Schadenfreude is tempting.
I see Goldman Sachs downgrade Peabody, and the first thing i think is that the thieves are telling their victims, ooo sorry, clients, sumpn about sumpn that they cashed out of a while ago, and have already organized a short on.
But it does reveal the vultures are getting more confident ... next they will go for the innards, the juicy assets. Not the coal, of course, but, for example, the rail lines owned (i was surprised at how much rail infrastructure is actually still owned by the coal companies themselves), the real estate (buncha strip mines have already leveraged ownership of the ridge lines into wind, like you can see in the USA on I81 in PA), lotsa nice juicy bits like a large fraction of transmission infrastucture. And lets not mention some of other scams with PJM and FERC like Reliable Power Pricing (RPR) and Reliable Must Run(RMR) clauses that have locked up MWH hour blocks many years into the future. Those started as insurance for baseload coal and nuke generation for the power companies, but now are valuable assets in play that the vultures will gorge on. And don't get me started on the Marcellus/Utica plays under the PA coal. This is a multiway knifefight between feds,states,miners,generators,transmission, and banks. In about 7-10 yrs they will unload the coal and natgas carcasses onto US taxpayers for remediation and cleanup. But till then, it's raining money and they're putting out buckets.
Only in America.
sidd