Bill Blain: “More And More Folk Are Pinching Themselves To Check If This Is Real”

Submitted by Bill Blain of Mint Partners
‘Always the hurricane’s blowing, always the population growing, and the money owing..’ Who will be the next Fed Head?
Marvellous start to the day as a cyclist stopped to say hello. He was one of my ‘nippers’ from a Canary Wharf HQ’d bank I once worked for. He started as a junior in Debt Capital Markets origination – today’s he’s head of their whole Sovereign, Supranational and Agency Group! Fantastic! He’s successfully built up the bank’s reputation to be a top name in the sector! I know many SSA issuers read the porridge and will know who he is, so give the lad a mandate from me! Quite proud of him and others I worked with at that bank…
Meanwhile, the markets continue to amaze me. Nothing has really changed re the fundamental picture: stocks continue to bound upwards, economic data is positive, but more and more folk are having to pinch themselves to check if this is real.
Clue: it is not..
Meanwhile, the disastrous intervention of Donald Trump’s twitter-feed on Puerto Rico debt on Tuesday night really should be the subject of a criminal investigation. Anyone with an erg of authority tweeting a borrower is bust is bound to impact prices: Trump’s intervention to say Puerto Rico would go bust caused prices to spike 20 points lower on $74 billion of its debt, before officials were able to restore sanity, and prices to spike back up.
But the damage is done. His ill-informed tweets undo confidence across the whole US municipal bond sector – funding everything from states to local football stadiums. He said, of Puerto Rico: ‘We have to look at their debt structure. They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street. We’re going to have to wipe that out.’

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Oct 5, 2017.