Showing posts with label Putin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Putin. Show all posts

Friday, January 2, 2015

America is Going to Have to Learn to Play Nicely......Where Have All the Statesmen Gone?

By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist

One of the most striking things about the Colder War—as I explore in my new book of the same name—has been the contrast between the peevish tone of the West’s leaders compared to the more grown-up and statesmanlike approach that Putin is taking in international affairs.

Western leaders and their unquestioning media propagandists appear to believe that diplomatic relations are some kind of reward for good behavior. But it’s actually more important to establish a constructive dialogue with your enemies or rivals than your friends, because that’s where you need to find common ground. Indeed, it’s been the basis for diplomacy since time immemorial.

Reassuringly, despite having been the target of the Ukraine crisis rather than the instigator, Putin still sees the West as a potential partner, not an enemy. Nor does, he says, Russia have any interest in building an empire of its own. In theory, if Putin is sincere, there should be plenty of room for cooperation, especially in the fight against terrorism.

As Putin said in his speech at the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi in October—whose theme was “The World Order: New Rules or a Game without Rules”—he hasn’t given up on working with the West on shared risks and common goals, provided it’s based on mutual respect and an agreement not to interfere in one another’s domestic affairs.

Putin has, of course, already shown that he can rise above the fray. By negotiating the destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal under international supervision, he did Obama a big favor and got him off the hook in Syria. But his collaboration with Obama went further than that. Putin had helped persuade Iran to consider making concessions on its nuclear program and was working behind the scenes on North Korean issues.

But as we’re discovering, this was precisely the sort of statesmanship that the neoconservative holdouts in Washington could simply not abide, because it would wreck the plan they’d been hatching for decades to bring about US military strikes against Assad and to move beyond sanctions and more aggressively confront Iran.

Determined to drive a wedge between Obama and Putin and punish Putin for interfering with their goal of regime change in the Middle East, these masters of chaos—like National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, and Senator John McCain—sprang into action.

These crazies first started fantasizing openly about regime change in Russia, and demonizing the “ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents,” before helping to topple Ukraine’s constitutionally elected government.

This is hardly the sort of behavior, to put it mildly, that would lead the Russians to trust American motives—especially after two rounds of NATO expansion in Central and Eastern Europe.

And the Russians also really don’t know what to make of the fact that one second Obama is including them on the list of the top global threats, and the next they’re being asked—yet again—to help secure a truly historical rapprochement with Iran. “It’s unseemly for a major and great power to take such a flippant approach toward its partners. When we need you, please help us, and when I want to punish you, obey me,” Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said last week.

The West has squandered the opportunity, after its victory in the Cold War, to establish a new stable system of international relations, with checks and balances, said Putin in Sochi. Instead, the US trashed the system to serve its own selfish ends and made the world a more dangerous place.

A particularly disturbing accusation Putin made is that the U.S. has been using “outright blackmail” against a number of world leaders. “It is not for nothing,” he added, “that ‘big brother’ is spending billions of dollars keeping the whole world, including its own allies, under surveillance.” If true, it would put the US beyond the pale of the civilized global diplomatic community.

Last year Putin reminded Americans, in a New York Times op-ed, that the UN was founded on the basis that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and that it’s this profound wisdom that has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades. The UN risked suffering the same fate as the League of Nations, he said, if America continued to bypass it and take military action without Security Council authorization.

What really amazes Putin—and most right-minded people—is that even after 9/11, when the US finally woke up to the common threat of Islamic terrorism and suffered the most epic blowback of all time, it continued to use various jihadist organizations as an instrument, even after getting its fingers burnt every time.
What did toppling Gaddafi achieve? Nothing, except to turn Libya into a total mess and fill it with al-Qaeda training camps. And what is Obama’s present strategy of funding “moderate” rebels in Syria going to achieve, if not more of the same mayhem, as one US-backed group after another joins forces with the Islamic State?

It’s hard to disagree with Putin that America’s neoconservatives have sown geopolitical chaos, by almost routinely meddling in others’ domestic affairs. He lists the many follies the US has committed, from the mountains of Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda had its roots in CIA-funded operations against the Russians, to Iraq and Saddam’s phantom weapons of mass destruction, to modern-day Syria, where the Islamic State appears to have benefited at least indirectly from some serious funding—and weapons smuggled out of Libya by the CIA.

Instead of searching for global solutions, the Russians think the US has started believing its own propaganda: that its policies and views represent the entire international community, even as the world becomes a multipolar one. It would appear that Putin is in good company. No less a statesman than former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agrees with him.

Sanctions against Russia are a huge mistake, says Kissinger: “We have to remember that Russia is an important part of the international system, and therefore useful in solving all sorts of other crises, for example in the agreement on nuclear proliferation with Iran or over Syria.”

Like Putin, Kissinger argues that a new world order is urgently needed. In an interview in Der Spiegel, he adds that the West has to recognize that it should have made the negotiations about Ukraine’s economic relations with the EU a subject of a dialogue with Russia. After all, he says, Ukraine is a special case, because it was once part of Russia and its east has a large Russian population.

So how has the current generation of American leaders responded to Putin’s accusation—shared by his allies Argentina, Brazil, China, India, and South Africa—that the U.S. is riding roughshod over the interests of other nations?

By mocking him with the sort of childishness that was on display at the G20 summit, where Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper grabbed headlines when he told Putin: “Well, I guess I’ll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: you need to get out of Ukraine.” While Putin is obviously no saint, his presence at the G20 summit shows that far from being isolated, he continues to be treated as respectable company, despite his actions over Ukraine.

At least Germany and the EU now appear to understand that diplomacy, not military action, is going to resolve differences between Russia and the West—even though Russia expelled one of Germany’s diplomats in Moscow last week. Following up on the four-hour meeting Merkel had with Putin in Melbourne and the call for intensified diplomacy by the EU’s new foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is now engaged in intensive shuttle diplomacy with Moscow.

The world will be better off if we all stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement, as Putin says. That’s what real statesmen would do, rather than trying to provoke Russia into a new Colder War. America is going to have to learn to play nicely. Otherwise, as Putin says, “today’s turmoil will simply serve as a prelude to the collapse of the world order.”

As you can see, there’s no greater force in geopolitics today than Vladimir Putin. But if you understand his role and how it influences the energy sector as Marin Katusa does, you’ll know how to get out in front of the latest moves and profit along the way. Of course, the situation is fluid, which is why Marin launched a brand new advisory dedicated to helping investors avoid energy companies that are being left behind and move into ones that will benefit from the tremendous shifts in capital being created by Putin. (In fact, Marin has the very best plays for taking advantage of cheap oil.)

It’s called The Colder War Letter. And it’s the perfect complement to Marin’s New York Times best seller, The Colder War, and the best way to navigate today’s fast-changing energy sector. When you sign up now, you’ll also receive a FREE copy of Marin’s book. Click here for all the details.

The article Where Have All the Statesmen Gone? was originally published at casey research


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Friday, December 19, 2014

The Burning Questions For 2015

By John Mauldin

Louis Gave is one of my favorite investment and economic thinkers, besides being a good friend and an all-around fun guy. When he and his father Charles and the well-known European journalist Anatole Kaletsky decided to form Gavekal some 15 years ago, Louis moved to Hong Kong, as they felt that Asia and especially China would be a part of the world they would have to understand. Since then Gavekal has expanded its research offices all over the world. The Gavekal team’s various research arms produce an astounding amount of work on an incredibly wide range of topics, but somehow Louis always seems to be on top of all of it.

Longtime readers know that I often republish a piece by someone in their firm (typically Charles or Louis). I have to be somewhat judicious, as their research is actually quite expensive, but they kindly give me permission to share it from time to time.

This week, for your Outside the Box reading, I bring you one of the more thought-provoking pieces I’ve read from Louis in some time. In Thoughts from the Frontline I have been looking at world problems we need to focus on as we enter 2015. Today, Louis also gives us a piece along these lines, called “The Burning Questions for 2015,” in which he thinks about a “Chinese Marshall Plan” (and what a stronger US dollar might do to China), Abenomics as a “sideshow,” US capital misallocation, and whether or not we should even care about Europe. I think you will find the piece well worth your time.

Think about this part of his conclusion as you read:

Most investors go about their job trying to identify ‘winners’. But more often than not, investing is about avoiding losers. Like successful gamblers at the racing track, an investor’s starting point should be to eliminate the assets that do not stand a chance, and then spread the rest of one’s capital amongst the remainder.

Wise words indeed.

A Yellow Card from Barry


What you don’t often get to see is the lively debate that happens among my friends about my writing, even as I comment on theirs. Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture pulled a yellow card on me over a piece of data he contended I had cherry picked from Zero Hedge. He has a point. I should have either not copied that sentence (the rest of the quote was OK) or noted the issue date. Quoting Barry:

Did you cherry pick this a little much? 

“… because since December 2007, or roughly the start of the global depression, shale oil states have added 1.36 million jobs while non-shale states have lost 424,000 jobs.”

I must point out how intellectually disingenuous this start date is, heading right into the crisis – why not use December 2010? Or 5 or 10 years? This is misleading in other ways:

It is geared to start before the crisis & recovery, so that it forces the 10 million jobs lost in the crisis to be offset by the 10 million new jobs added since the recovery began. That creates a very misleading picture of where growth comes from.

We have created 10 million new jobs since June 2009. Has Texas really created 4 million new jobs? The answer is no.

According to [the St. Louis Fed] FRED [database]:

PAYEMS – or NFP – has gone from 130,944 to 140,045, a gain of 9,101 over that period.
TXNA – Total Nonfarm in Texas – has gone from 10,284 to 11,708, for a gain of 1,424.

That gain represents 15.6% of the 9.1MM total.

Well yes, Barry, but because of oil and other things (like a business-friendly climate), Texas did not lose as many jobs in the recession as the rest of the nation did, which is where you can get skewed data, depending on when you start the count and what you are trying to illustrate.

My main point is that energy production has been a huge upside producer of jobs, and that source of new jobs is going away. And yes, Josh, the net benefit for at least the first six months until the job non production shows up (if it does) is a positive for the economy and the consumer. But I was trying to highlight a potential problem that could hurt US growth. Oil is likely to go to $40 before settling in the $50 range for a while. Will it eventually go back up? Yes. But it’s anybody’s guess as to when.

By the way, a former major hedge fund manager who closed his fund a number of years ago casually mentioned at a party the other night that he hopes oil goes to $35 and that we see a true shakeout in the oil patch. He grew up in a West Texas oil family and truly understands the cycles in the industry, especially for the smaller producers. From his point of view, a substantial shakeout creates massive upside opportunities in lots of places. “Almost enough,” he said, “to tempt me to open a new fund.”

On a different note, everyone is Christmas shopping and trying to find the right gift. Two recommendations. First, the Panasonic wet/dry electric razor (with five blades). I just bought a new set of blades and covers for mine after two years (you do have to replace them every now and then); and the new, improved shave reminded me how much I was in love with it when I bought it. Best shaver ever.

Second, and I know this is a little odd, but for a number of years I’ve been recommending a face cream that contains skin stem cells, which I and quite a number of my readers have noticed really helps rejuvenate our older skin. (I came across the product while researching stem cell companies with Patrick Cox.) It clearly makes a difference for some people. I get ladies coming up all the time and thanking me for the recommendation, and guys too sometimes shyly admit they use it regularly. (It turns out that just as many men buy the product as women.) The company is Lifeline Skin Care, and they have discounted the product for my readers. If you can get past the fact that this is a financial analyst recommending a skin cream for a Christmas gift, then click on this link.

It is time to hit the send button. I trust you are having a good week. Now settle in and grab a cup of coffee or some wine (depending on the time of day and your mood), and let’s see what Louis has to say.
Your trying to catch up analyst,

John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
subscribers@mauldineconomics.com

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The Burning Questions For 2015

By Louis-Vincent Gave, GavekalDragonomics

With two reports a day, and often more, readers sometimes complain that keeping tabs on the thoughts of the various Gavekal analysts can be a challenge. So as the year draws to a close, it may be helpful if we recap the main questions confronting investors and the themes we strongly believe in, region by region.

1. A Chinese Marshall Plan?


When we have conversations with clients about China – which typically we do between two and four times a day – the talk invariably revolves around how much Chinese growth is slowing (a good bit, and quite quickly); how undercapitalized Chinese banks are (a good bit, but fat net interest margins and preferred share issues are solving the problem over time); how much overcapacity there is in real estate (a good bit, but – like youth – this is a problem that time will fix); how much overcapacity there is in steel, shipping, university graduates and corrupt officials; how disruptive China’s adoption of assembly line robots will be etc.

All of these questions are urgent, and the problems that prompted them undeniably real, which means that China’s policymakers certainly have their plates full. But this is where things get interesting: in all our conversations with Western investors, their conclusion seems to be that Beijing will have little choice but to print money aggressively, devalue the renminbi, fiscally stimulate the economy, and basically follow the path trail-blazed (with such success?) by Western policymakers since 2008. However, we would argue that this conclusion represents a failure both to think outside the Western box and to read Beijing’s signal flags.

In numerous reports (and in Chapters 11 to 14 of Too Different For Comfort) we have argued that the internationalization of the renminbi has been one of the most significant macro events of recent years. This internationalization is continuing apace: from next to nothing in 2008, almost a quarter of Chinese trade will settle in renminbi in 2014:

This is an important development which could have a very positive impact on a number of emerging markets. Indeed, a typical, non oil exporting emerging market policymaker (whether in Turkey, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, Argentina or India) usually has to worry about two things that are completely out of his control:

1)   A spike in the US dollar. Whenever the US currency shoots up, it presents a hurdle for growth in most emerging markets. The first reason is that most trade takes place in US dollars, so a stronger US dollar means companies having to set aside more money for working capital needs. The second is that most emerging market investors tend to think in two currencies: their own and the US dollar. Catch a cab in Bangkok, Cairo, Cape Town or Jakarta and ask for that day’s US dollar exchange rate and chances are that the driver will know it to within a decimal point. This sensitivity to exchange rates is important because it means that when the US dollar rises, local wealth tends to flow out of local currencies as investors sell domestic assets and into US dollar assets, typically treasuries (when the US dollar falls, the reverse is true).

2)   A rapid rise in oil or food prices. Violent spikes in oil and food prices can be highly destabilizing for developing countries, where the median family spends so much more of their income on basic necessities than the typical Western family. Sudden spikes in the price of food or energy can quickly create social and political tensions. And that’s not all; for oil importing countries, a spike in oil prices can lead to a rapid deterioration in trade balances. These tend to scare foreign investors away, so pushing the local currency lower and domestic interest rates higher, which in turn leads to weaker growth etc...

Looking at these two concerns, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, as things stand, China is helping to mitigate both:
  • China’s policy of renminbi internationalization means that emerging markets are able gradually to reduce their dependence on the US dollar. As they do, spikes in the value of the US currency (such as we have seen in 2014) are becoming less painful.
     
  • The slowdown in Chinese oil demand, as well as China’s ability to capitalize on Putin’s difficulties to transform itself from a price taker to a price setter, means that the impact of oil and commodities on trade balances is much more contained.
Beyond providing stability to emerging markets, the gradual acceptance of the renminbi as a secondary trading and reserve currency for emerging markets has further implications. The late French economist Jacques Rueff showed convincingly how, when global trade moved from a gold based settlement system to a U.S. dollar based system, purchasing power was duplicated. As the authors of a recent Wall Street Journal article citing Reuff’s work explained: “If the Banque de France counts among its reserves dollar claims (and not just gold and French francs) – for example a Banque de France deposit in a New York bank – this increases the money supply in France but without reducing the money supply of the US. So both countries can use these dollar assets to grant credit.” Replace Banque de France with Bank Indonesia, and U.S. dollar with renminbi and the same causes will lead to the same effects.

Consider British Columbia’s recently issued AAA rated two year renminbi dim sum bond. Yielding 2.85%, this bond was actively subscribed to by foreign central banks, which ended up receiving more than 50% of the initial allocation (ten times as much as in the first British Columbia dim sum issue two years ago). After the issue British Columbia takes the proceeds and deposits them in a Chinese bank, thereby capturing a nice spread. In turn, the Chinese bank can multiply this money five times over (so goes money creation in China). Meanwhile, the Indonesian, Korean or Kazakh central banks that bought the bonds now have an asset on their balance sheet which they can use to back an expansion of trade with China...

Of course, for trade to flourish, countries need to be able to specialize in their respective comparative advantages, hence the importance of the kind of free trade deals discussed at the recent APEC meeting. But free trade deals are not enough; countries also need trade infrastructure (ports, airports, telecoms, trade finance banks etc...). This brings us to China’s ‘new silk road’ strategy and the recent announcement by Beijing of a US$40bn fund to help finance road and rail infrastructure in the various ‘stans’ on its western borders in a development that promises to cut the travel time from China to Europe from the current 30 days by sea to ten days or less overland.

Needless to say, such a dramatic reduction in transportation time could help prompt some heavy industry to relocate from Europe to Asia.

That’s not all. At July’s BRICS summit in Brazil, leaders of the five member nations signed a treaty launching the U.S. $50bn New Development Bank, which Beijing hopes will be modeled on China Development Bank, and is likely to compete with the World Bank. This will be followed by the establishment of a China-dominated BRICS contingency fund (challenging the International Monetary Fund). Also on the cards is an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to rival the Asian Development Bank.

So what looks likely to take shape over the next few years is a network of railroads and motorways linking China’s main production centers to Bangkok, Singapore, Karachi, Almaty, Moscow, Yangon, Kolkata. We will see pipelines, dams, and power plants built in Siberia, Central Asia, Pakistan and Myanmar; as well as airports, hotels, business centers... and all of this financed with China’s excess savings, and leverage. Given that China today has excess production capacity in all of these sectors, one does not need a fistful of university diplomas to figure out whose companies will get the pick of the construction contracts.

But to finance all of this, and to transform herself into a capital exporter, China needs stable capital markets and a strong, convertible currency. This explains why, despite Hong Kong’s pro democracy demonstrations, Beijing is pressing ahead with the internationalization of the renminbi using the former British colony as its proving ground (witness the Shanghai-HK stock connect scheme and the removal of renminbi restrictions on Hong Kong residents). And it is why renminbi bonds have delivered better risk adjusted returns over the past five years than almost any other fixed income market.

Of course, China’s strategy of internationalizing the renminbi, and integrating its neighbors into its own economy might fall flat on its face. Some neighbors bitterly resent China’s increasing assertiveness.

Nonetheless, the big story in China today is not ‘ghost cities’ (how long has that one been around?) or undercapitalized banks. The major story is China’s reluctance to continue funneling its excess savings into US treasuries yielding less than 2%, and its willingness to use that capital instead to integrate its neighbors’ economies with its own; using its own currency and its low funding costs as an ‘appeal product’ (and having its own companies pick up the contracts as a bonus). In essence, is this so different from what the US did in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s with the Marshall Plan?

2. Japan: Is Abenomics just a sideshow?


With Japan in the middle of a triple dip recession, and Japanese households suffering a significant contraction in real disposable income, it might seem that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has chosen an odd time to call a snap election. Three big factors explain his decision:

1)   The Japanese opposition is in complete disarray. So Abe’s decision may primarily have been opportunistic.

2)   We must remember that Abe is the most nationalist prime minister Japan has produced in a generation. The expansion of China’s economic presence across Central and South East Asia will have left him feeling at least as uncomfortable as anyone who witnessed his Apec handshake with Xi Jinping three weeks ago. It is not hard to imagine that Abe returned from Beijing convinced that he needs to step up Japan’s military development; a policy that requires him to command a greater parliamentary majority than he holds now.

3)   The final factor explaining Abe’s decision to call an election may be that in Japan the government’s performance in opinion polls seems to mirror the performance of the local stock market (wouldn’t Barack Obama like to see such a correlation in the US?). With the Nikkei breaking out to new highs, Abe may feel that now is the best time to try and cement his party’s dominant position in the Diet.

As he gets ready to face the voters, how should Abe attempt to portray himself? In our view, he could do worse than present himself as Japan Inc’s biggest salesman. Since the start of his second mandate, Abe has visited 49 countries in 21 months, and taken hundreds of different Japanese CEOs along with him for the ride. The message these CEOs have been spreading is simple: Japan is a very different place from 20 years ago. Companies are doing different things, and investment patterns have changed. Many companies have morphed into completely different animals, and are delivering handsome returns as a result. The relative year to date outperformances of Toyo Tire (+117%), Minebea (+95%), Mabuchi (+57%), Renesas (+43%), Fuji Film (+33%), NGK Insulators (+33%) and Nachi-Fujikoshi (+19%) have been enormous. Or take Panasonic as an example: the old television maker has transformed itself into a car parts firm, piggy backing on the growth of Tesla’s model S.

Yet even as these changes have occurred, most foreign investors have stopped visiting Japan, and most sell-side firms have stopped funding genuine and original research. For the alert investor this is good news. As the number of Japanese firms at the heart of the disruptions reshaping our global economy – robotics, electric and self-driving cars, alternative energy, healthcare, care for the elderly – continues to expand, and as the number of investors looking at these same firms continues to shrink, those investors willing to sift the gravel of corporate Japan should be able to find real gems.

Which brings us to the real question confronting investors today: the ‘Kuroda put’ has placed Japanese equities back on investor’s maps. But is this just a short term phenomenon? After all, no nation has ever prospered by devaluing its currency. If Japan is set to attract, and retain, foreign investor flows, it will have to come up with a more compelling story than ‘we print money faster than anyone else’.

In our recent research, we have argued that this is exactly what is happening. In fact, we believe so much in the opportunity that we have launched a dedicated Japan corporate research service (GK Plus Alpha) whose principals (Alicia Walker and Neil Newman) are burning shoe leather to identify the disruptive companies that will trigger Japan’s next wave of growth.

3. Should we worry about capital misallocation in the US?


The US has now ‘enjoyed’ a free cost of money for some six years. The logic behind the zero-interest rate policy was simple enough: after the trauma of 2008, the animal spirits of entrepreneurs needed to be prodded back to life. Unfortunately, the last few years have reminded everyone that the average entrepreneur or investor typically borrows for one of two reasons:
  • Capital spending: Business is expanding, so our entrepreneur borrows to open a new plant, or hire more people, etc.
     
  • Financial engineering: The entrepreneur or investor borrows in order to purchase an existing cash flow, or stream of income. In this case, our borrower calculates the present value of a given income stream, and if this present value is higher than the cost of the debt required to own it, then the transaction makes sense.
Unfortunately, the second type of borrowing does not lead to an increase in the stock of capital. It simply leads to a change in the ownership of capital at higher and higher prices, with the ownership of an asset often moving away from entrepreneurs and towards financial middlemen or institutions. So instead of an increase in an economy’s capital stock (as we would get with increased borrowing for capital spending), with financial engineering all we see is a net increase in the total amount of debt and a greater concentration of asset ownership. And the higher the debt levels and ownership concentration, the greater the system’s fragility and its inability to weather shocks.

We are not arguing that financial engineering has reached its natural limits in the US. Who knows where those limits stand in a zero interest rate world? However, we would highlight that the recent new highs in US equities have not been accompanied by new lows in corporate spreads. Instead, the spread between 5-year BBB bonds and 5-year US treasuries has widened by more than 30 basis points since this summer.

Behind these wider spreads lies a simple reality: corporate bonds issued by energy sector companies have lately been taken to the woodshed. In fact, the spread between the bonds of energy companies, and those of other US corporates are back at highs not seen since the recession of 2001-2002, when the oil price was at US$30 a barrel.

The market’s behavior raises the question whether the energy industry has been the black hole of capital misallocation in the era of quantitative easing. As our friend Josh Ayers of Paradarch Advisors (Josh publishes a weekly entitled The Right Tale, which is a fount of interesting ideas. He can be reached at josh@paradarchadvisors.com) put it in a recent note: “After surviving the resource nadir of the late 1980s and 1990s, oil and gas firms started pumping up capex as the new millennium began. However, it wasn’t until the purported end of the global financial crisis in 2009 that capital expenditure in the oil patch went into hyperdrive, at which point capex from the S&P 500’s oil and gas subcomponents jumped from roughly 7% of total US fixed investment to over 10% today.”

“It’s no secret that a decade’s worth of higher global oil prices justified much of the early ramp-up in capex, but a more thoughtful look at the underlying data suggests we’re now deep in the malinvestment phase of the oil and gas business cycle. The second chart (above) displays both the total annual capex and the return on that capex (net income/capex) for the ten largest holdings in the Energy Select Sector SPDR (XLE). The most troublesome aspect of this chart is that, since 2010, returns have been declining as capex outlays are increasing. Furthermore, this divergence is occurring despite WTI crude prices averaging nearly $96 per barrel during that period,” Josh noted.

The energy sector may not be the only place where capital has been misallocated on a grand scale. The other industry with a fairly large target on its back is the financial sector. For a start, policymakers around the world have basically decided that, for all intents and purposes, whenever a ‘decision maker’ in the financial industry makes a decision, someone else should be looking over the decision maker’s shoulder to ensure that the decision is appropriate. Take HSBC’s latest results: HSBC added 1400 compliance staff in one quarter, and plans to add another 1000 over the next quarter. From this, we can draw one of two conclusions:

1)   The financial firms that will win are the large firms, as they can afford the compliance costs.
2)   The winners will be the firms that say: “Fine, let’s get rid of the decision maker. Then we won’t need to hire the compliance guy either”.

This brings us to a theme first explored by our friend Paul Jeffery, who back in September wrote: “In 1994 Bill Gates observed: ‘Banking is necessary, banks are not’. The primary function of a bank is to bring savers and users of capital together in order to facilitate an exchange. In return for their role as [trusted] intermediaries banks charge a generous net spread. To date, this hefty added cost has been accepted by the public due to the lack of a credible alternative, as well as the general oligopolistic structure of the banking industry.

What Lending Club and other P2P lenders do is provide an online market place that connects borrowers and lenders directly; think the eBay of loans and you have the right conceptual grasp. Moreover, the business model of online market-place lending breaks with a banking tradition, dating back to 14th century Florence, of operating on a “fractional reserve” basis. In the case of P2P intermediation, lending can be thought of as being “fully reserved” and entails no balance sheet risk on the part of the service facilitator. Instead, the intermediary receives a fee- based revenue stream rather than a spread-based income.”

There is another way we can look at it: finance today is an abnormal industry in two important ways:

1)   The more the sector spends on information and communications technology, the bigger a proportion of the economic pie the industry captures. This is a complete anomaly. In all other industries (retail, energy, telecoms...), spending on ICT has delivered savings for the consumers. In finance, investment in ICT (think shaving seconds of trading times in order to front run customer orders legally) has not delivered savings for consumers, nor even bigger dividends for shareholders, but fatter bonuses and profits for bankers.

2)   The second way finance is an abnormal industry (perhaps unsurprisingly given the first factor) lies in the banks’ inability to pass on anything of value to their customers, at least as far as customer’s perceptions are concerned. Indeed, in ‘brand surveys’ and ‘consumer satisfaction reports’, banks regularly bring up the rear. Who today loves their bank in a way that some people ‘love’ Walmart, Costco, IKEA, Amazon, Apple, Google, Uber, etc?

Most importantly, and as Paul highlights above, if the whole point of the internet is to:

a) measure more efficiently what each individual needs, and
b) eliminate unnecessary intermediaries,

then we should expect a lot of the financial industry’s safe and steady margins to come under heavy pressure. This has already started in the broking and in the money management industries (where mediocre money managers and other closet indexers are being replaced by ETFs). But why shouldn’t we start to see banks’ high return consumer loan, SME loan and credit card loan businesses replaced, at a faster and faster pace, by peer-to-peer lending? Why should consumers continue to pay high fees for bank transfers, or credit cards when increasingly such services are offered at much lower costs by firms such as TransferWise, services like Alipay and Apple Pay, or simply by new currencies such as Bitcoin?

On this point, we should note that in the 17 days that followed the launch of Apple Pay on the iPhone 6, almost 1% of Wholefoods’ transactions were processed using the new payment system. The likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon have grown into behemoths by upending the media, advertising retail and entertainment industries. Such a rapid take- up rate for Apple Pay is a powerful indicator which sector is likely to be next in line. How else can these tech giants keep growing and avoid the fate that befell Sony, Microsoft and Nokia? On their past record, the technology companies will find margins, and growth, in upending our countries’ financial infrastructure. As they do, a lot of capital (both human and monetary) deployed in the current infrastructure will find itself obsolete.

This possibility raises a number of questions – not least for Gavekal’s own investment process, which relies heavily on changes in the velocity of money and in the willingness and ability of commercial banks to multiply money, to judge whether it makes sense to increase portfolio risk. What happens to a world that moves ‘ex-bank’ and where most new loans are extended peer-to-peer? In such a world, the banking multiplier disappears along with fractional reserve banking (and consequently the need for regulators? Dare to dream...).

As bankers stop lending their clients umbrellas when it is sunny, and taking them away when it rains, will our economic cycles become much tamer? As central banks everywhere print money aggressively, could the market be in the process of creating currencies no longer based on the borders of nation states, but instead on the cross-border networks of large corporations (Alipay, Apple Pay...), or even on voluntary communities (Bitcoin). Does this mean we are approaching the Austrian dream of a world with many, non government-supported, currencies?

4. Should we care about Europe?


In our September Quarterly Strategy Chartbook, we debated whether the eurozone was set for a revival (the point expounded by François) or a continued period stuck in the doldrums (Charles’s view), or whether we should even care (my point). At the crux of this divergence in views is the question whether euroland is broadly following the Japanese deflationary bust path. Pointing to this possibility are the facts that 11 out of 15 eurozone countries are now registering annual year-on-year declines in CPI, that policy responses have so far been late, unclear and haphazard (as they were in Japan), and that the solutions mooted (e.g. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s €315bn infrastructure spending plan) recall the solutions adopted in Japan (remember all those bridges to nowhere?). And that’s before going into the structural parallels: ageing populations; dysfunctional, undercapitalized and overcrowded banking systems; influential segments of the population eager to maintain the status quo etc....

With the same causes at work, should we expect the same consequences? Does the continued underperformance of eurozone stocks simply reflect that managing companies in a deflationary environment is a very challenging task? If euroland has really entered a Japanese-style deflationary bust likely to extend years into the future, the conclusion almost draws itself.

The main lesson investors have learned from the Japanese experience of 1990-2013 is that the only time to buy stocks in an economy undergoing a deflationary bust is:

a)   when stocks are massively undervalued relative both to their peers and to their own history, and
b)   when a significant policy change is on the way.

This was the situation in Japan in 1999 (the first round of QE under PM Keizo Obuchi), 2005 (PM Junichiro Koizumi’s bank recapitalization program) and of course in 2013-14 (Abenomics). Otherwise, in a deflationary environment with no or low growth, there is no real reason to pile into equities. One does much better in debt. So, if the Japan-Europe parallel runs true, it only makes sense to look at eurozone equities when they are both massively undervalued relative to their own histories and there are expectations of a big policy change. This was the case in the spring of 2012 when valuations were at extremes, and Mario Draghi replaced Jean-Claude Trichet as ECB president. In the absence of these two conditions, the marginal dollar looking for equity risk will head for sunnier climes.

With this in mind, there are two possible arguments for an exposure to eurozone equities:

1)   The analogy of Japan is misleading as euroland will not experience a deflationary bust (or will soon emerge from deflation).
2)   We are reaching the point when our two conditions – attractive valuations, combined with policy shock and awe – are about to be met. Thus we could be reaching the point when euroland equities start to deliver outsized returns.

Proponents of the first argument will want to overweight euroland equities now, as this scenario should lead to a rebound in both the euro and European equities (so anyone underweight in their portfolios would struggle). However, it has to be said that the odds against this first outcome appear to get longer with almost every data release!

Proponents of the second scenario, however, can afford to sit back and wait, because it is likely any outperformance in eurozone equities would be accompanied by euro currency weakness. Hence, as a percentage of a total benchmark, European equities would not surge, because the rise in equities would be offset by the falling euro.

Alternatively, investors who are skeptical about either of these two propositions can – like us – continue to use euroland as a source of, rather than as a destination for, capital. And they can afford safely to ignore events unfolding in euroland as they seek rewarding investment opportunities in the US or Asia. In short, over the coming years investors may adopt the same view towards the eurozone that they took towards Japan for the last decade: ‘Neither loved, nor hated... simply ignored’.

Conclusion:


Most investors go about their job trying to identify ‘winners’. But more often than not, investing is about avoiding losers. Like successful gamblers at the racing track, an investor’s starting point should be to eliminate the assets that do not stand a chance, and then spread the rest of one’s capital amongst the remainder.

For example, if in 1981 an investor had decided to forego investing in commodities and simply to diversify his holdings across other asset classes, his decision would have been enough to earn himself a decade at the beach. If our investor had then returned to the office in 1990, and again made just one decision – to own nothing in Japan – he could once again have gone back to sipping margaritas for the next ten years. In 2000, the decision had to be not to own overvalued technology stocks. By 2006, our investor needed to start selling his holdings in financials around the world. And by 2008, the money-saving decision would have been to forego investing in euroland.

Of course hindsight is twenty-twenty, and any investor who managed to avoid all these potholes would have done extremely well. Nevertheless, the big question confronting investors today is how to avoid the potholes of tomorrow. To succeed, we believe that investors need to answer the following questions:
  • Will Japan engineer a revival through its lead in exciting new technologies (robotics, hi-tech help for the elderly, electric and driverless cars etc...), or will Abenomics prove to be the last hurrah of a society unable to adjust to the 21st century? Our research is following these questions closely through our new GK Plus Alpha venture.
     
  • Will China slowly sink under the weight of the past decade’s malinvestment and the accompanying rise in debt (the consensus view) or will it successfully establish itself as Asia’s new hegemon? Our Beijing based research team is very much on top of these questions, especially Tom Miller, who by next Christmas should have a book out charting the geopolitical impact of China’s rise.
     
  • Will Indian prime minister Narendra Modi succeed in plucking the low-hanging fruit so visible in India, building new infrastructure, deregulating services, cutting protectionism, etc? If so, will India start to pull its weight in the global economy and financial markets?
     
  • How will the world deal with a US economy that may no longer run current account deficits, and may no longer be keen to finance large armies? Does such a combination not almost guarantee the success of China’s strategy?
     
  • If the US dollar is entering a long term structural bull market, who are the winners and losers? The knee-jerk reaction has been to say ‘emerging markets will be the losers’ (simply because they were in the past. But the reality is that most emerging markets have large US dollar reserves and can withstand a strong US currency. Instead, will the big losers from the US dollar be the commodity producers?
     
  • Have we reached ‘peak demand’ for oil? If so, does this mean that we have years ahead of us in which markets and investors will have to digest the past five years of capital misallocation into commodities?
     
  • Talking of capital misallocation, does the continued trend of share buybacks render our financial system more fragile (through higher gearing) and so more likely to crack in the face of exogenous shocks? If it does, one key problem may be that although we may have made our banks safer through increased regulations (since banks are not allowed to take risks anymore), we may well have made our financial markets more volatile (since banks are no longer allowed to trade their balance sheets to benefit from spikes in volatility). This much appeared obvious from the behavior of US fixed income markets in the days following Bill Gross’s departure from PIMCO. In turn, if banks are not allowed to take risks at volatile times, then central banks will always be called upon to act, which guarantees more capital misallocation, share buybacks and further fragilization of the system (expect more debates along this theme between Charles, and Anatole).
     
  • Will the financial sector be next to undergo disintermediation by the internet (after advertising and the media). If so, what will the macro consequences be? (Hint: not good for the pound or London property.)
     
  • Is euroland following the Japanese deflationary bust roadmap?
The answers to these questions will drive performance for years to come. In the meantime, we continue to believe that a portfolio which avoids a) euroland, b) banks, and c) commodities, will do well – perhaps well enough to continue funding Mediterranean beach holidays – especially as these are likely to go on getting cheaper for anyone not earning euros!

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Thursday, December 18, 2014

Why Russia Will Halt the Ruble’s Slide and Keep Pumping Crude Oil

By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist

The harsh reality is that U.S. shale fields have much more to fear from plummeting oil prices than the Russians, since their costs of production are much higher, says Marin Katusa, author of The Colder War: How the Global Energy Trade Slipped from America’s Grasp.

Russia’s ruble may have strengthened sharply Wednesday, but it’s plunge in recent days has encouraged plenty of talk about the country’s catastrophe, with some even proclaiming that the new Russia is about to go the way of the old USSR.

Don’t believe it. Russia is not the United States, and the effects of a rapidly declining currency over there are much less dramatic than they would be in the U.S.

One important thing to remember is that the fall of the ruble has accompanied a precipitous decline in the per barrel price of oil. But the two are not as intimately connected as might be supposed. Yes, Russia has a resource based economy that is hurt by oil weakness. However, oil is traded nearly everywhere in U.S. dollars, which are presently enjoying considerable strength.

This means that Russian oil producers can sell their product in these strong dollars but pay their expenses in devalued rubles. Thus, they can make capital improvements, invest in new capacity, or do further explorations for less than it would have cost before the ruble’s value was halved against the dollar. The sector remains healthy, and able to continue contributing the lion’s share of governmental tax revenues.

Nor is ruble volatility going to affect the ability of most Russian companies to service their debt. Most of the dollar-denominated corporate debt that has to be rolled over in the coming months was borrowed by state companies, which have a steady stream of foreign currency revenues from oil and gas exports.

Russian consumers will be hurt, of course, due to the higher costs of imported goods, as well as the squeeze inflation puts on their incomes. But, by the same token, exports become much more attractive to foreign buyers. A cheaper ruble boosts the profit outlook for all Russian companies involved in international trade. Additionally, when the present currency weakness is added to the ban on food imports from the European Union, the two could eventually lead to an import substitution boom in Russia.

In any event, don’t expect any deprivations to inspire riots in the streets of Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity has soared since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis. The people trust him. They’ll tighten their belts and there will be no widespread revolt against his policies.

Further, the high price of oil during the commodity super cycle, coupled with a high real exchange rate, led to a serious decline in the Russia’s manufacturing and agricultural sectors over the past 15 years. This correlation — termed by economists “Dutch disease”— lowered the Russian manufacturing sector’s share of its economy to 8% from 21% in 2000.

The longer the ruble remains weak, however, the less Dutch disease will rule the day. A lower currency means investment in Russian manufacturing and agriculture will make good economic sense again. Both should be given a real fillip.

Low oil prices are also good for Russia’s big customers, especially China, with which Putin has been forging ever stronger ties. If, as expected, Russia and China agree to transactions in rubles and/or yuan, that will push them even closer together and further undermine the dollar’s worldwide hegemony. Putin always thinks decades ahead, and any short term loss of energy revenues will be far offset by the long term gains of his economic alliances.

In the most recent development, the Russian central bank has reacted by raising interest rates to 17%. On the one hand, this is meant to curb inflation. On the other, it’s an direct response to the short selling speculators who’ve been attacking the ruble. They now have to pay additional premiums, so the risk/reward ratio has gone up. Speculators are going to be much warier going forward.

The rise in interest rates mirrors how former U.S. Fed Chair Paul Volcker fought inflation in the U.S. in the early ‘80s. It worked for Volcker, as the U.S. stock market embarked on a historic bull run. The Russians — whose market has been beaten down during the oil/currency crisis — are expecting a similar result.

Not that the Russian market is anywhere near as important to that country’s economy as the US’s is to its. Russians don’t play the market like Americans do. There is no Jim Kramerovsky’s Mad Money in Russia.

Russia is not some Zimbabwe-to-be. It’s sitting on a surplus of foreign assets and very healthy foreign exchange reserves of around $375 billion. Moreover, it has a strong debt-to-GDP ratio of just 13% and a large (and steadily growing) stockpile of gold. Why Russia will arrest the ruble’s slide and keep pumping oil
And there is Russia’s energy relationship with the EU, particularly Germany. Putin showed his clout when he axed the South Stream pipeline and announced that he would run a pipeline through Turkey instead.

The cancellation barely lasted long enough to speak it before the EU caved and offered Putin what he needed to get South Stream back on line. Germany is never going to let Turkey be a gatekeeper of European energy security. With winter arriving, the EU’s dependence on Russian oil and gas will take center stage, and the union will become a stabilizing influence on Russia once again.

In short, while the current situation is not working in Russia’s favor, the country is far from down for the count. It will arrest the ruble’s slide and keep pumping oil. Its economy will contract but not crumble. The harsh reality is that American shale fields have much more to fear from plummeting oil prices than the Russians (or the Saudis), since their costs of production are much higher. Many US shale wells will become uneconomic if oil falls much further. And it they start shutting down, it’ll be disastrous for the American economy, since the growth of the shale industry has underpinned 100% of US economic growth for the past several years.

Those waving their arms about the ruble might do better to look at countries facing real currency crises, like oil dependent Venezuela and Nigeria, as well as Ukraine. That’s where the serious trouble is going to come.
The collapse in oil prices is just the opening salvo in a decades long conflict to control the world’s energy trade. To find out what the future holds, specifically how Vladimir Putin has positioned Russia to come roaring back by leveraging its immense natural resource wealth, click here to get your copy of Marin Katusa’s smash hit New York Times bestseller, The Colder War. Inside, you’ll discover how underestimating Putin will have dire consequences.

And you’ll also discover how dangerous the deepening alliance between China, Russia and the emerging markets is to the future of American prosperity. Click here to get your copy.



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Tuesday, December 16, 2014

German Chancellor Merkel Won’t Let Ukraine Get in the Way of Business

By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist

The Ukraine crisis has moderated for now, but it should have awakened the world to the new “great game” being played in Eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin is positioning Russia to control the global energy trade, knowing that he holds the trump card: Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas.

This epic struggle between the US and Russia could change the very nature of the Euro-American trans Atlantic alliance, because Europe is going to have to choose sides.

The numbers in Putin’s OIL = POWER equation are only going to keep getting bigger as Russia’s control and output of energy continues to grow and as Europe’s supply from other sources dwindles—as I outline in my new book, The Colder War. Finland and Hungary get almost all their oil from Russia; Poland more than 75%; Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Belgium about 50%; Germany and the Netherlands, upward of 40%.

Cutting back on energy imports from Russia as a means of pressuring Moscow is hardly in the EU’s best interest.

Germany, the union’s de facto leader, has simply invested too much in its relationship with Putin to sever ties—which is why Chancellor Angela Merkel has blocked any serious sanctions against Russia, or NATO bases in Eastern Europe.

In fact, Germany is moving to normalize its relations with Russia, which means marginalizing the Ukrainian showdown. Ukraine is but a very small part of Moscow’s and Berlin’s plans for the 21st century. Though the U.S. desperately wants Germany to lean Westward, it has instead been pivoting East. It’s constructing an alliance that will ultimately elbow the US out of Eastern and Central Europe and consign it to the status of peripheral player. (The concept of the “pivot “ in geopolitics was advanced by the celebrated early 20th century English geographer Halford Mackinder with regard to Russia’s potential to dominate Europe and Asia because it forms a geographical bridge between the two.

Mackinder’s “Heartland Theory” argued that whoever controlled Eurasia would control the world. Such a far flung empire might come into being if Germany were to ally itself with Russia. It’s a doctrine that influenced geopolitical strategists through both World Wars and the Cold War. It was even embraced by the Nazis before Russia became an enemy. And it may still be relevant today—despite the historical animosities between the two countries. After all, the mutually beneficial alliance of a resource-hungry Germany with a resource-rich Russia is a logical one.)

Considering the deepening ties between Russia and Germany in recent years, the real motive for the US’s stoking of unrest in Ukraine may not have been to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and into the West’s orbit—it may have been primarily intended to drive a wedge between Germany and Russia.

The US almost certainly views the growing trade between them—3,000 German companies have invested heavily in Russia—as a major geopolitical threat to NATO’s health. The much-publicized spying on German politicians by the US and the British—and Germany’s reciprocal surveillance—shows the level of mutual distrust that exists.

If sowing discord between Russia and Germany was America’s goal, the implementation of sanctions might look like mission accomplished. Appearances can be deceptive, though.

Behind the scenes, Germany and Russia maintain a cordial dialogue, made all the easier because Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel get along well on a personal level. They’re so fluent in each other’s languages that they correct their interpreters. They often confer about the possibility of creating a stable, prosperous and secure Eurasian supercontinent.

Despite the sanctions, German and Russian businessmen are still busy forging closer ties. At a shindig in September for German businesses in the North-East and Russian companies from St. Petersburg, Gerhard Schröder—former German prime minister and president, and friend of Putin—urged his audience to continue to build their energy and raw-material partnership.

Schröder’s close personal relationship with Putin is no secret. He considers the Russian president to be a man of utmost trustworthiness, and his Social Democratic Party has always been wedded to Ostpolitik (German for “new Eastern policy”), which asserts that his country’s strategic interest is to bind Russia into an energy alliance with the EU.

Schröder would have us believe that they never talk politics. Yet in his capacity as chair of the shareholders’ committee of Gazprom’s Nord Stream—the pipeline laid on the Baltic seabed which links Germany directly to Russian gas—he continues to advocate for a German-Russian “agreement.”

That’s a viewpoint Merkel shares. In spite of her public criticism of Putin’s policy toward Ukraine, Merkel has gone out of her way to play down any thought of a new Cold War. She’s on the record as wanting Germany’s “close partnership” with Russia to continue—and she’s convinced it will in the not-so-distant future.

Though Merkel has rejected lifting sanctions against Russia and continues to publicly call on Putin to exert a moderating influence on pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists, it looks like Germany is seeking a reasonable way out. That makes sense, given the disproportionate economic price Germany is paying to keep up appearances of being a loyal US ally.

Politicians in Germany are alert to the potential damage an alienated Russia could inflict on German interests. Corporate Germany is getting the jitters as well, and there are a growing number of dissenting voices in that sector. And anti-American sentiment in Germany—which is reflected in the polls—is putting added pressure on Berlin to pursue a softer line rather than slavishly following Washington’s lead in this geopolitical conflict.
With the eurozone threatened by a triple dip recession, expect Germany and the EU to act in their own interests. Germany has too much invested in Russia to let Ukraine spoil its plans.

As you can see, there’s no greater force controlling the global energy trade today than Russia and Vladimir Putin. But if you understand his role in geopolitics as Marin Katusa does, you’ll know how he’s influencing the flow of the capital in the energy sector—and which companies and projects will benefit and which will lose out.

Of course, the situation is fluid, which is why Marin launched a brand new advisory dedicated to helping investors get out in front of the latest chess moves in this struggle and make a bundle in the process.
It’s called The Colder War Letter. And it’s the perfect complement to Marin’s New York Times best-seller, The Colder War, and the best way to navigate and profit in the fast changing new reality of the energy sector. When you sign up now, you’ll also receive a FREE copy of Marin’s book. Click here for all the details.




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Friday, December 5, 2014

Russia and China’s Natural Gas Deals are a Death Knell for Canada’s LNG Ambitions

By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist

In recent years, a number of Asian companies have been betting that Canada will be able to export cheap liquefied natural gas (LNG) from its west coast. These big international players include PetroChina, Mitsubishi, CNOOC, and, until December 3, Malaysian state owned Petronas.

However, that initial interest is decidedly on the wane. In fact, while the British Columbia LNG Alliance is still hopeful that some of the 18 LNG projects that have been proposed will be realized, it’s now looking less and less likely that any of these Canadian LNG consortia will ever make a final investment decision to forge ahead.

That’s thanks to the Colder War—as I explain in detail in my new book of the same name—and the impetus it’s given Vladimir Putin to open up new markets in Asia.

The huge gas export deals that Russia struck with China in May and October—with an agreed-upon price ranging from $8-10 per million British thermal units (mmBtu)—has likely capped investors’ expectations of Chinese natural gas prices at around $10-11 per mmBtu, a level which would make shipping natural gas from Canada to Asia uneconomic.

At these prices, not even British Columbia’s new Liquefied Natural Gas Income Tax Act—which has halved the post payout tax rate to 3.5% and proposes reducing corporate income tax to 8% from 11%—can make Canadian natural gas globally competitive.

These tax credits are too little, too late, because Canada is years behind Australia, Russia, and Qatar’s gas projects. This means there’s just too much uncertainty about future profit margins to commit the vast amount of capital that will be needed to make Canadian LNG a reality.

Sure, there are huge proven reserves of natural gas in Canada. It’s just been determined that Canada’s Northwest Territories hold 16.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, 40% more than previous estimates.

But the fact is that Canada will remain a high-cost producer of LNG, and its shipping costs to Asia will be much higher than Russia’s, Australia’s, and Qatar’s. So unless potential buyers in Asia are confident that Henry Hub gas prices will stay below $5, they’re unlikely to commit to long-term contracts for Canadian LNG—or US gas for that matter—because compression and shipping add at least another $6 to the price.

Shell has estimated that its proposed terminal, owned by LNG Canada, will cost $40 billion, not including a $4 billion pipeline. As LNG Canada—whose shareholders include PetroChina, Korea Gas Corp., and Mitsubishi Corp.—admits, it’s not yet sure that the project will be economically viable. Even if it turns out to be, LNG Canada says it won’t make a final investment decision until 2016, after which the facility would take five years to build.

But investors shouldn’t hold their breath. It seems like Korea Gas Corp. has already made up its mind. It’s planning to sell a third of its 15% stake in LNG Canada by the end of this year.

And who can blame it? The industry still doesn’t have clarity on environmental issues, federal taxes, municipal taxes, transfer pricing agreements, or what the First Nations’ cut will be. And these are all major hurdles.

Pipeline permits are also still incomplete. The federal government still hasn’t decided if LNG is a manufacturing or distribution business, which matters because if it rules that it’s a distribution business, permitting is going to be delayed.

And to muddy the picture even further, opposition to gas pipelines and fracking is on the rise in British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada. While fossil fuel projects are under fire from climate alarmists the world over, Canadian environmentalists are also angry that increased tanker traffic through its pristine coastal waters could lead to oil spills.

Canada is now under the sway of radical environmental groups and think tanks like the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, which take as a given that Canada should shut down its tar sands industry altogether. For these people, there’s no responsible way to build new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Elsewhere, investors might expect money and jobs to do the talking, but Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, which has called for greenhouse gas limits on oil sands, is now leading the conservatives in the polls. (Just out of curiosity, does Trudeau plan on putting a cap on the carbon monoxide concentration from his marijuana agenda? But I digress.) If a liberal government is elected next year, it might adopt a national climate policy that would cripple gas companies and oil companies alike.

Some energy majors are already shying away from Canadian LNG. BG Group announced in October that it’s delaying a decision on its Prince Rupert LNG project until after 2016. And Apache Corp., partnered with Chevron on a Canadian LNG project, is seeking a buyer for its stake.

Not everyone is throwing in the towel. Yet. ExxonMobil—which is in the early planning phase for the West Coast Canada LNG project at Tuck Inlet, located near Prince Rupert in northwestern British Columbia—has just become a member of the British Columbia LNG alliance.

But Petronas was a key player. It was thought that the company would be moving ahead after British Columbia’s Ministry of Environment approved its LNG terminal, along with two pipelines that would feed it.

Instead, Petronas pulled the plug. We can’t know how many things factored into that decision nor whether it’s absolutely final. All the company would say is that projected costs of C$36 billion would need to be reduced before a restart could be considered. (That $36B figure includes Petronas’s 2012 acquisition of Calgary based gas producer Progress Energy Resources Corp., as well as the C$10 billion proposed terminal, a pipeline, and the cost of drilling wells in BC’s northeast.)

This latest blow leaves Canadian LNG development very much in doubt. In fact, most observers believe that Petronas’s move to the sidelines probably sounds the death knell for the industry, at least for the foreseeable future.
For more on how the Colder War is forever changing the energy sector and global finance itself, click here to get your copy of Marin’s New York Times bestselling book. Inside, you’ll discover more on LNG and how this geopolitical chess game between Russia and the West for control of the world’s energy trade will shape this decade and the century to come.



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Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Breakfast with a Lord of War

By David Galland, Partner, Casey Research

For reasons that will become apparent as you read the following article, I was quite reluctant to write it.
Yet, in the end, I decided to do so for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it ties into Marin Katusa’s best selling new book, The Colder War, which I read cover to cover over two days and can recommend warmly and without hesitation. I know that Casey Research has been promoting the book aggressively (in my view, a bit too aggressively), but I exaggerate not at all when I tell you that the book sucked me in from the very beginning and kept me reading right to the end.

The second reason, however, is that I have a story to tell. It’s a true story and one, I believe, which needs to be told. It has to do with a breakfast I had four years ago with a Lord of War.

With that introduction, we begin.

Breakfast with a Lord of War

In late 2010, I was invited to a private breakfast meeting with an individual near the apex of the U.S. military’s strategic planning pyramid. Specifically, the individual we were to breakfast with sits at the side of the long serving head of the department in the Pentagon responsible for identifying and assessing potential threats to national security and devising long term strategies to counter those threats.

The ground rules for the discussion—that certain topics were off limits—were set right up front. Yet, as we warmed up to each other over the course of our meal, the conversation went into directions even I couldn’t have anticipated.

In an earlier mention of this meeting in a Casey Daily Dispatch, I steered clear of much of what was discussed because frankly, it made me nervous. With the passage of time and upon reflection that it was up to my breakfast companion, who spends long days cloaked in secrecy, to know what is allowed in daylight, I have decided to share the entire story.

During our discussion, there were four key revelations, each a bit scarier than the last.

Four Key Revelations


Once we had bonded a bit, the military officer, dressed in his civvies for the meeting, began opening up. As I didn’t record the discussion, the dialogue that follows can only be an approximation. That said, I assure you it is accurate in all the important aspects.

“Which country or countries most concern you?” I asked, not sure if I would get an answer. “China?”
“Well, I’m not going to say too much, but it’s not China. Our analysis tells us the country is too fractured to be a threat. Too many different ethnic and religious groups and competing political factions. So no, it’s not China. Russia, on the other hand…” He left it at that, though Russia would come up again in our conversation on several occasions.

As breakfast was served, the conversation meandered here and there before he volunteered, “There are a couple of things I can discuss that we are working on, one of which won’t surprise you, and one that will.”
“The first is precision guided weaponry.” Simply, the airplane and drone launched weaponry that is deployed so frequently today, four years after our breakfast conversation, that it now barely rates a back-page mention.

“The second,” he continued,” will surprise you. It’s nuclear armaments.”

“Really? I can’t imagine the US would ever consider using nuclear weapons again. Seriously?”

“Yes, there could be instances when using nukes might be advisable,” he answered. “For example, no one would argue that dropping atomic bombs on Japan had been a bad thing.” (I, for one, could have made that argument, but in the interest of harmony didn’t.)

“Even so, I can’t imagine a scenario that would warrant using nukes,” I persisted. “Are there any other countries doing the same sort of research?”

“Absolutely. For example, the Russians would love to drop a bomb that wiped out the people of Chechnya but left the infrastructure intact.”

“So, neutron bombs?”

“Yeah, stuff like that,” he added before turning back to his coffee.

“Okay, well,” I continued, “you at least have to admit that, unlike last century when hundreds of millions of people died directly or indirectly in world wars, pogroms, and so forth—most related to governments—the human race has evolved to the point where death on that scale is a thing of the past. Right?”

I kid you not in the slightest, but at this question the handsome, friendly countenance I had been sitting across from morphed as if literally a mask had been lifted away and was replaced with the emotionless face of a Lord of War.

“That would be a very poor assumption,” he answered coldly before the mask went back on.

I recall a number of thoughts and emotions coursing through my brain at his reply, most prevalently relief that I had moved with my family to La Estancia de Cafayate in a remote corner of Argentina. We didn’t move there to escape war, but after this conversation, I added that to my short list of reasons why the move had been a good idea.

Recapping the conversation later, my associate and I concurred that Russia was in the crosshairs and that if push came to shove, the US was fully prepared to use the new nuclear weapons being worked on.

Four Years Later


As I write, four years after that conversation, it’s worth revisiting just what has transpired.

First, as mentioned, the use of precision-guided weaponry has now firmly entered the vernacular of US warmaking. Point of fact: there are now more pilots being trained to fly drones than airplanes. And the technology has reached the point where there is literally no corner on earth where a strategic hit couldn’t be made. Even more concerning, the political and legal framework that previously caused hesitation before striking against citizens of other countries (outside of an active war zone) has largely been erased. Today Pakistan, tomorrow the world?

Second, instead of winding back the US nuclear program—a firm plank in President Obama’s campaign platform—the Nobel Prize winner and his team have indeed been ramping up and modernizing the US nuclear arsenal. The following is an excerpt from a September 21, 2014 article in the New York Times, titled “U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms”…,,

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A sprawling new plant here in a former soybean field makes the mechanical guts of America’s atomic warheads. Bigger than the Pentagon, full of futuristic gear and thousands of workers, the plant, dedicated last month, modernizes the aging weapons that the United States can fire from missiles, bombers and submarines.

It is part of a nationwide wave of atomic revitalization that includes plans for a new generation of weapon carriers. A recent federal study put the collective price tag, over the next three decades, at up to a trillion dollars.

Third, the events unfolding in Ukraine, where the US was caught red handed engineering the regime change that destabilized the country and forced Russia to act, show a clear intent to set the world against Putin’s Russia and in time, neutralize Russia as a strategic threat.

So the only revelation from my breakfast four years ago remaining to be confirmed is for the next big war to envelope the world. Per the events in Ukraine, the foundations of that war have likely already been set. Before I get to that, however, a quick but relevant detour is required.

The Nature of Complex Systems


Last week the semiannual Owner’s & Guests event took place here at La Estancia de Cafayate. As part of the weeklong gathering, a conference was held featuring residents speaking on topics they are experts on.
Among those residents is a nuclear-energy engineer who spoke on the fragility of the US power grid, the most complex energy transmission system in the world.
He went into great detail about the “defense-in-depth” controls, backups, and overrides built into the system to ensure the grid won’t—in fact, can’t—fail. Yet periodically, it still does.

How? First and foremost, the engineer explained, there is a fundamental principle that holds that the more complex a system is, the more likely it is to fail. As a consequence, despite thousands of very bright people armed with massive budgets and a clear mandate to keep the transmission lines humming, there is essentially nothing they can do to actually prevent some unforeseen, and unforeseeable, event from taking the whole complex system down.

Case in point: in 2003 one of the largest power outages in history occurred. 508 large power generators were knocked out, leaving 55 million people in North America without power for upward of 24 hours. The cause? A software defect in an alarm system in an Ohio control center.

I mention this in the context of this article because, as complex as the U.S. power grid is, it is nothing compared to the complexities involved with long-term military strategic planning. This complexity is the result of many factors, including:
  • The challenges of identifying potential adversaries and threats many years, even a decade or more, into the future.
  • New and evolving technologies. It is a truism that the military is always fighting the last war: by the time the military machine spins up to build and deploy a new technology, it is often already obsolete.
  • The entrenched bureaucracies, headed by mere mortals with strong biases. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa.
  • The unsteady influences of a political class always quick to react with policy shifts to the latest dire news or purported outrage.
  • The media, a constant source of hysteria making headlines masquerading as news. And let’s not overlook the media’s role as active agents of the entrenched bureaucratic interests. In one now largely forgotten case, Operation Mockingbird, the CIA actually infiltrated the major US media outlets, specifically to influence public opinion.

    All you need to do to understand the bureaucratic agenda is to take a casual glance at the “news” about current events such as those transpiring in the Ukraine.
  • And, most important, human nature. We humans are the ultimate complex system, prone to a literally infinite number of strong opinions, exaggerated fears, mental illnesses, passions, vices, self-destructive tendencies, and stupidity on a biblical scale.
The point is that the average person assumes the powers-that-be actually know what they are doing and would never lead us into disaster, but quoting my breakfast companion, that would be a very poor assumption.

Simply, while mass war on the level of the wholesale slaughter commonplace in the last century is unimaginable to most in the modern context, it is never more than the equivalent of a faulty alarm system away from occurring.

Those history buffs among you will confirm that up until about a week before World War I began, virtually no one in the public, the press, the political class, or even the military had any idea the shooting was about to start. And 99.9% of the people then living had no idea the war was about to begin until after the first shot was fired.

Back to the Present


It is a rare moment in one’s life when the bureaucratic curtain falls away long enough to reveal something approximating The Truth. In my opinion, that’s what I observed over breakfast four years ago. That, right or wrong, the proactive military strategy of the US had been turned toward Russia.
Knowing that and no more, one can only guess what actual measures have been planned and set into motion to defang the Russian bear.

Based on the evidence, however, the events in Ukraine appear to be a bold chess move on the bigger board… and to be fair, a pretty damn effective move at that. The problem for the US and its allies is that on the other side of the table is one Vladimir Putin, self made man, black belt judo master, and former KGB spy master.

And that’s just scratching the surface of this complicated and determined individual. One thing is for sure: if you had to pick your adversary in a global geopolitical contest, you’d probably pick him dead last.
Which brings me to a quick mention of The Colder War, Marin’s book, which was released yesterday.
I mentioned earlier that the book had sucked me in and kept me in pretty much straight through until I finished. One reason is that while you can tell Marin has a great deal of respect for Putin’s capabilities and strategic thinking, he doesn’t shy away from revealing the judo master’s dark side. As you will read (and find quoting to your friends, as I have), it is a very dark side.

But the story is so much bigger than that, and Marin does a very good job of explaining the increasingly hostile competition between the US and Russia and the seismic economic consequences that will affect us all as the “Colder War” heats up.

Before signing off for now, I want to add that it is not Marin’s contention that the Colder War will devolve into an actual shooting war. In my view, however, due to the complexities discussed above, you can’t dismiss a military confrontation, even one involving nukes. Every complex system ultimately fails, and the more the US pushes in on Putin’s Russia, the more likely such a failure is to occur.

I recommend Marin’s book, The Colder War; here is the link.

We’ll leave the lights on down here in Cafayate.

Casey Research partner David Galland lives in La Estancia de Cafayate (www.LaEst.com).
The article Breakfast with a Lord of War was originally published at casey research.com.


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Friday, November 14, 2014

The Looming Uranium Crisis: Strategic Implications for the Colder War

By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist

In the wake of one singular event—the disaster at Fukushima in March 2011, the effects of which are still being felt today across the planet—nuclear power has seemingly fallen into utter disrepute, at least in the popular mind. But this is largely an illusion.

It’s true that Japan took all 52 of its nuclear plants offline after Fukushima and sold much of its uranium inventory. South Korea followed with shutdowns of its own. Germany permanently mothballed eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022. Austria and Spain have enacted laws to cease construction on new nuclear power stations. Switzerland is phasing them out. A majority of the other European nations is also opposed.

All of this has resulted in a large decrease in demand for uranium, a glut of the fuel on the market, and a per-pound price that fell as low as $28.50 in mid-2014, down nearly 80% from its peak of $135 in 2007.

Currently, it’s languishing around $39 per pound, still below the cost of production for many miners—about 80% need prices above $40 to make any return on investment, and even at that level, no new mines will be built. It’s easy to hear a death knell for nuclear energy on the breeze. And that may well be the case for Europe (except for France). But Europe is hardly the world.

South Korean plants are back online. Japan is planning to restart its reactor fleet (despite a great deal of citizen protest) beginning in 2015. Russia is heavily invested, with nine plants under construction and 14 others planned. China, faced with unhealthy levels of air pollution in many of its cities due to coal power generation, is going all in on nuclear. 26 reactors are under construction, and the government has declared a goal of quadrupling present capacity—either in operation or being built—by 2020. India has 20 plants and is adding seven more. And in the rest of the developing nations, nuclear power is exploding.

Worldwide, no fewer than 71 new plants are under construction in more than a dozen countries, with another 163 planned and 329 proposed. Many countries without nuclear power soon will build their first reactors, including Turkey, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and several of the Gulf emirates.

For years, China, with its stunning GDP growth rate, has been seen as the leading destination for natural resources. “Produce what China needs” has been every supplier’s ongoing mantra. Yet, as many Americans fail to realize, it’s their own home that is the biggest uranium consumer. Despite having not opened a new plant since 1977 (though six additional units are scheduled to open by 2020), the US is the world’s #1 producer of nuclear energy, accounting for more than 30% of the global total. France is a distant second at 12%; China, playing catchup, sits at only 6% right now. The 65 American nuclear plants, housing just over 100 reactors, generate 20% of total US electricity.

Yet uranium is the one fuel for which there is very little domestic supply.


As you can see, the US has to import over 90% of what it uses. That’s a huge shortfall—and it’s persisted for many years. How has the country made it up?

In a word: Russia.

America’s former Cold War archenemy—and antagonist in the unfolding sequel, the Colder War—has in fact been keeping the US nuclear fires burning, through conduits like the Megatons to Megawatts Program.
When the USSR collapsed, Russia inherited over two million pounds of HEU—highly enriched uranium (the 90% U-235 needed to fashion a bomb)—and vast, underused facilities for handling and fabricating the material. Starting in 1993, it cut a deal with the US dubbed the Megatons to Megawatts Program. Over the 20 years that followed, 1.1 million pounds of Russian weapon-grade uranium, equivalent to about 20,000 nuclear warheads, was downblended to U3O8 and sold to the United States as fuel.

That source was very important in helping to fill the US supply gap for those two decades. It represented, on average, over 20 million pounds of annual uranium supply, or half of what the country consumed. I’m sure it would have come as a shock to most Americans if they’d realized that one in ten of their homes was being powered by former Soviet missiles.

Megatons to Megawatts expired in November 2013, but US dependence on Russia did not. Russia is easily able to maintain its sizeable export presence, due largely to present economics.

Because of all the uranium swamping the market since Fukushima, separative work units (SWUs) are trading at very low prices. SWUs measure the amount of separation work necessary to enrich uranium—in other words, how much work must be done to raise the product’s concentration of U-235 to the 3-5% that most reactors require for fission?

The tails that are left behind when U-235 is separated out to make warheads still contain some amount of the isotope, usually around 0.2% to 0.3%. When the price of SWUs gets low enough, it’s a condition known as “underfeeding,” meaning it’s worth the effort to go back and extract leftover U-235 from the tails. That’s done through the process of re-enrichment, the reverse of the procedure that creates HEU. It’s kind of like getting fresh gold from old ore that had already yielded the easy stuff.

After the Soviet Union broke up, Russia had a lot of enrichment capacity it no longer needed for its military program. And major uranium companies like Areva and Urenco had sent trainloads of enrichment tails to Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Great stockpiles were built up, and they’ll be put to use until the pendulum swings the other way and we get “overfeeding,” where the price of SWUs makes re-enrichment too costly to continue. We will go from under- to overfeeding in the near future. Rising demand from the Japanese restart and new plants coming online ensures that it will happen, and probably within the next 24 months. The market is already anticipating it, with the per-pound price of uranium up more than 35% in the past few months. It’s going to double to $75… at the least.

Meanwhile, though, the ability to profitably produce fuel-grade uranium from tails confers on Russia a number of significant advantages. Among them:
  • It permits the country to exploit a previously worthless resource.
  • The more tails it can use as feedstock, the fewer it has to dispose of.
  • Most important, it means Russia can conserve much of its mineral supply for a future when higher prices will dramatically increase its leverage. That includes in-ground ore, of which it has a lot, and probably uranium picked up on the cheap when Japan did its massive post-Fukushima fuel dump (though it has never been officially confirmed who the buyers of Japan’s uranium supply were, I have some very connected sources who tell me it was the Russians who snapped most of it up).
This is one part of Vladimir Putin’s plan to dominate the world energy markets. In my book, The Colder War, I call it the “Putinization” of uranium.  And he has nicely positioned his country to pull it off.
In January 2014, Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russian energy giant Rosatom, was bursting with enthusiasm when he predicted that Russia’s recent annual production rate of 6.5 million pounds of uranium would triple in 2015.

Rosatom puts Russia’s uranium reserves in the ground at 1.2 billion pounds of yellowcake, which would be the second largest in the world; the company is quite capable of mining 40 million pounds per year by 2020. Add in Russia’s foreign projects in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia, and annual production in 2020 jumps to more than 63 million pounds. Include all of Russia’s sphere of influence, and annual production easily could amount to more than 140 million pounds six years from now.

No other country has a uranium mining plan nearly this ambitious. By 2020, Russia itself could be producing a third of all yellowcake. With just its close ally Kazakhstan chipping in another 25%, Russia would have effective control of more than half of world supply.

That’s clout. But it doesn’t end there.
Globally, there are a fair number of facilities for fabricating fuel rods. Not so with conversion plants (uranium oxide to uranium hexafluoride) or enrichment plants (isolating the U-235). And the world leader in conversion and enrichment is…. yes, Russia.

All told, Russia has one-third of all uranium conversion capacity. The United States is in second place with 18%. And Russia’s share is projected to rise, assuming Rosatom proceeds with a new conversion plant planned for 2015. Similarly, Russia owns 40% of the world’s enrichment capacity. Planned expansion of the existing facilities will push that share close to 50%.

That’s Putin’s goal—to corner the conversion and enrichment markets—because it wraps Russian hands around the chokepoints in the whole yellowcake to electricity progression. It’s a smart strategy, too—control those, and you control the availability and pricing of a product for which demand will be rising for decades.

And that control will tighten, because the barrier to entry for either function is very high. Building new conversion or enrichment facilities is too costly for most countries, and it is especially difficult in the West due to the influence of environmentalists.

It’s worth reiterating. Russia is on track to control 58% of global yellowcake production; currently responsible for a third of yellowcake-to-uranium-hexafluoride conversion; and soon to hold half of all global enrichment capacity.

There’s a word for this: stranglehold.

That is what Putin and Russia will have on the supply chain for nuclear fuel in a world where new atomic power plants are being constructed at warp speed, which will force the price of uranium ever higher. It will give Russia enormous global influence and great leverage in all future dealings with the US America can mine some uranium domestically and buy some more from its Canadian ally. But even taken together, those sources put only a small patch on the supply gap.

The US government would do well to make peace with Putin, if it can, because the domestic nuclear power industry—and by extension the economic health of the country—is at the mercy of Russia, indefinitely.
To get the full story, click here to order your copy of my new book, The Colder War.

Inside, you’ll discover more on how Putin has cornered the market on Uranium, and how he’s making a big play to control the world's oil and natural gas markets. You’ll also glimpse his endgame and how it will personally affect millions of investors and the lives of nearly every American.



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