Tag Archives: Zombie companies

Death to Zombies, by MN Gordon

Posted on November 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

A lot of zombie corporations were being kept alive by extremely low borrowing costs. Now that interest rates are rising, many of those zombies will die. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), inflated at an annual rate of 7.7 percent in October.  Investors went bananas on this apparent pullback in the headline CPI.

The stock market responded with one of its biggest single day rallies in history.  The S&P 500 jumped over 5.5 percent.  The NASDAQ jumped over 7.3 percent.  Of greater note, the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note dropped to just 3.81 percent – its lowest yield in over a month.

So, is raging consumer price inflation no longer a concern?  Has the ugly storm come and gone?  Can Powell now pivot?

Probably not.  More than likely, consumer price inflation will rage throughout the decade.  Regardless, now’s not the time to go all in on stocks.  We’ll explain why in just a moment.  But first several words on consumer price inflation.

Consumer price inflation, remember, is an effect of money supply inflation.  The Federal Reserve inflated its balance sheet with upwards of $5 trillion in digital monetary units – created out of thin air – between September 2019 and April 2022.

Since then, the Fed has contracted its balance sheet by about $300 billion – or by about 6 percent of the preceding inflation.  Clearly, there’s still plenty more inflation to be reckoned with.

And while the Fed, in concert with the Treasury and Congress, was busy spewing reams of printing press money into the economy between fall-2019 and spring-2022, other mistakes were also being made.

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The Cannibalization Is Complete: Only Inedible Zombies Remain, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on March 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

Our economy has become the land of the walking dead. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Poor powerless Fed, poor starving cannibals, poor zombies turning to dust. That’s the American economy once the curtains are ripped away.

Setting aside the fictional flood of zombie movies for a moment, we find the real-world horror is the cannibalization of our economy, a cannibalization that is now complete. Every organic source of prosperity and productivity has been captured and consumed, hidden behind the convenient curtains of central bank intervention, “market forces” (hahaha), financialization and fiscal stimulus.

All that’s left now are zombies feeding off the offal of stimulus. Sadly for the cannibals who’ve feasted so well for decades, zombies are inedible. So now the cannibals are starving. Poor cannibals! Once the stimulus runs out, no more zombies. Poor zombies!

The cannibals feasted on $50 trillion in earnings stripped from the bones of the workforce ( Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018, RAND Corporation) and trillions more in fraud and financial gimmickry.

And when the cannibals had consumed the bottom 90%, they moved on and devoured the next 5%. That left only the top 5%, which they needed to keep alive to maintain the curtains masking their ghoulish destruction.

But after gorging on trillions for so long, the cannibals appetites can never be sated, so they ambushed their loyal toadies, apologists, lackeys, apparatchiks and sycophants of the top 4.9% and ate them, too, but a bit more stealthily because they still needed an army of toadies to do their dirty work.

The top 4.9% have been transformed into zombies so stealthily they still believe they’re in charge and wealthy–hahaha, the jokes on you!

With nobody left to devour, the cannibals turned to their last resort: the Federal Reserve. Please print us up some more bodies to feast on, Federal Reserve. We demand it. We want it, we need it, we’re starving.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Debt, Economy, Financial markets, Government, Labor

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The Zombie Companies Are Coming, by Wolf Richter

Posted on August 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

Endless money for deeply indebted companies that have no prospect of making a profit is not a feature of capitalism. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

By Wolf Richter. This is the transcript of my podcast last Sunday, THE WOLF STREET REPORT. You can listen to it on YouTube, and you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts,  iHeart Radio, and others.

Through the first half of August – which is normally a quiet period for the bond market in the US – a total of $56 billion in junk bonds and leveraged loans were issued by junk-rated companies, according to S&P Global. That was nearly 50% higher than the prior records for the same period in 2012 and 2016, and more than double the amount issued in the entire month of August last year.

The Fed’s announcement on March 23rd that it would start buying corporate bonds and bond ETFs set off a huge rally in the bond market, including in the junk-bond market.

The rally started before the Fed ever actually bought the first bond. And then the Fed hardly bought anything by Fed standards. Through the end of July, it bought just $12 billion in corporate bonds and bond ETFs, including a minuscule $1.1 billion in junk bond ETFs. It’s not even a rounding error on its $7-trillion mountain of assets.

But the announcement was enough to trigger the biggest junk-debt chase in the shortest amount of time the world has likely ever seen. And it kept the zombies walking, and it generated a whole new generation of zombies too.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Capitalism, Collapse, Debt, Economics, Economy

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The Fed Detests Free Markets, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on November 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Fed is head of the US banking cartel. The last thing it wants is free markets, especially in interest rates and banking risk. Interest rates are to be suppressed, and banking risk socialized. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

To be completely honest, I wrote -most of- the second part of this a while ago, and then I was thinking this first part should be part of the second, if you can still follow me. But it doesn’t really, it’s fine. I wanted to write something to address how little people know and acknowledge about how disastrous central bank policies have been for our societies and economies.

Because they don’t, and they have no clue, largely and simply because of the way central banks are presented both by themselves and by the financial press that covers them. Make that “covers”. Still, going forward, we will have no way to ignore the damage done. All the QE and ZIRP and NIRP will turn out to be so destructive for us all they will rival climate change or actual warfare. That’s what I wanted to talk about.

You see, free markets are a great idea in theory. Or you can call it “capitalism”, or combine the two and say “free market capitalism”. There’s very little wrong with it in theory. You have an enormous multitude of participants in an utterly complex web of transitions, too complex for the human mind to comprehend, and in the end that web figures out what values all sorts of things, and actions etc., have.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Capitalism, Debt, Economics, Economy, Financial markets, Governments, Money, Politics

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When Dead Companies Don’t Die – Welcome To The Fat, Slow World, by Ruchir Sharma

Posted on June 18, 2019 | Leave a comment

There’s a huge price to pay for not allowing the market to kill off companies that can’t compete. From Ruchir Sharma at nytimes.com via zerohedge.com:

he policies created to pull the world out of recession are still in place, but now they are strangling the global economy…

The United States’ recovery from the Great Recession recently turned 10 years old, matching the longest American expansion since records were first kept in the 1850s. The global recovery will also turn 10, in January, if it lasts that long — and that, too, would be a record.

But there have been few celebrations, in part because trade tensions have further slowed the pace of recovery. Since the end of the recession, the economy has grown at about 2 percent a year in the United States and 3 percent worldwide – both nearly a point below the average for postwar recoveries.

What explains the longest, weakest recovery on record? I blame the unintended consequences of huge government rescue programs, which have continued since the recession ended.

Before 2008, more open trade borders and better internet communications promoted strong growth by leveling the playing field, inspiring the Times columnist Thomas Friedman to declare that “the world is flat.”

Once the crisis hit, however, governments erected barriers to protect domestic companies. Central banks aggressively printed money to restore high growth. Instead, growth came back in a sluggish new form, as easy money propped up inefficient companies and gave big companies favorable access to cheap credit, encouraging them to grow even bigger.

If the world was flat and fast before 2008, today it’s fat and slow.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Cronyism, Debt, Economy, Governments

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The Japanification of the World, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on April 6, 2019 | Leave a comment

As it grows faster than the underlying economy, debt becomes quicksand from which the economy cannot extricate itself. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Zombification / Japanification is not success; it is only the last desperate defense of a failing, brittle status quo by doing more of what’s failed.

A recent theme in the financial media is the Japanification of Europe.Japanification refers to a set of economic and financial conditions that have come to characterize Japan’s economy over the past 28 years: persistent stagnation and deflation, a low-growth and low-inflation economy, very loose monetary policy, a central bank that is actively monetizing debt, i.e. creating currency out of thin air to buy government debt and a government which funds “bridges to nowhere” and other stimulus spending to keep the economy from crashing into outright contraction.

The parallels with Europe are obvious, but they don’t stop there: the entire world is veering into a zombified financial, economic, social and political status quo that is the core of Japanification.

While most commentators focus on the economic characteristics of Japanification, social and political stagnation are equally consequential. If we only measure economic/financial stagnation, it appears as if Japan and Europe are holding their own, i.e.maintaining the status quo via near-zero growth and near-zero interest rates.

But if we measure social and political decay, the erosion is undeniable. Here’s one example. Few Americans have access to or watch Japanese TV, so they are unaware of the emergence of the homeless as a permanent feature of urban Japan. The central state propaganda media is focused on encouraging tourism, a rare bright spot in Japan’s moribund economy, and so you won’t find much media coverage of homelessness or other systemic signs of social breakdown.

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EU monetary and economic failures, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on March 15, 2019 | Leave a comment

Alasdair Macleod documents the reasons behind the EU’s impending failure. From Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Introduction and summary

The monetary, financial and political weaknesses of the EU are about to be exposed by the forthcoming global credit crisis.

This article assumes the combination of end of credit cycle dynamics and the rise in trade protectionism in 1929 is a valid precedent for gauging the scale of a developing global credit crisis today, as described in my earlier article published here. Then, it was heavier tariffs coinciding with a less destabilising inflation cycle than we face today, a combination that saw stock markets collapse. Today, we have the additional factors of far greater monetary inflation, far higher levels of government debt, low savings coupled with record consumer borrowing, and unbacked fiat currencies likely to lose purchasing power instead of gold-backed currencies which increased their purchasing power.

Declining international trade has already become evident in only a few months, and prescient observers detect early signs of a rapidly developing global recession. In response, the ECB has announced it will target lending to non-financial businesses with its TLTRO-III programme from September onwards.

The larger problem is the crony capitalists in the EU have captured the EU institutions, including the ECB, and will demand ever-accelerating monetary inflation. I have chosen to examine the consequences for the Eurozone, which is one of the more vulnerable economic and political constructs likely to be exposed in the severe economic downturn the world faces today.

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Posted in Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Financial markets, Governments

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The dangerous zombie infestation (of the world economy), by Tuomas Malinen

Posted on March 12, 2019 | Leave a comment

Ultra-low interest rates keep alive walking dead companies and create a walking dead economy. From Tuomas Malinen at gnseconomics.com:

It is estimated that over 14% of companies in the S&P 1500 are zombies. In China, roughly 20 percent of A-share listed companies on Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges are zombies. In the developed economies, approximately 12 percent of all non-financial companies are ‘zombies’. Only 30 years ago, this share was just 2 percent.

These are stunning figures.  How did we get there? What is behind the worrying phenomenon of zombification?

The risks of this zombie infestation to the economy and markets are also widely misunderstood and mostly ignored at the moment. They should not be. The large share of zombie companies creates the possibility of the spontaneous collapse of both global asset markets and economy.

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”

Zombies were introduced in the economic jargon by Caballero, Hoshi and Kashyap (2008) when they described the unproductive and indebted—yet still operating—firms in Japan as ”zombie companies”. They found that, after the economic crash of the early 1990’s, instead of calling-in or refusing to refinance existing debts, large Japanese banks kept lending flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (aka zombies).

Zombies companies restrict the entry of new, more productive companies, diminish job creation in the economy and lock capital into unproductive uses. In a word, they are a menace to the economy and society.

According to current academic research, the biggest factor in the creation of zombie companies is the health of banks. When they are fragile and unable to cope with loan losses, banks start to evergreen debtor companies. That is, weak banks support ailing companies, which support each other. This is why low interest rates foster zombie creation. Low (or negative) interest rates make banks weaker, by restricting their profits, and they provide cheap loans to zombie companies to avert losses.

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Economic Brake Lights, by John Mauldin

Posted on November 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

The economy is flashing multiple warning signs. From John Mauldin at mauldineconomics.com:

Zombies and Unicorns
Missing Investment
The Deficit and Debt Drag on the Economy
Swimming in Liquidity
Work Your IRA Like a Mule
Germany, Georgia, and Thanksgiving

But, like Cinderella at the ball, you must heed one warning or everything will turn into pumpkins and mice: Mr. Market is there to serve you, not to guide you. It is his pocketbook, not his wisdom, that you will find useful. If he shows up some day in a particularly foolish mood, you are free to either ignore him or to take advantage of him, but it will be disastrous if you fall under his influence. Indeed, if you aren’t certain that you understand and can value your business far better than Mr. Market, you don’t belong in the game. As they say in poker, “If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”

Warren Buffett (b. 1930), 1987 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

—George Santayana (1863–1952), Spanish-American philosopher

Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.

—Tom Toro (b. 1982), American cartoonist for The New Yorker

All good things come to an end, even economic growth cycles. The present one is getting long in the tooth. While it doesn’t have to end now, it will end eventually. Signs increasingly suggest we are approaching that point.

Whenever it happens, the next downturn will hit millions who still haven’t recovered from the last recession, millions more who did recover but forgot how bad it was, and millions more who reached adulthood during the boom. They saw it as children or teens but didn’t feel the full impact. Now, with their own jobs and families, they will.

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The Global Distortions of Doom Part 1: Hyper-Indebted Zombie Corporations, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on October 7, 2018 | Leave a comment

Cheap credit keeps alive a lot of corporations who should be dead. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

The defaults and currency crises in the periphery will then move into the core.
It’s funny how unintended consequences so rarely turn out to be good. The intended consequences of central banks’ unprecedented tsunami of stimulus (quantitative easing, super-low interest rates and easy credit / abundant liquidity) over the past decade were:
1. Save the banks by giving them credit-money at near-zero interest that they could loan out at higher rates. Savers were thrown under the bus by super-low rates (hope you like your $1 in interest on $1,000…) but hey, bankers contribute millions to politicos and savers don’t matter.
2. Bring demand forward by encouraging consumers to buy on credit now. Nothing like 0% financing to incentivize consumers to buy now rather than later. Since a mass-consumption economy depends on “growth,” consumers must be “nudged” to buy more now and do so with credit, since that sluices money to the banks.

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