- Cocos are designed to transfer the risk of a bank failing from governments to bondholders, avoiding a repeat of the bailouts that scarred taxpayers during the financial crisis. For this reason, they offer high levels of return to compensate buyers.
And that’s helped stir their recent recovery. Unlike sovereign and corporate debt, the European Central Bank isn’t buying unsecured bank bonds as part of its stimulus programme. While yields in many other portions of the bond universe have been compressed by the ECB hoovering up debt, yields on coco bonds stand out.
RBS’s latest bond of this type, with a rating of single B from S&P, pays a coupon of 8.625 per cent.
So ECB is squeezing folks into riskier assets since they are competing for less-risky ones?
I read about a similar effect occurring due to an upcoming money market mutual fund reform that is being reflected in the recent increase in LIBOR. In short, banks are being forced into riskier assets in the hunt for yield.
Hella strong and getting stronger Talks ran for about two weeks, involving Deutsche’s chief executive, John Cryan, as well as his counterpart at Commerzbank, Martin Zielke, according to people familiar with the situation.Germany’s two biggest lenders, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, held talks about a tie-up earlier this month, before deciding that it was not the right time to proceed with a combination.
Well, Woot did have a deal on two months dehydrated food... Mauldin made the point several years back that crypto geeks were basically millenial gold bugs with a techno fetish. I'm not sure I entirely agree but there are definitely parallels. My basic thinking is this: (1) diversification isn't a bad idea (2) kinebars look hella cooler than etherium.
One need only look at the phenomenon of zombies to understand preppers. I call it the elevator effect - no, not that elevator effect - the fact that we're required to be polite when we're crammed into small spaces and made uncomfortable yet what we really want to do is lash out and call people shitcamels and bash our cars into theirs. "Zombies" make it okay to fantasize about taking a sledgehammer to the masses because you've dehumanized them into "walkers" or whatever while prepping gives you the same leash: "I'm not stockpiling guns and food because I want the opportunity to treat the rest of humanity as NPCs in my first person shooter of the mind. I'm stockpiling guns and food because you never know what sort of behavior will occur when our social barriers break down!"
Having spent several years gazing through the long lens of history, I'm pretty sure the modern prepper movement is kind of unique. I mean, societies certainly crumbled and bad shit happened but when your ruler is Kaiser Wilhelm and you've been a nation just since the fall of the Hapsburgs your benchmark of stability is substantially lower than when, say, your biggest worry is "ZOMG what happens when we leave the gold standard." Most of my prepper buddies point to Argentina's collapse as the modern model for prepperdom, and that was the collapse of a military junta.
I think Dillian said something like "it's safer to be wrong together than right alone".