Tag: High Yield bonds

WHAT KEEPS THEM UP AT NIGHT

“Government has coddled, accepted, and ignored white collar crime for too long. It is time the nation woke up and realized that it’s not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it’s the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most. They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives.” – Harry Markopolos, Madoff Whistleblower

Image result for bank ceos in front of congress

The tenth anniversary of the Wall Street created financial catastrophe brought back some bittersweet memories this week. I wrote my first articles during the summer/fall of 2008 for Seeking Alpha. They included: Is The U.S Banking System Safe? (Aug 2008), The Great Consumer Crash of 2009 (Aug 2008), Looming Financial Catastrophe: A Real Inconvenient Truth (Aug 2008), Is Wachovia the Worst Run Bank in America (Sept 2008), The U.S. on the Precipice (Sept 2008), On Board the U.S.S. Titanic (Sept 2008), Our Coming Depression (Oct 2008), among others. I was pumping out 5,000 word articles every 2 or 3 days.

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Ominous Signals Coming From The High Yield Market

Via Investment Research Dynamics

Are you prepared for impact? One of my readers alerted me to the fact that someone bought 15,000 January 2016, 80-strike puts on the HYG high yield bond ETF. That’s a $1.6 million cash bet on an event that has not occurred since July 2009.

The high yield bond indices are rolling over quickly.  As the graph below shows, after the QE-driven big bounce from the 2008 collapse in the financial markets, the high yield market has largely drifted sideways since the middle of 2010.   Energy bonds represent about 15% of the high yield market.  But the junk bond market actually began slowly rolling over a full year before the price of oil collapsed:

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You see that the junk bond market, as represented by the HYG ETF, peaked in July 2013. The price of oil began to drop like a rock in mid-June 2014. This event didn’t seem to infect the junk bond market until early July 2014.

For a lot of reasons, the high yield market is a lot more sensitive to changes in the financial and economic condition of the system than are stocks. From the graph above, you can see that HYG is down 12.5% from its peak in 2013. At that point in time, the S&P 500 was still on its way to an all-time high. More than half of the 12.5% drop in junk bonds has occurred since the spring of 2015.

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