Month: February 2016

US monetary conditions are the tightest since 2009, financial conditions the tightest since 2009, and as Moody's reports today Liquidity Stress is at its worst since February 2010 – all forewarning of a notable rise in defaults in 2016… and what can the Fed do?

Worryingly, as Credit Suisse explains, US monetary conditions are now the tightest that they have been since 2009…

…At a time when financial conditions are also moving to their tightest level since 2009.

This is the first time in 10 years that monetary and financial conditions are tightening at the same time. In the past, a tightening of financial conditions has tended to be accompanied by monetary easing… but The Fed seems set on hiking rates no matter what (to sustain bank earnings?)

However, as Moody's reported today, things are worse still as their Liquidity Stress Index (LSI) jumped to 6.8% at the end of December 2015 from 6.4% in November, reaching the index's highest level since February 2010 forewarning of a rise in the default rate in 2016.

The LSI for oil and gas increased to 19.6% in December from 19.3% in November as low oil prices continued to weaken liquidity and raise default risk. Among the four exploration and production companies downgraded to SGL-4, the weakest liquidity category, were Atlas Energy Holdings (Caa1 negative), California Resources Corp. (Caa1 negative) and Ultra Petroleum Corp. (Caa1 negative).

Liquidity weakness is also starting to spread to select lower-rated issuers in other sectors, though not broadly.

The non-oil and gas LSI rose to 3.6% in December from 3.0% in the prior month.

 

The ratio of all SGL liquidity downgrades to upgrades was 1.74 for 2015, with 141 downgrades to 81 upgrades — the highest since 2008 when the ratio was a record 2.96. Energy has been the key driver of liquidity downgrades, followed by metals and mining, amid weakening commodities demand in major developing countries such as China.

 

"As borrowing rates rise and credit markets tighten, companies closer to the margin will find it challenging to cost-effectively refinance their upcoming debt maturities."

 

Moody's forecasts the US speculative-grade default rate will climb to 4.1% in November this year from 3.0% in November 2015.

Which perhaps explains why US bank credit risk is soaring…

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1PQEkNc Tyler Durden

In mid-January, just as the market was crashing due to among other things concerns that the economy was prolapsing, we had a brief exchange with the Atlanta Fed asking them why they waited until the after the close of trading to report that its Q1 GDP estimate had crashed to the lowest yet, at 0.6% (incidentally almost exactly what the final Q1 GDP print was), a number that is traditionally revealed at or before noon. The Fed’s answer: “Apologies for the late-day data release. Nothing more nefarious than technical difficulties, which we believe have been resolved.”

Said otherwise, just a glitch.

Shortly thereafter, following a Zero Hedge exclusive laying out the latest policy directives by the Dallas Fed to lenders with substantial exposure to the oil and gas sector, namely to suspend mark-to-market of stressed loan books, while urging banks to avoid cascading bankruptcies of energy debtor counterparties, the Dallas Fed decided to lie and state unofficially (well, on Twitter), that there was no truth to our story.

The same Fed then “responded” to our subsequent FOIA request by providing absolutely none of the information required, because it turns out, the Fed “does not maintain or possess calendars of Federal Reserve staff.”

Said otherwise, people at the Fed come and go and nobody knows anything.

Then, last night, shortly after the Iowa caucus had concluded, we noticed something just as disturbing: the “apolitical” San Francisco Fed, which tends to be quite active on Twitter, made what amounted to a derisively political comment, one which it promptly deleted but not before we managed to screengrab it:

We had some follow up questions:

We wonder: does the San Fran Fed deny there is any truth to this tweet? Or maybe, like the Dallas Fed, it simply does not keep a log of what it tweets?

 

That aside, perhaps the San Francisco Fed and its staffers can explain what “matters”?

 

Is it Goldman Sachs? Or JPMorgan?

 

Or any other bank that the “Board” has decided it is time to bailout?

To our surprise, the SF Fed did not have any retorts. In fact, the otherwise quite chatty Twitter account was even more quiet than Donald Trump’s, which prompted this question from us earlier:

no tweets from @sffed today?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 2, 2016

 

Within minutes of our question we received the following response from the heretofore mute San Francisco Fed:

(1/2) Last night an employee mistakenly tweeted from the Bank’s account. The tweet was deleted b/c it doesn’t represent the Bank’s views.

— San Francisco Fed (@sffed) February 2, 2016

(2/2) We apologize for this mistake; we are reviewing our policies & practices to ensure that this does not happen again.

— San Francisco Fed (@sffed) February 2, 2016

Actually, the only reason why the Fed apologized is because it was caught. As for the now ex-employee, we can only assume he or she will be a seasonal adjustment in this week’s initial unemployment insurance claims number.

But what is more disturbing is that a pattern is emerging: a Federal Reserve plagued by “non-nefarious” technical difficulties, one where nobody has any idea where anyone is going or what anyone is doing (and where there seemingly are no records and no accountability), and one where random employees can take over official Fed communication channels to disseminate their biased, political views and who knows what else.

In retrospect, it is no surprise that the Fed is losing credibility with every passing day.

That said, we are delighted that in under three weeks, we have interacted directly with three regional Feds. At this rate soon Janet Yellen, if not Ben Bernanke himself, will finally address our concerns after 7 years of day after day demonstrating to the world and to the Federal Reserve how its actions have led this country to ruin, something everyone else is finally realizing too. Even if it is on Twitter.

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Via GEFIRA,

The Bank of Japan’s unexpected rate cuts to negative are a desperate attempt to help out the FED and to support the dollar at the expense of the aging Japanese population.

The negative market reaction to the FED’s rate hike of December shows that investors do not believe an economic recovery in the US is underway. Two reasons make central banks start to raise interest rates.

• The first is that economy is doing well, and central banks have to prevent an overheated economy. But it is also a signal to investors everything is going well. In this situation, the first reaction of investors will be the opposite as central bankers planned they will and increase their investments and markets will go up.
• The second reason central banks raise interest rates is the defensive one; the moment the economy is out of control, investors are beginning to abandon the sinking ship. The continually increasing interest rate has the task of keeping the investors aboard. Central banks in less developed economies raise rates to defend the national currency, thus preventing investors from fleeing. An increase in the interest rate can add fuel to the fire and in many cases has the opposite effect. Investors start smelling angst of the authorities and start abandoning the sinking ship. In such a situation stock markets are coming crashing down because investors withdraw from them.

We saw this last pattern happening in the US economy after the December FED’s rate hike. As a result, the dollar-yen exchange rate is starting to decline, with the value of the dollar falling off as Japanese investors start panicking and fleeing the US market. Surely, Japanese investors know that a rate hike without an accompanying economic growth will erode every existing investment.

There is a general misconception according to which countries drive their currency down to generate growth. People adhere to the simplistic belief that a weak currency drives exports and helps the nation to prosper. The fact is that a cheap currency creates growth by giving away real goods in exchange for IOU (I Owe Yous) or paper debt obligations that will never be repaid. The US is the beneficiary or the receiving end of the weak yen policy. Because the US continues to maintain its world hegemony, it needs a strong dollar. A strong dollar makes everything the US empire buys in the world cheap. A strong dollar causes the world to be willing to exchange real goods for printed paper dollars that have no intrinsic value, and that are issued by a country that does not have the industrial capacity to ever repay what it owes its debtors.

The endless trade deficit the US has with Japan shows how the Japanese are prepared to provide the US with real goods without demanding tangible goods in return. Because the international press publishes trade data in dollars, the trade balance deficit seems to have been shrinking over the last years. The actual situation becomes apparent if we look at the trade deficit in yens.

 

The US trade deficit with Japan is growing bigger and bigger year after year, as Japanese producers are giving away a big chunk of their production to US consumers in return for more and more US paper debt. By manipulating the yen, Japanese authorities are giving away a real part of their GDP  that they take from their people to the US empire.

In January, the yen started to appreciate because Japanese investors withdrew their money from the shaky US economy. Not only does an expensive yen lower the purchasing power of US consumers, but it can also render the US, Asian military pivot, quite expensive. It looks like Kuroda-san, president of the Bank of Japan, got new marching orders from his US masters during his Davos visit.

The submissive Japanese leaders have no choice but to obey their US masters and come up with a next trick to keep the yen cheap.

The Bank of Japan does not have much room to maneuver, so it lowered the excess-deposit rate into negative territory. It was marginal from 0.1 to -0.1 and only applicable to a small number of the Japanese bank deposits at the Bank of Japan; nevertheless, the music started playing again. It will be harder for Kuroda-san to press the yen lower and come up with new tricks indefinitely.

Investors may be fooled by the vast amount of public debt of the Japanese government, not realizing that the Japanese nation as a whole has a massive saving surplus. Some day the Bank of Japan will run out of tricks, and the yen will explode as Japanese savers will try to repatriate their savings. It will affect not only the financial markets but also the US ability to counter its Chinese rival in the Yellow Sea. For now, the desperate move of the Central Bank of Japan will not help the aging Japanese population. It will keep the financial markets happy for a short period.

…or not even that…

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The US military faces five “big challenges,” Ash Carter told the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday.

Those challenges are: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and ISIS.

So essentially, the exact same “challenges” Washington has been trotting out for years to justify hundreds upon hundreds of billions in defense spending, only with one CIA pet project gone horribly awry added to the list.

Despite the fact that The Pentagon’s list of threats includes all of the usual suspects, Carter contends that “today’s security environment is dramatically different than the one America has been engaged with for the last 25 years.”

This “new” environment, Carter argues, “requires new ways of thinking and new ways of acting.”

Developing these “new” ways of doing business militarily will apparently cost $582.7 billion. That’s the figure for The Pentagon’s 2017 defense budget and it will include the following line items.

• $7.5 billion to fight Islamic State (which the US pretty clearly thinks is going to be sticking around for a while because after all, the next fiscal year doesn’t begin until October)
• $71.4 billion for “strategic development”
• $8.1 billion on “undersea warfare”
• $1.8 billion for “munitions” (recall that the US is about to run out of bombs to drop on the Mid-East)

Drilling down, Washington will increase military spending in Europe fourfold to $3.4 billion in an effort to deter what the Pentagon calls “Russian aggression.”

“Almost half of the new investments Carter will propose are related to what officials see as a growing threat from Moscow, where President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated his willingness to employ Russian military might from Ukraine to Syria,” The Washington Post wrote on Monday. “Under the proposed expansion to the European Reassurance Initiative the Pentagon would increase the U.S. troop presence in Europe; expand positioning of combat vehicles and other equipment there; help allies build up military infrastructure; and train more allied troops.”

In other words, $3.4 billion worth of (loud) sabre rattling in the Baltics.

“This is not really a provocation or an escalation,” a senior administration official said. “Rather, it is the result of our longer term response to Russia’s foreign interventions.”

Right. Well you can bet Russia won’t see it that way. If Moscow had 62,000 troops (the number of active duty US service members operating in Europe) in Canada and Mexico along with a variety of “equipment” and missiles, The White House would be just as ornery and hypersensitive as The Kremlin sometimes appears to be. 

Additionally, it’s always worth noting the hypocrisy inherent in the utterances of any US official who chides another nation for “foreign interventions” when Washington has its hands in more global conflicts that we’d care to catalogue. 

“Even as we fight today’s fights, we must also be prepared for the fights that might come 10, 20 or 30 years down the road,” Carter said on Tuesday, as though the idea of not fighting has never crossed his mind. 

The Defense Chief, who last month used a make believe medical term (the “parent tumor”) to describe the ISIS stronghold at Raqqa, was back at it with the semantic shenanigans. “We cannot blind ourselves to the actions nations appear to choose to pursue,” he said, in a linguistically torturous allusion to Russia’s activities in Ukraine and China’s land reclamation efforts in the Spratlys. Russia and China, he added, are America’s “most stressing competitors.”

Also “stressing” for Carter is the threat of a cyber attack which is why The Pentagon is going to spend $7 billion next year shoring up the nation’s cyber defenses and developing “offensive” capabilities. “Among other things,” Carter said, “this will help further improve DoD’s network defenses, which is critical, build more training ranges for our cyber warriors, and develop cyber tools and infrastructure needed to provide offensive cyber options (so no more sabotaged Seth Rogen movies on this defense chief’s watch).”

So there you have it. Ash Carter is all set to make you safer in 2017 by spending nearly $600 billion of your taxpayer dollars on, i) exacerbating what amounts to a new Cold War in the Balkans, ii) buying smart bombs to drop on Sunni extremists that the CIA probably armed with more of your tax dollars, iii) making sure Kim Jong-Un can’t sabatoge any more Seth Rogen movies.

You’re in good hands America…

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Py3JzD Tyler Durden

Submitted by Tony Sagami via MauldinEconomics.com,

“At current spot rates, we would expect a significant impact to revenue and profit again in 2016.”
—Martin Schroeter, CFO of IBM

We’re in the middle of earnings season, and one of the themes I am hearing over and over from American companies is how the strong dollar is killing their profits.

How strong? Since mid-2014, the US dollar has appreciated about 15% against a basket of trade-weighted foreign currencies. In 2015 alone, it was up 12%, the biggest one-year gain since the 1970s.

If you’ve traveled abroad recently, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

While a strong dollar is a positive for vacationing Americans, it is bad, bad news for American companies with significant international business because it makes US exports more expensive to foreign buyers and reduces the conversion of foreign profits from foreign currencies into dollars.

And it is only going to get worse. Wall Street economists predict that the US dollar will appreciate by another 4% against the euro and by another 6% against the Japanese yen.

In the third quarter of 2015, the strong US dollar decreased the average American company’s earnings by 12 cents per share, and a growing list of American companies are suffering even more dollar-related pain.

Dollar Casualty #1: Kimberly-Clark

Kimberly-Clark sells a lot of Huggies diapers all around the world. However, it reported that its 2015 revenues were down by 6%. Worse yet, it warned Wall Street that its 2016 revenues would fall by another 3%.

That sounds like business is bad, but Kimberly-Clark is actually pulling in more sales than ever. It is just the currency impact that makes its business look awful—if it weren’t for the effect of the strong US dollar, management said sales would actually be up 3%–5%.

Dollar Casualty #2: Procter & Gamble

Procter & Gamble gets 60% of its revenues from outside of North America, so it is one of the most vulnerable companies to a rising US dollar.

The company reported a 9% drop in quarterly revenues to $16.9 billion because of the dollar.

Dollar Casualty #3: Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson said its revenues were reduced by 7.5% in 2015 by currency losses.

Dollar Casualty #4: Monsanto

Monsanto is the world's largest seed company and gets 43% of its revenues from outside the US. The company just reported a loss for the fourth quarter of 2015, citing the strong dollar as one of the main reasons. It also cut its 2016 profit forecast from $4.44–$5.01 per share to $4.12–$4.79 per share.

Dollar Casualty #5: DuPont

Chemical company DuPont reported a quarterly loss of $0.29 per share, compared with a net income of $0.74 per share a year earlier. Sales slid 9.3% to $5.3 billion, but without the effect of the strong dollar, sales would have been down only 1%.

A 1% decline isn’t good, but a 9.3% is horrendous.

Dollar Casualty #6: 3M

3M, the maker of Post-it Notes, gets about two-thirds of its revenues from outside the US, and that global reach has cost it dearly. 3M reported an 8.3% drop in profits to $1.66 per share and expects the currency effects to reduce this year’s earnings by 5%.

“The Dollar Dog Ate My Homework”

Those are just a few examples from last week. We are certainly going to hear a lot more companies blaming the strong dollar for disappointing earnings.

And those the-dog-ate-my-homework excuses are going to continue for the rest of 2016.

Here’s what you need to do: Take a look at every stock you own and find out what percentage of the company’s revenues comes from outside the US.

If the answer is more than 40%, you should consider dumping the stock before the dollar shrinks profits (and stock price) even more.

There are always exceptions—but fighting the strong dollar is going to be a battle that your portfolio is going to lose.

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1TBHU3J Tyler Durden

In the leadup to the financial crisis, lenders did some pretty silly things.

The securitization bonanza and the attendant proliferation of the “originate to sell” model drove lenders to adopt increasingly lax underwriting standards.

Put simply, the pool of creditworthy borrowers is by definition finite. That’s a problem because the securitization machine needs feeding. So what do you do if you’re a lender? Why, you expand the pool of eligible borrowers by making it easier to get a loan.

And we’re not talking about a giving would-be buyers a few FICO points worth of leeway here. We’re talking about the infamous “liar loans” which produced myriad tales of a market run horribly amok as everyone from maids to strippers could buy a McMansion with little to nothing in the way of documentation.

Well don’t look now, but the infamous Alt-As are making a comeback thanks to “big money managers including Neuberger Berman, Pacific Investment Management Co. and an affiliate of Blackstone Group LP [who] are lobbying lenders to make more of these “liar’ loans—or even buying loan-origination companies to control more of the supply themselves,” WSJ reports.

Once again, it’s the same old story. ZIRP has left investors starved for yield and that’s herding money into riskier and riskier assets and creating demand for paper backed by everything from subprime auto to P2P loans. Alt-As can carry rates as high as 8% which obviously looks great to anyone who’s stuck squeezing 300 bps out of something you picked up during last year’s IG issuance bonanza.

As WSJ goes on to note, the structure is a bit different this time around as large banks are steering clear of the market. “Virtually none of these Alt-A loans are being sliced and packaged into securities,” The Journal writes. “Instead, private-equity firms, hedge funds and mutual-fund companies are playing a larger role as buyers, placing the loans into private funds that are sold to institutional investors and wealthy clients.”

Of course pooling the loans and issuing ABS versus pooling the loans and selling shares of funds backed by those loans are really the same thing. In both cases, investors are betting on a pile of possibly risky mortgages extended to borrowers who for whatever reason don’t meet the requirement for a standard 30-year fixed.

For their part, money managers are rolling out the same tired excuse about reaching “underserved corners” of the market where unnecessary restrictions are keeping “some folks” from buying their dream home. Here’s WSJ again:

By backing these loans, money managers said they would reach an underserved corner of the housing market: Borrowers who have good credit but might be self-employed or report income sporadically. In part because more Americans work that way, some money managers expect the market could increase to hundreds of billions of dollars each year, or more than 10% of the total mortgage debt outstanding.

 

Alt-A loans gained prominence in the years leading up to the financial crisis, with lenders originating $400 billion at their peak in 2006, according to trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance.

 

Derided as “liar loans,” they were often extended to people who had no proof of income. By February 2010, about 26% of Alt-A mortgages were 90 or more days delinquent, up from 2% three years earlier, according to CoreLogic, a real-estate data and analytics company.

 

That compares with conventional conforming mortgages, which saw delinquencies of 7.2% in February 2010, up from 1.4% three years earlier.

 

 

The generation of Alt-A loans has been minimal since then. Just $17 billion in Alt-A loans were originated in 2014, compared with $767 billion for conventional mortgages, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, which estimates that $18 billion to $20 billion were made in 2015.

Some money managers are apparently making the rounds in an effort to convince mortgage companies to help get the ball rolling. Essentially, they want to act as the lender by bankrolling the loans, but aren’t too keen on bothering with the actual homebuyers and all of the paperwork. The idea then, is to partner up with mortgage firms who would theoretically take care of the administrative side of things.

But that’s not good enough for some asset managers. Take Minneapolis-based Varde Partners, for instance. Rather than haggle with mortgage companies, the firm simply went out and bought one through which it will lend to Alt-A borrowers.

Needless to say, this isn’t materially different from what was going on prior to the crisis even if the “Alt-A” has been given a new nickname (the “nonqualified mortgage”) in an effort to shed the stigma.

This is still just Wall Street forcing the issue on mortgages and selling the risk to investors who are happy to go along for the ride as long as the yield is there.

It will end in tears just as it did before, for everyone involved – especially the homeowners.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1X1xKJx Tyler Durden

How many "distracted" Americans are using their iGadget to ponder how a country with $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities can possibly survive?

 

 

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

 

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.

 

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

 

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

 

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

 

In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

 

In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”

 

Neil Postman

Source: The Burning Platform blog

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1TBsfRU Tyler Durden

Lately UBS, which just announced its latest ugly quarter in which the ultra-wealthy client dependent bank saw $3.3 billion in outflows from its all important wealth-management business, has been increasingly dour on the future, whether it is warning to “Buy Gold” As Equities “Rolling Over” or explaining “How The Investment Grade Dominos Will Fall.” Today, UBS’ chief global credit strategist Matthew Mish takes on the pleasant topic of predicting what the next imploding “energy-like” sector in credit markets, which is particularly relevant after today’s historic downgrade of several energy names which until last year seemed unshakable.

Here is his response:

What’s the next ‘energy’ sector in credit markets?

Our recent conversations have led to investors’ increasingly scrutinizing our world view, demanding to better understand the risks inherent in the US corporate and broader credit markets; i.e., proverbially what is the next ‘energy sector‘. While that question is indeed challenging, we’ll do our best to paint a straightforward answer. To reiterate, our focus in this piece is on US corporate credit and, more broadly, US credit conditions; we will not discuss dynamics outside our own borders. And it is indeed possible that there may not be another ‘energy’ story, but rather a series of smaller episodic stresses that play out across credit segments.

The hallmarks of most asset price booms and busts are grounded in irrational and aggressive future return expectations, which fuel a significant easing of lending standards and debt growth followed by a reversal of both conditions. Historically, one clear harbinger of future stresses has been debt growth. Those industries with the most aggressive credit growth in prior cycles (e.g., telecommunications in the ’90s, finance and autos in the 00’s, Figure 1) tend to ultimately cause the most pain for investors. Some would say this is an obvious and inherent flaw in the structure of corporate debt markets; that is to say those sectors that issue the most debt naturally grow larger in benchmark HY funds, and ultimately – when the credit regime turns – their investors have too much exposure to industries and issuers with substantial gearing. The result is a lower risk appetite, tighter lending conditions and deleveraging. But such is the largely indexed world we live in.

We believe the lower quality (e.g., triple C) segment of the US HY market fits this thesis to a ‘T’, and remains a unique risk in this cycle given the factors of Fed QE and regulation. However, some would argue this sector has re-priced considerably and liquidity is challenging to manoeuvre positions (i.e., it’s too late).

The other areas we will highlight have not re-priced to the same extent, so the risk is we are early (or simply wrong) – but this thesis is what many investors are seeking. In US high yield, excluding energy E&P the next largest industries experiencing debt growth in this cycle are technology and cable. In US leveraged loans, we have seen a similar trend in technology specifically. However, in both cases the relative growth is not as extreme as that witnessed in energy. In US high grade, the picture changes with outliers excluding gas pipelines in the REIT and pharmaceutical industries.

The latest Fed SLOOS offers some key insights in this regard. First, banks indicated that their lending standards for commercial real estate (CRE) loans of all types tightened in Q4, with significant fractions reporting tightening in multifamily (MF) and moderate fractions reporting tightening for construction/land development (CLD) loans. Second, banks were asked about longer term expectations for lending conditions through 2016: significant fractions of banks stated they expect to tighten lending standards on MF and CLD loans, while a moderate fraction expected tightening on nonfarm nonresidential (NFNR) loans. And third, on the outlook for loan performance in 2016, a significant fraction reported that they expect rising delinquencies and charge-offs for all categories of C&I loans.

In short, while there may not be another ‘energy’ sector this cycle, our proverbial list of candidates includes lower quality high yield (ex-commodities) and commercial real estate (CRE). More broadly, the OCC’s own examiners would also likely add asset-backed and auto loans to the list. The stark conclusions these credit officers draw with respect to the massive easing of credit standards due to competitive pressures seems clear enough – but unfortunately they seem to largely fall on deaf ears.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1TBp10O Tyler Durden