Low hanging fruit (non-intentional bad pun). I’d put Time Warner, Comcast, and EA above Monsanto.
@Geo - you’re listing companies that make things that are bad for you. I don’t consider that evil since everyone has a choice whether or not to smoke a cig, for example. Nestle is actually taking water away from people in Africa that are literally dying without it. That’s just slightly worse than EA putting out one crappy Madden after another.
That’s fair STL, though I’d argue tobacco built their customer base and continues to do so with highly suspect methods to offer a lethal product. Monsanto just doesn’t compare to either on evilness. Why do you put the cable cos and EA above Monsanto?
^I only have a passing understanding of people’s beef with Monsanto, but so far I haven’t heard much that really gets me riled up. Maybe that’s just because I hear farmers bitch and moan about Monsanto, and I have zero sympathy for farmers. Admittedly, more research on my part is required.
Time Warner, Comcast, and EA are consistently voted among the most hated companies in America. TW and Comcast are fairly self-evident if you’ve used their services for a while. Both have zero respect for their costumers, offer the bare minimum services (bandwidth caps for no reason other than to charge people being one example), and since they have a monopoly (or close enough to it) in many places, they can just sit there and jab you in the eye with a pointy stick and we just have to take it.
EA is a good example of a company trying to do what all companies try to do - maximize profits - and then finding out they went about it the entirely wrong way and pissed off a loyal costumer base. They take beloved game franchises and run them into the ground by ignoring the developers’ timeline so they can send an unfinished product to the marketplace in the current fiscal quarter. People that have prepaid for games (which no one should ever do) get especially screwed.
tl;dr - TW, Comcast, and EA literally hate their costumers and spit in our cereal. Perhaps not “evil” but definitely some of the biggest assholes around.
This might be playing into all these negative yields (yes, another ZH reference): http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-09/stunning-chart-day-first-time-ever-global-net-sovereign-debt-issuance-will-be-negati
Does anyone still read that website? Hasn’t ZH been wrong about practically everything? I don’t read it so I can’t say for sure but the OMGWTFBBQLOL hyper inflation scenario didn’t play out, Japan’s nuclear issues weren’t the end of the world, Europe did not collapse, Tim Geithner did not ruin the country, etc., etc. That website is so tiresome, and that’s coming from someone who is naturally pretty bearish much of the time.
^ Ignore the calls, not the data.
I’m not sure what you mean. The calls are a contrarian indicator, apparently. I haven’t studied all the calls and it’s more than one author so I don’t know how relevant it is anyway, but the world view has been very persistently wrong in aggregate. It’s fringe. Some angry dudes on the internet. Boring.
ZH doesn’t make that many calls really. And they are certainly guilty of over using hyberbole. But, once you cut through that, they make very solid points on geo-politics and the potential dangers of central planning. Very rarely do they come out and say a certain stock is going to crash.
For an example of one recent “call” they got right - oil. They were pretty much the only “news” outlet talking about the political subtext of falling oil for the first several weeks. Then Bloomberg caught on, then WSJ, etc…
Excellent question about ZH. Don’t know what to think myself. I like them but shit gets old. Visionaries or tin foil hats writing everyday that shit is hitting the fan ?
Ok I’ll put it this way : - ZH is very bad at timing - ZH is very good at reminding us that many problems remain unsolved.
I’ve learned in life that you’re better off being optimistic than pessismistic. A lot of what is being said in ZH makes sense, but just because it does doesn’t mean the world comes crashing down. In a world without government intervention and central banks, they would be right but we don’t live in that kind of world. It’s like they didn’t adjust to the post 19th century marketplace. There used to be depressions and panics every 10 years in the 1800s.
I remember studying this when people started to tell me gold standard is better. People seem to forget how violatile things were
ZeroHedge is like Captain Obvious with that article; doesn’t everyone one that CB balance sheets have expanded immensely? What’s new in that article?
LONDON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Bonds issued by European blue chips such as EDF, Nestle and Royal Dutch Shell have slipped into negative-yield territory as investors seek refuge from sub-zero central bank rates.
A Reuters analysis of top-rated euro-denominated corporate debt showed bonds maturing in the next couple of years from France’s EDF, Switzerland’s Nestle, German railway firm Deutsche Bahn, energy major Shell and drugmakers Sanofi and Novartis were all trading with an ‘offer’ yield of below zero.
The ‘offer’ indicates the level at which holders are prepared to sell their security. The ‘bid’, an indication of what investors are willing to pay for the bond, remains in positive territory for these companies.
What’s the spread on these bad boys? Perhaps this is a non story if thinly traded and a huge bid-ask.
I don’t have access to that information, but I would doubt they are thinly traded. But the bid ask could still be screwy, since you know. . . things are just really strange lately.
This poses some really interesting questions on the corporate finance side though. How do I issue a negative yield bond? Just throw out a zero above par? Are zeros the way forward? That has all sorts of implications. I don’t see how a negative coupon bond could possibly work. Obviously this trend may be transitory and few corporates are in this enviable situation… But its an interesting thought. One firm I follow locally here due to some personal connections is seeing indicative new issue pricing at 0.85 for a 5yr note. And this is Canada, not EUR or CHF where benchmarks are even lower. This could be a very real issue.
How can a coupon paying bond yield negative?
Unless it is a new issue, I do not get it.
MAybe someone could also post the CUSIP so I would look it up myself?
THank you
^ Priced at a premium a coupon paying bond can yield negative. Historically you would see it occasionally with convertible bonds.