It was a month ago when Zero Hedge first revealed that as QE was “tapering”, a just as powerful and even more indiscriminate force had stepped in to make up for the loss of Fed buying of last resort: corporations themselves, almost exclusively on a levered basis (issuing debt whose use of proceeds are stock buybacks). Specifically, we showed that the total amount of stock bought back by corporations in Q1 was the highest since the bursting of the last credit bubble.