Well, one extreme case suggests 90%! Reuters reported this week (HT to Almost Daily Grants) that Country Garden, the large Chinese property developer that defaulted on it’s external bondholders has offered up new debt instruments with extended payback, or cash with a 90% haircut! Maybe the property sector is worse than the other capital misallocation […]

First up, as reported by Yahoo yesterday, and covered in the WSJ today is that long term interest rates continue to rise, with the 20 year U.S. Treasury over 5%, and the U.S. ten year going from 3.62% in the trough in September to 4.76% today. In Trumpian lingo, this is a HUUUUGE move up […]

So reports the WSJ this morning. I’m reminded of the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and the reporting that Mr. Biden ignoring military general’s advice and stubbornly followed his own poor political calculus that he had to have the U.S. out of Afghanistan by his own arbitrary timeline of 9/11/2021. At that time we […]

A few posts back I critiqued Fox News Laura Ingraham’s comment that basically said (my paraphrase) “Europe pursues a Europe-first policy in managing their economy and so we should be be pursuing an America-First policy with our economy” (embracing Trump’s tariffs). My retort was do we really want to be like Europe, when for multiple […]

Yesterday Donald Trump and the CEO of the Japanese Softbank company announced a deal to invest $100B in the U.S. You can ignore the question of why investment by Japanese that Mr. Trump likes is good while Japanese investment in US Steel is bad, because a little cognitive dissonance is good for us all. The […]

So American CEOs can just pound sand! The WSJ reports yesterday that CEOs are quietly trying to get into the Trump transition team to try and influence the new administration to not start a trade war, which will harm their businesses and raise prices. But as the headline says, “He isn’t budging.” I’ll have more […]

Of course, he doesn’t see it that way, but that is the reality nonetheless. Mr. Trump once again came out yesterday against Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel. We’ve discussed this a couple of times, here and here, so the basics of the deal haven’t changed–Nippon Steel will invest significant capital ($1.4B) into the new […]

I’m actually both amused and tremendously surprised at the depth of coverage of Mr. Biden’s pardon of his son this weekend. I’m surprised because everybody had to know it was going to happen. Mr. Biden’s protestations to the contrary, that paragon of virtue was always almost certainly going to pardon his son. No one in […]