De beurs wat omlaag vrijdag, groei viel 1% tegen.

15:16 ET Bond Mar­ket Sum­ma­ry : The trea­suries con­tin­ued to defy direc­tion­al log­ic by shrug­ging off the stronger con­fi­dence and Chica­go PMI num­bers to focus on the dis­ap­point­ing (every­thing is rel­a­tive) GDP report. The longer matu­ri­ties per­sist­ed in chug­ging high­er through­out the day, suck­ing fuel from week- and month-end activ­i­ty, tech­ni­cal trad­ing and short cov­er­ing. The mar­ket con­tin­ues to push the flat­ten­ing (or per­haps more appro­pri­ate, crush­ing) trend, and the ten-year over two-year spread has head­ed to 230.5 from Mon­day’s 243.7. March ten-year note futures saw record open inter­est at the CBOT on Thurs­day’s action, with a total open inter­est of 9,543,591 con­tracts. The week ahead offers anoth­er good flush of num­bers, includ­ing the always-enjoy­able employ­ment report on Fri­day (please see eco­nom­ic cal­en­dar for a full sched­ule). The ten-years are end­ing the ses­sion near their highs, and are cur­rent­ly +10/​32nds yield­ing 4.132%; twos are unchanged yield­ing 1.827%; threes are +01/​32nds yield­ing 2.240%; fives are +05/​32nds yield­ing 3.150%; thir­ties are +17/​32nds yield­ing 4.964%.

07:19 ET KO: Coca-Cola may have ille­gal­ly pumped up sales in Japan –WSJ

09.59: The Wall Street Jour­nal reports that three for­mer Coca-Cola Co. (KO) finance offi­cials have told fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors that they wit­nessed a com­pa­ny prac­tice of over­stat­ing finan­cial results in recent years by ship­ping exces­sive bev­er­age con­cen­trate to bot­tlers in Japan. Offi­cials from the U.S. Attor­ney’s Office in Atlanta, the FBI and the SEC launched a wide-rang­ing probe into Coke last sum­mer after a for­mer com­pa­ny audi­tor made alle­ga­tions of the fraud, among oth­er charges, in a wrong­ful-ter­mi­na­tion law­suit. Inves­ti­ga­tors have also exam­ined sim­i­lar alle­ga­tions in North Amer­i­ca. Peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter say fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors have asked cur­rent and for­mer Coke offi­cials about a ware­house or third-par­ty ven­dor in Japan that could have been used to facil­i­tate alleged ​“chan­nel-stuff­ing” by stor­ing excess bev­er­age ingre­di­ents that Coke sold but still had not deliv­ered to bot­tlers. Accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the probe, inves­ti­ga­tors were told that Coke often shipped extra inven­to­ry for its Geor­gia cof­fee brand, a pop­u­lar line of drinks in Japan with high prof­it mar­gins. Accord­ing to paper for­mer exec­u­tives told inves­ti­ga­tors, there were up to 80 days worth of ingre­di­ents on hand for cer­tain drinks rather than the nor­mal inven­to­ry of about 30 days. Coke appar­ent­ly per­suad­ed bot­tlers in Japan to accept unwant­ed con­cen­trate by offer­ing var­i­ous incen­tives includ­ing extend­ed pay­ment terms, such as 60 days rather than sev­en days.

Pret­tig weekend,

Guy Boscart