It's Thursday and I get to work from home. Thankfully.

Cenk Uygur went ham on the Villagers for proclaiming HRC won the debate and ignoring every metric that Sanders was seen as the winner.

As for female artists that I dig, I gotta go with Tina Turner, Esthero, Lauryn Hill, Pink, Patti LaBelle, Madonna (yeah, I know, but she's awesome anyway), Skye Edwards of Morcheeba, Bebel Gilberto, Natalie Merchant, Lykke Li, Cher, Diana Ross, Shakira (her earlier stuff before her debut in the USA), Emilíana Torrini and I'll stop there because my list would get insane.

Last night I played in a poker tourney again. At the Church Street Tavern. Nice bar. Looks old, lived in, and oak-ish. That building's more than a century old, 1886 I think. Ended up in 2nd place and out of the money. I just ran out of luck and wasn't getting any cards in the end, although I knocked out several players in the evening with guile, luck, and good poker face. Everyone in the game has different...what I call kung fu. My kung fu involves trapping a lot with minimal bluffing. I rarely bluff. And if I do, it's usually successful. I'm not World Series of Poker good, or good with calculating odds in my head like a scientific calculator, but I get mine. Except for last night.

After the game, the bartender, his lady friend (who dressed like she was from 1955 and was cool), and I went over to help celebrate our mutual friend winning a bartenders competition over at Lizzy McCormack's. It was one of those sponsored things and apparently he totally dominated the competition and won a swag bag with a bit of cash. And, most importantly, bragging rights. So that was cool. Then we sat around the table and sang, talked about where we've been, and another buddy hopped on the bar with a bottle of whisky, pouring it down people's throats as he walked by. Good times.

link

It’s more expensive for even the most creditworthy companies to borrow or refinance even as the Fed has kept its benchmark at near-zero the last seven years. Companies have loaded up on debt. They owe more in interest than they ever have, while their ability to service what they owe, a metric called interest coverage, is at its lowest since 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The deterioration of balance-sheet health is “increasingly alarming” and will only worsen if earnings growth continues to stall amid a global economic slowdown, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. credit strategists led by Lotfi Karoui. Since corporate credit contraction can lead to recession, high debt loads will be a drag on the economy if investors rein in lending, said Deutsche Bank AG analysts led by Oleg Melentyev, the bank’s U.S. credit strategy chief.
...
As of the second quarter, high-grade companies tracked by JPMorgan incurred $119 billion in interest expenses over the last year, the most for data going back to 2000, according to the bank’s analysts. The amount the companies owed rose 4 percent in the second quarter, the analysts said.

The fallout of more borrowing coupled with lower earnings has raised concern among the analysts who track the debt and the money managers who buy it. Yet it seems the companies themselves are acting as if it’s not happening. They’re still paying out record amounts in buybacks and dividends.
In the second quarter, the most creditworthy companies posted declining earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Yet they returned 35 percent of those earnings to shareholders, according to JPMorgan.
That’s kept their cash-payout ratio -- how much money they give to shareholders relative to Ebitda -- steady at a 15-year high.

The borrowing has gotten so aggressive that for the first time in about five years, equity fund managers who said they’d prefer companies use cash flow to improve their balance sheets outnumbered those who said they’d rather have it returned to shareholders, according to a survey by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Since May, stocks of companies that have spent the most buying back their shares have performed even worse than the S&P 500 index. That comes after buyback stocks outperformed the S&P 500 each year since 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.