Ka-boom Goes the Bottom of the US Bond Market

[marmar]

Ka-boom Goes the Bottom of the US Bond Market
by Wolf Richter • January 27, 2016


And it’s not just oil & gas!

The toxic pile of distressed corporate debt in the US grew to $285 billion in January, up 22% from a month ago and up 162% from a year ago, according to S&P Capital IQ. The number of distressed issuers ballooned to 324 US corporations, up 20% from a month ago and up 84% from a year ago.

The last time the total amounts of distressed debt and the number of distressed issuers had shot up to these levels was in October 2008, just after Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy.

That’s how bad it is now in the US. It’s the essential consequence of years of artificially easy credit, the Fed-inspired blind confidence of yield-desperate investors, ludicrous corporate risk-taking to take advantage of those blind investors, private-equity asset stripping and buyouts, and among other things, the collapse of commodity prices that resulted from overproduction.

During the Financial Crisis, the total amount of distressed US corporate debt maxed out at $398 billion in December 2008 and then began to drop as the Fed was dousing the land with QE and started manually bailing out corporations and banks with emergency loans. Today, there are no bailouts in sight, and no one is talking about an emergency. So the distressed debt of $285 billion today is just the beginning. ................(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2016/01/27/distressed-us-corporate-debt-at-lehman-moment-levels/

[PeoViejo]

1. Like any Ponzi scheme...

At least Las Vegas has some strict rules for Gambling...