By Wolf Richter, WOLF STREET
Companies are still borrowing and spending billions on buying back their own shares – one of the big drivers behind the blistering stock market rally of the past few years. It worked wonderfully and without fail. But sudd…
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com
The US corporate default rate, according to Standard & Poor’s Global Fixed Income Research, soared from 2.8% in January to 3.3% in February, a big jump for just one month, and the highest rate since Dec…
Most of the defaults, debt restructurings, and bankruptcies so far this year and last year were triggered when over-indebted cash-flow negative companies could not make interest payments on their debts.
During the crazy days of the peak of the credit b…
In Saudi Arabia, the Tadawul All Share Index plunged 5.4% on Sunday and dropped further on Monday before ticking up a smidgen. It’s at the lowest level since March 2011. Soothsayers blamed oil, and what Iran will do to the already oversupplied o…
Standard & Poor’s slashed the credit ratings of 112 corporations around the globe to default (D) or selective default (SD) in 2015, according to S&P Capital IQ Global Credit. The highest number of global defaults since nightmare-year 2009, wh…
The transportation sector just keeps getting worse. Even after today’s uptick, the Dow Jones Transportation Average is back where it was in April 2014, and down 18% from its peak a year ago. Within this transportation sector is freight, a gauge of th…
It got somewhat lost in the hoopla of the jobs report and the blistering rally in the stock market on Friday. But the US trade deficit worsened by 3.4% in October to $43.9 billion, according to the Commerce Department, once again disappointing soothsay…
Pfizer’s revenues have been declining for what will be four years in a row by the end of 2015. Its liabilities have ballooned to $104 billion. Its “goodwill” and “intangible assets” – future expenses temporarily parked on the balance sheet …
Transportation is a gauge into how well the real economy is doing. And it just keeps getting worse.
In October, the number of freight shipments in North America fell from September, in line with the patterns of the past few years, but it fell more shar…
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com
Chesapeake Energy is a good example. The second largest natural gas producer in the US, after Exxon, reported its debacle yesterday.
Revenues plunged 49% from the quarter a year ago, when the oil bust had alr…
This comes at the totally wrong time. Trucking had been booming. 2014 had been a banner year. Capacity was squeezed, and rates were rising, so trucking companies went on a buying binge, ordering everything in the book in preparation for red-hot demand …
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
Banks, when reporting earnings, are saying a few choice things about their oil-and-gas loans, which boil down to this: it’s bloody out there in the oil patch, b…
By Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com
Revenues of the companies in the S&P 500 have been declining all year. Companies and analysts blamed the strong dollar. They blamed China. They blamed oil, Greece, Japan, and a million other things. In…
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
To the never-ending astonishment of our economists, global growth has been much weaker since the Financial Crisis than before it, despite enormous global sti…
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
The Province of Alberta, the epicenter of the Canadian oil bust, may be sliding into something much worse than a plain-vanilla recession. And it’s not exactly perking up …
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
When something collapses, new opportunities open up. Hedge funds, private equity firms, and other asset managers specialize in this. And now there are signs of ho…
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
It’s been tough for US oil companies. And even tougher for their investors. The hero du jour is Marathon Oil.
Wednesday afterhours it reported an eye-poppi…
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
For a long time, the conservative mortgage lending standards in Canada, including a slew of new ones since 2008, have been touted as one of the reasons why Canada…
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
There’s a reason why it’s called a “housing crisis” – rather than a “healing housing market,” as some pundits might prefer. It boils down to this: M…
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
As the M&A boom in the US explodes from record to record, with one mega-merger succeeding another, Microsoft clarified on Wednesday just how much all thi…
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