David Stockman’s Contra Corner

To think it was less than three months ago that we wrote that "leveraged loan demand is off the charts as dangers mount." Since then, a lot has happened in the credit market, with yields and spreads blowing out in credit in a delayed response to the turmoil in the equity market, eventually hitting the leveraged loan market too, where as we wrote last week, loan prices have...

But here’s the catch: The U.S. government wants not just Americans to obey its sanctions. It expects the entire world to obey its dictates. That’s the way the U.S. Empire works. It claims worldwide jurisdiction for its decrees, edicts, and laws. Thus, when President Trump issues a decree that says “No more trading with Iran,” the people of the United States are, of course,...

This year, I simply couldn’t get one fact out of my head: according to a 2017 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, three billionaires -- Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates -- have amassed as much wealth as the bottom half of American society. That’s 160 million people! (And unlike our president, I don’t use exclamation points lightly or often.) Or as Oxfam...

The saddest victims of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, it now seems clear, are going to be his voters. The greatest beneficiaries of that election are going to be his haters. This political paradox stems from the seeming inevitability of this president leaving his constituency high and dry through political incompetence, behavioral incontinence, an inability to...

New-vehicle sales in China plunged 13.9% in November, compared to a year ago, to 2.55 million units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) announced today. This was the fifth month in a row of year-over-year drops, and the steepest year-over-year drop since January 2012, which had been caused by the timing of the lunar new year. November brought sales for the...

Parker Drilling announced Wednesday morning that it had filed for a “pre-arranged” chapter 11 bankruptcy. The storied drilling contractor has been in business since 1934. It has been involved in oil fields from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and the Siberian Artic to the Caspian Sea and China, in addition to its work in the US. The company had somehow survived the first Oil Bust this...

I vividly remember thinking that when she first became ‘news’ for ‘infiltrating’ the NRA, for which there were plenty cute pictures taken, I remember thinking she would have been 22 or 23 years old when as a super- devious Russian redhead she allegedly penetrated the trillion dollar NRA, and the trillion dollar Republican Party, and the Trump campaign, which according to some...

Today, in his latest note, Edwards doubles down on his assertion that a China hard-landing may be "the grey rhino that investors are ignoring" even as he once again admits that "naysayers, such as I, have consistently been proved wrong about the ability of China’s policymakers to successfully navigate choppy waters without capsizing the economic ship. And it is wholly natural...