September 21, TrimTabs founds, adding that this month’s volume of $5.7 billion is already the highest in any September in the past decade.

Of course this comes at a time of record corporate stock buybacks, resulting in a perverse loops in which insiders dumping near record amount of stock to their own, far less informed, shareholders.

“While insiders are selling hard with their own money, they’ve committed record amounts of shareholders’ money to prop up stock prices this year,” said David Santschi, Director of Liquidity Research at TrimTabs Investment Research.

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Market Stunned After Musk Discloses Intention To LBO Tesla, Lawsuits Threatened

Update 10: After all that, nobody has any idea what just happened, and a word being increasingly thrown around is lawsuit. As Yahoo's Rick Newman writes, if the LBO deal described by Musk with "funding secured" is true, it’s a boon for shareholders. But if it’s not true, Tesla is in trouble, and shareholders may feel the pain.

“If funding is secured, then it’s a factual statement,” says John C. Coffee, director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. “But if he can’t prove that, he’s in some danger of a big lawsuit because short sellers will be devastated by this.”

On Aug. 7, Musk tweeted: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” Those nine words sent the stock soaring from $342 to around $370, an 8% jump. Then the Nasdaq exchange temporarily halted trading in the shares, pending clarification of material news by the company.

About three hours after his momentous tweet, Musk posted a message to employees explaining his rationale for going private. He cited “wild swings” in the stock price and frequent attacks by short sellers as “a major distraction for everyone working at Tesla.” He cited Space X, the  rocket-launching company where Musk is also CEO, as an example of a privately owned company better able to focus on a complex long-term mission. “A final decision has not yet been made,” he said.

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Tech Investors Start To Panic As Facebook’s Stock Price Plunges More Than 20 Percent

Is this the beginning of the fall of Facebook?  After announcing disappointing numbers for the second quarter on Wednesday, Facebook’s stock price plunged more than 20 percent in after-hours trading.  If that decline holds on Thursday, it will be the biggest stock price drop in Facebook’s entire history.  But the truth is that we will probably see the stock price bounce back a bit, because Wednesday’s crash was almost certainly an overreaction.  Unlike many other tech companies, Facebook is still making lots of money, and the number of users globally is still growing.  However, there are definitely some huge red flags.  In the U.S. and Canada the number of users is stagnant, and in Europe the number of users is actually declining.  Facebook’s user base is aging as many young people abandon the platform for trendier alternatives, and there is a growing backlash among conservatives against the tremendous censorship that we have seen in recent months.  People are hungry for an alternative, and if something more appealing comes along Facebook could ultimately suffer the same fate as MySpace very rapidly.

Stock prices tend to fall a lot faster than they go up, but what happened to Facebook on Wednesday was truly breathtaking…

Facebook lost about $130 billion in market value in just two hours, its steepest stock decline ever, after warning of slowing sales growth.

The stock, which plunged as much as 24% in after-hours trading Wednesday, had a cascading effect on competitors Snap and Twitter, which dropped, too. Traders are bracing for a decline in tech stocks when the markets open Thursday.

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Comcast, AT&T Set To Become World's Most Indebted Companies With Over $350BN In Debt

At a time when the IMF estimates that more than 20% of the world's companies would be unable to cover their interest payments if interest rates moved sharply higher, Comcast and AT&T are poised to become the most indebted companies in the world following media megadeals that leave the two companies with little room to maneuver if profits fail to materialize, according to the Wall Street Journal.

As WSJ points out, assuming both are finalized, the deals would leave the two companies with a combined $350 billion in bonds and loans, more than one-third of a trillion dollars in debt. The number is making some bond fund managers nervous, and some are saying they won't include Comcast or AT&T debt in their portfolios - unless they bear a suitably high yield.

"It’s a very big number," said Mike Collins, a bond fund manager at PGIM Fixed Income, which manages $329 billion of corporate debt investments. "It has fixed-income investors a little nervous and rightfully so."

But rather than looking at these deals as isolated examples, WSJ reminds us that companies only arrived at this level of corporate indebtedness following a decadelong surge in corporate borrowing, as companies - including these two telecoms giants - eagerly bought back their shares to appease investors, and financed these purchases with debt. Global corporate debt, excluding financial institutions, now stands at $11 trillion. Meanwhile, the median leverage for companies with an investment grade rating has increased by 30% since the financial crisis.

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"Tanks On Their Lawn": Comcast Challenges Fox With $31 Billion Bid For Sky

US cable-and-content behemoth Comcast issued a brazen challenge to News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch by offering a 22 billion pound ($31 billion) cash bid to buy Sky, challenging Murdoch's Twenty-First Century Fox - which is trying to buy the 61% of the company that it doesn't already own - and Walt Disney, which recently purchased nearly all of the entertainment assets once owned by the Murdoch-controlled 21st Century Fox.

Comcast's bid comes out to GBP12.5 per share in cash for the UK broadcaster, a 16% premium to the GBP10.75 per share that Fox recently agreed to.

Sky shares soared nearly 20% on the news.

As Reuters points out, Sky services 23 million homes across Europe and is known for its technological innovation. Murdoch has been trying to gain 100% control of the company, but has been stymied by British regulators, who have raised concerns about his stewardship stemming from the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and his already vast influence over UK media. Murdoch already owns several of the UK's most widely circulated print publications, as well as his 39% stake in Sky, According to Reuters.

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These Are The 10 Companies That Dominate the Global Arms Trade

The world puts $1.69 trillion towards military expenditures per year, and about $375 billion of that goes towards buying arms specifically.

Whether it is guns, tanks, jets, missiles, or ships that are on your shopping list, in the international arms community, as Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardin notes, there is a supplier for any weapon your country desires.

USA, USA!

While it is common knowledge that the United States plays a big role in the global arms trade, the numbers are still quite astounding.

Of the top ten companies by sales, firms based in the U.S. make up seven of them. That includes the clear #1, Lockheed Martin, which had $40.8 billion in arms-related sales in 2016, as well as the remaining constituents of the top three: Boeing and Raytheon.

Further, on SIPRI’s wider top 100 list, a good proxy for total arms sales globally, U.S. defense companies accounted for a whopping 58% of total global arms sales. That adds up to $217.2 billion in 2016, a 4.0% rise over the previous year.

ROUNDING OUT THE TOP 10

Only three companies make the top 10 leaderboard from outside of the United States.

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Tech Giants Look to WTO to Entrench Their Monopoly Powers and Profits

In the early 1990s, transnational corporations (TNCs) in the agriculture, services, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing sectors each got agreements as part of the WTO to lock in rights for those companies to participate in markets under favorable conditions, while limiting the ability of governments to regulate and shape their economies. The topics corresponded to the corporate agenda at the time.

Today, the biggest corporations are also seeking to lock in rights and handcuff public interest regulation through trade agreements, including the WTO. But today, the five biggest corporations are all from one sector: technology; and are all from one country: the United States. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, with support from other companies and the governments of Japan, Canada, and the EU, are seeking to rewrite the rules of the digital economy of the future by obtaining within the WTO a mandate to negotiate binding rules under the guise of “e-commerce.”

However, the rules they are seeking go far beyond what most of us think of as “e-commerce.” Their top agenda is to ensure free ― for them ― access to the world’s most valuable resource ― the new oil, which is data. They want to be able to capture the billions of data points that we as digitally-connected humans produce on a daily basis, transfer the data wherever they want, and store them on servers in the United States. This would endanger privacy and data protections around the world, given the lack of legal protections on data in the US.

Then they can process data into intelligence, which can be packaged and sold to third parties for large profits, akin to monopoly rents. It is also the raw material for artificial intelligence, which is based on the massive accumulation of data in order to “train” algorithms to make decisions. In the economy of the future, whoever owns the data will dominate the market. These companies are already being widely criticized for their monopolistic and oligopolistic behaviors, which would be consolidated under these proposals.

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“The Medical Cost Reduction Act of 2017”

Law #1 – Establish A National Fee Schedule for Emergency Procedures
For unscheduled hospital admissions and surgeries, patients cannot realistically “consent” to provider charges.

The documents that patients must  sign to “pay whatever is charged”  or to “ pay whatever your insurance does not cover” are what legal scholars call ‘procedurally unconscionable.’

The patient must agree to the terms of the providers.  The only way to receive desperately-needed care is to accept whatever charges are assessed. The patient is simply assumed to have provided informed consent to any procedure, and to any fee from any provider. This is not normal commercial practice…..instead it is naked force. And it must change, with the following new rules:

In emergencies, the charges to an uninsured or ‘out of-network’ patient must not exceed 150% of the lowest basic charge in the Medicare fee schedule. (i.e., no upcoding)
Hospitals can no longer use their “chargemaster” rates to bill the uninsured.
Doctors called in for emergencies cannot charge 800% of Medicare, as they often do today.
Any provider who tries to bill above the allowed rates, for patients who are clearly unable to provide informed consent, will be considered guilty of consumer fraud. Not only will their bills be uncollectible, they could be charged criminally in the most egregious cases.

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What Does the Surprise Selection of Expedia’s Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO Mean for Uber?

You could have gotten whiplash from watching Uber’s CEO selection ping pong today. First former supposed lead horse, ex GE CEO Jeff Immelt, withdrew, apparently because he’d gotten wind he wasn’t going to get the nod. Then the press briefly reported that HP’s Meg Whitman was who the board wanted….despite her having said firmly she didn’t want the job, twice. It turns out she’d come on Saturday, apparently at Benchmark’s behest, and given the board a little speech on what she thought Uber ought to do.

Not long after that, the press started reporting that the board had settled on a name that had been kept under wraps, that of Dara Khosrowshahi, currently the CEO of Expedia, who was also the highest paid CEO in 2015, pulling down a cool $94.5 million in 2015. While there has been some grumbling about Khosrowshahi’s rich compensation, he’s never made any of the “overpaid CEO” lists. That’s because his spectacular 2015 payday was almost entirely the result of a grant of $90.8 million in stock options…for signing a long term employment agreement stipulating that he remain at the helm until September 2020. In 2016, his pay was a more staid $2.45 million.

But Khosrowshahi is going to be Uber’s $100+ million man, since that’s going to be the order of magnitude cost of buying him out from his Expedia agreement plus whatever special inducements needed for him to join Uber (almost certainly vastly richer in expected comp if you believe that Uber will be able to do an IPO at a suitably lofty valuation, an idea we regard with considerable skepticism).

The press has been positive about the choice, if nothing else because Expedia has been a drama-free tech company and the financial media likes the idea of a tech CEO for Uber (arguably a necessity to keep up the fantasy that a local transportation company deserves a unicorn premium). Expedia managed to be one of two winners in what was originally a four-company fight for dominance in the travel booking business. And it also represents at least a momentary cessation of hostilities at the Uber board, since the vote on Khosrowshahi was unanimous. Recode gives some detail about his background, focusing on factors that may help him succeed, without acknowledging the magnitude of the task.

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As Farmers Go Broke, John Deere Ramps Up It's Captive Financing Operation To Keep The Ag Party Going

So what do you do when your John Deere and your entire business revolves around selling really expensive equipment to farmers who have been absolutely decimated financially by low crop prices and can no longer convince commercial banks that they're worthy of additional debt needed to buy fancy new tractors?  Well, you take some plays from the automotive industry, that's what.  Here's how it works:

Step 1:  Setup a captive financing arm to underwrite all of the credit risk that no reasonable commercial ag bank would touch with a 10 foot pole.

Step 2:  Boost your tractor sales volumes by financing every farmer who walks through your door with a soybean dream and pulse.

Step 3:  When you run out of farmers willing to buy your brand new shiny green tractors then just start selling all your production volume to yourself and then lease it to customers at an attractive price.  This way you can still show sales growth and never have to cut production volume.

Step 4:  Finally, when it all goes horribly wrong because used tractor prices crash due to the flood of off-lease volume and brings down the new market with it then you take a one-time charge to write-off the losses, wall streets forgives you...it was just a 1x charge, right...and then you promptly rinse and repeat.

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It's Confirmed: Without Government Subsidies, Tesla Sales Implode

According to the latest data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), sales of Electrically Chargeable Vehicles (which include plug-in hybrids) in Q1 of 2017 were brisk across much of Europe: they rose by 80% Y/Y in eco-friendly Sweden, 78% in Germany, just over 40% in Belgium and grew by roughly 30% across the European Union... but not in Denmark: here sales cratered by over 60% for one simple reason: the government phased out taxpayer subsidies.

As Bloomberg writes, and as Elon Musk knows all too well, the results confirm that "clean-energy vehicles aren’t attractive enough to compete without some form of taxpayer-backed subsidy."

The Denmark case study is emblematic of where the tech/cost curve for clean energy vehicles currently stands, and why for "green" pioneers the continued generosity of governments around the globe is of absolutely critical importance, and also why Trump's recent withdrawal from the Paris Climate Treaty is nothing short of a business model death threat.

To be sure, Denmark's infatuation with green cars is well-known: the country's bicycle-loving people bought 5,298 of them in 2015, more than double the amount sold that year in Italy, which has a population more than 10 times the size of Denmark's. However, those phenomenal sales figures had as much to do with price and convenience as with environmental concerns: electric car dealers were for a long time spared the jaw-dropping import tax of 180 percent that Denmark applies on vehicles fueled by a traditional combustion engine.

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Sears Closing Another 66 Stores; Joe's Crab Shack Files For Bankruptcy

Here's another example of when cornered hacks blame "fake news" or in this case, the "irresponsible media" for their gross incompetence, only to prove the media very much responsible and unfake.

One month ago, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert blasted the media for "unfairly singling out" the company over the past decade and blamed "irresponsible" coverage for the retailer's woes. Sears, once the largest U.S. retailer, recently hit rock bottom and continued to dug when it warned investors in March there was a chance it may not survive after years of losses and declining sales. Still, that very warning did not prevent Lampert from lashing out at those who have - correctly - been warning that his company bankruptcy is just a matter of time, and back in May he kicked off the company's annual shareholders' meeting at the company's HQ with a 12 page slideshow of headlines about the company's financial distress, dating back to 2008 (Lampert is known for his peculiarities, collecting morbid headlines about his biggest asset was not known to be among them).

"You'd think it was from a month ago, but it's literally been going on for a decade," Lampert told the handful of furious Sears shareholders in attendance who have seen the value of their stock wiped out over the years.

There were other fireworks during the meeting, like for example when Lampert compared Sears - which hasn't posted a profit in six years - to Amazon's early unprofitable growth. He predicted people will look back and wonder how they missed the Sears' turnaround. The audience was not amused, and six shareholders questioned Lampert, including one asked if Lampert was paranoid and in denial about the company's losses.

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Welcome To The Corporatocracy

America’s large corporations and its government have merged. Or was it an acquisition? If the latter, who acquired whom? Unfortunately, the labels affixed to purely corporate combinations lose their analytical usefulness here. While the two retain their own distinct legal structures and managements, so to speak, such a close community of interest has evolved that it’s no longer possible to separate them or delineate their individual contours. Political labels are no help; the ones most often used have become hopelessly imprecise. The Wikipedia definition of “fascism” is over 8,000 words, with 43 notes and 16 references.

However, the conjoined blob is so big, rapacious, and intrusive that akin to Justice Potter Stewart’s famous non-definition of obscenity, everybody knows it when they see or otherwise come into contact with it. This article will use the term “corporatocracy.” It’s less letters, dashes, and words to type than “the corporate-government-combination.” No serviceable understanding of either US history or current events is possible without close study of the corporatocracy. Unfortunately, such study, like entomology or cleaning septic tanks, requires a stout constitution. But take heart, entomologists grow to love their creepy crawly things, and septic tank cleaners say that after a few minutes you don’t even notice the smell.

A cherished delusion of naive liberals holds that big government is a counterweight, not a partner, to big business. Such a rationale is touted when the righteous demand new regulation, the public and media endorse it, the legislators pass it, and the president signs it into law. However, there are always unpaved stretches on the road to hell—once regulation is law, the righteous, public, media, legislators, and president, and their ostensibly good intentions, are on to the next cause.

In the quiet obscurity they relish, regulators and regulated get down to doing what they do best: bending the law to their joint benefit. Business, whose P&L’s can be powerfully affected by regulations, hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers in a never ending effort to tilt the playing field in their direction, and improve bottom lines, stock prices, and executive bonuses. The return on such investment is far higher than on old fashioned expenditures like research and development, plant and equipment, and job-creating expansion.

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Amazon Discovers the High Cost of Being Poor

Sometimes financial services industry mouthpieces inadvertently give the game away. When this happens – and a tame bank-friendly publication runs a story which aims to fulfil their role as boosters and palliatives for what outside their bubbles is an industry which is beyond redemption – the results are often amusing. If they try to brush the problems big finance causes to media darlings like Amazon under the rug, they look even more ridiculous when their attempts at finessing them away draws even more attention back to the underlying issue.

Once such example comes from big finance’s Mrs. Malaprop, the American Banker. To save weary readers from having to parse the whole article, in this piece American Banker made even by their standards a risible effort to re-tread Amazon’s press release in which Amazon announced to an eager public how it was going to “help” customers give founder Jeff Bezos (who in my mind is living proof of what happens when you cross breed a unicorn and a bunny boiler) even more money.

To cut American Banker’s long story short — by which I am sure I am performing a community service — Amazon now offers customers a means of crediting their Amazon account with funds which they deposit at a range of partner bricks-and-mortar retail outlets. There are some shenanigans with a smartphone app, bar codes, optional Apple Pay or Android Pay snooping, trips to the store to pay in cash and so forth which you can read about in American Banker’s explanation but — to cut to the chase — the new service means that if you have cash, you can get that cash into your Amazon account without needing to have access to a credit or debit card.

The unintentionally amusing aspect of this rah-rah’ing from Amazon and American Banker is that it accidentally highlights a significant issue for so-called New Economy players such as Amazon. The problem for non-traditional retailers and service providers who lack physical premises is that it is very difficult for them to be able to handle customers who either don’t want to pay by credit or debit card or, more intractably, don’t have a debit or credit card in the first place.

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60% Of US Metro Areas See More Businesses Close Than Open

It may come as a surprise that Americans are less likely to start a business, move to another region of the country, or switch jobs now than at any time in recent memory. But dynamism is in retreat nationwide and in nearly every measurable respect.

Conventional wisdom seems to accept the idea that too much churn and destruction now plague wide swaths of the American economy. The latest economic data, however, turns this conclusion on its head. The United States actually suffers from a problem of too little creation—not too much destruction—perhaps for the first time in its history. Our economic and job creation engine is rapidly slowing down.

America’s economic engine is losing steam.

Consider this: In spite of massive changes throughout the global economy, the rate at which businesses close has remained fairly steady in the United States over the past 40 years. In contrast, the rate of new business formation has plummeted, falling by half since the late 1970s—including a severe decline during the Great Recession. From small mom and pop storefronts to high tech startups, new businesses are simply scarcer than ever.

Why does this matter? New firms are the “creative” part of creative destruction. They help keep the economy in a constant state of rebirth, serving to replace dying industries, foster competition with incumbent companies, and produce new, higher wage jobs. When they disappear, the cycle of creative destruction falls out of balance. That is the core economic problem America faces today.

In short, we’ve lost the economic dynamism that powered U.S. prosperity for the past century.

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The Corporate Bond Market: Binge-Borrowing

Celery and raspberry? Marathon miles of Sudoku and crossword puzzles? Extra reps at the gym? Binge away.

‘Tis the season after the season, that other most wonderful time of the year when it’s a challenge to get a machine at the gym and resolutions are resolute, at least until February or a more intriguing deal comes along. What better way to make amends for that huge holiday hangover that crescendos with so many a New Year’s Eve bash?

Some of us chose to ring in 2017 in a substantially more subdued manner that nevertheless entailed binging of a decidedly different derivation. Enter Netflix. Yours truly must confess that closet claustrophobia was the culprit in keeping this one indoors coveting the control, confining the choices to richly royal romps. It all started innocently enough, with a recommendation to catch The Crown, which has just won a Golden Globe. The devolution that followed began in Italy, with Medici, stopped over in France, with Versailles, and round tripped back to England, with the epic saga that kicked off the modern day, small screen genre, The Tudors. At some point hallucinations began to give the impression that all the series’ stars had British accents. Wait, they actually did.

Thankfully, at some point, bowl games snapped the spell and reality rudely reared its redemptive head before anyone’s else’s head rolled (those royals were a bloodthirsty lot!). Sleep and sanity followed.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of borrowers of almost every stripe these days. For those tapping the fixed income markets, the borrowing binge fest is conspicuous in its constancy. Not only did global bond issuance top $6.6 trillion last year, a fresh record, sales are off to a galloping start thus far in January.

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