Distressed Investing

By Jared Dillian 

When most people think of distressed investing, they think of buying CCC-rated bonds at 20 or 30 cents on the dollar, then maybe sitting in bankruptcy court to divvy up the capital structure, making healthy risk-adjusted returns in the end. You just need to hire a few lawyers.

Distressed investors are a different breed of cat. It’s one of those countercyclical businesses, like repo men, who do well when everyone else is getting hammered.

I remember distressed guys killing it in 2002. Most people remember the dot-com bust, but there was a nasty credit crunch that went along with it. Nasty. High yield/distressed investments had some amazing years in 2003 and 2004. Convertible bonds in particular.

Funny thing about distressed investors is that they like to stay within their comfort zone. In my experience, they’re not keen on commodities. Like coal mining, which this week saw one bankruptcy filing and another one in the works. Distressed guys hate commodities because they are just timing the earnings cycle – which is the same as market timing.  Distressed guys want less volatile earnings so their projections aren’t totally dependent on commodity prices rising.

Coal is distressed, all right. But you don’t see the distressed guys getting involved. Even they are too scared!

Here’s a somewhat controversial statement: I think most commodities are distressed. Coal is definitely distressed. So is iron ore. Copper, too. And yes, even gold. Corn and beans have had a nice little run, but metals and energy in particular have been a complete horrorshow.

So I think it’s time to start looking at commodities as a distressed asset class. The assumption is that fair value of these commodities/producers is well above current market prices, and current market prices are wrong because of, well, a lot of things. In particular, a self-reinforcing process where selling begets more selling.

If you’re a distressed investor and you’re buying something at a deep discount, if you have a long enough time horizon, you’ll be vindicated eventually. Sometimes, it takes a long time. Sometimes, not very long at all. It’s pretty great when it works.

I have never had much aptitude for it. But I am trying it now.

Gold: A Special Case

Gold is a little different.

How do you value gold? It has no cash flows. An industrial commodity like copper is pretty easy to value. With gold, you’re trying to gauge investment demand (at the retail or sovereign level), which is hard, against mining production, which is a little easier.

But what an ounce of gold is worth is entirely subjective. More subjective than copper or cocoa or coffee. For example, if everyone started using bitcoin, there would be little to no demand for gold. (For the record, I think cryptocurrencies indeed have had an impact on gold demand.)

Basically, people want gold when they think their government no longer cares about the purchasing power of their currency. In our case, that was when the Fed was conducting quantitative easing, known colloquially as printing money.

But that’s not really what people were nervous about. Think about it. The Fed was printing money for monetary policy reasons. They were trying to effect monetary policy with interest rates at the zero bound. That’s different from printing money to buy government bonds because nobody else wants to. That’s called debt monetization.

When budget deficits get sufficiently large, people worry about things like failed bond auctions, that the Fed will have to step in and be the buyer of last resort. This is the nightmare scenario described in Greenspan’s Gold and Economic Freedom essay.

We had $1.8 trillion deficits not that long ago. The bond auctions were a little scary. I thought debt monetization was a possibility.

The deficit is lower today, mostly because of higher taxes, more aggressive revenue collection, and economic growth. As you can see, the price of gold has corresponded almost perfectly with the budget deficit.

With a small deficit today, nobody cares about gold.

Is the deficit going higher or lower in the future? Higher. Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner. One of the reasons I’m happy owning gold as a part of my portfolio.

Paper vs. Things

Asset allocation gets a lot easier when you figure out that the financial markets are a tug-of-war between paper and things. Sometimes, like now, financial assets (stocks and bonds) outperform. Stocks are overpriced, and bonds are way overpriced. Other times, like 10 years ago, commodities outperformed.

It has to do with the degree of confidence people have in… other people. A bond is a promise to repay. A stock is a promise to pay dividends, or that there will be something left over at the end. A dollar is a promise that it’s worth something, namely, a divisible part of the sum total of the productive abilities of all the people in the country.

These are pieces of paper. Paper promises. When confidence in promises is high, nobody needs gold, coal, or copper. When confidence in promises is low, time to build that underground bunker in the backyard. Confidence in promises is currently at all-time highs. Without making a positive statement either way, I’d say that only in the year 2000 were commodities more undervalued than they are right now.

Sidebar: it is tempting to treat commodities as an asset class, but you should try not to. They are idiosyncratic, and for most commodities, the cost of carry is high enough that it’s impractical to hold them for long periods of time.

Commodity related equities are a different story.

Disclaimer

I’m kind of biased on this, and I always think commodities are undervalued because I’m a deeply suspicious person and I don’t believe promises. I’ve owned gold and silver for years (plus GLD and SLV, and GDX and SIL), and if prices get low enough, I will add to those positions.

Keep in mind that I worked for the government under the Clinton administration. Clinton’s mantra to government employees was, “Do more with less.” The man did a lot to restrain the growth of government—and he was a Democrat!

People resented him for it. They wanted their fancy toys and their boondoggles. Public servants have been much happier under Bush and Obama. Not coincidentally, gold bottomed in 2000, at the end of Clinton’s presidency, and has basically been going up since.

So here is the secret sauce: You want to know when commodities are going up?
Watch the deficit. If someone dreams up free college for everyone, buy commodities with veins popping out of your neck.

Jared Dillian

If you enjoyed Jared's article, you can sign up for The 10th Man, a free weekly letter, at mauldineconomics.com. Follow Jared on Twitter @dailydirtnap

The article The 10th Man: Distressed Investing was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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The Biggest Trade Ever....No Exaggeration

By Jared Dillian

I won’t keep you in suspense. The biggest trade ever is in demographics. In particular, our rapidly increasing life expectancy.

Quick story. My Coast Guard friends are retiring now. You get to retire after 20 years of service, but some of them have been taking advantage of early retirement and are leaving the service as young as age 40.
Oh my God, what a deal: At age 40, you can bring home about $50K a year and then start a whole new career on the side!

In the old days, you could offer that deal because military folks would die at 47. Now they will live to 100.
Paying out benefits for 60 years to retired military personnel doesn’t sound like a great deal for the taxpayer.
Of course, the military pensions are just the tip of the iceberg. To receive Social Security, you can retire at age 62 (or 67 for full benefits). Again, that’s fine when most people die before 62. The blended life expectancy (for both men and women) is almost 79 years and trending higher.

Or my favorite chart on life expectancy ever, also a rebuttal to those who don’t like capitalism.

If you pay attention to Silicon Valley stuff, you know that Google and Ray Kurzweil and some other folks are working on projects that will allow us to live to 150 or even beyond. That would involve doing a couple of things, first

1. Curing cancer
2. Curing heart disease
3. Curing Alzheimer’s disease

You do these three things, it increases life expectancy by another 10 years or more. And we are actually doing those things!

Once you have a cure for all known diseases (attainable in my lifetime), then you have a different problem. Cells get old and die. The Silicon Valley folks are working on that too. Funny, if you don’t smoke, eat right, and get a little exercise, you will pretty much live to 80, no matter what. What happens beyond that is up to genetics, which we will solve one day. So what will the world look like if people live to 100, 150, or more?

It Looks Like Greece

Greece’s retirement age (to receive benefits) used to be 55 years. Again: retiring at 55, what a deal! I would only have 14 more years to go. People are pretty healthy at 55 (though maybe not the Greeks—they have the highest rate of tobacco use in the developed world).

So if people live way longer than the retirement age, the Social Security system goes kablooey. It just does. And yet people resist all attempts to reform it. We know Social Security is in trouble. George W. Bush tried to tackle it. For all his faults, it was the right thing to do. But he got laughed at.

The first thing we will do is to means-test the benefits, which will just make it more progressive but won’t solve the actual problem. You need to push back the retirement age, like, to 80.

But wait a minute. There aren’t even enough jobs for people to work until age 80.

I know…..

The World Was a Lot Simpler When People Just Died When They Were Supposed To

We’re going to look back at the 1940s-2000s as an exceptional period in economic history—with high, virtually straight line, uninterrupted economic growth. We had debt problems before, but biology has made them intractable.

In fact, the whole profession of economics is based on the very idea that there is population growth and inflation. What happens if birth rates decline? They are. Population growth rates will peak very soon. (By the way, the old Malthusian idea of overpopulation is being discredited.) What does the profession of economics look like with declining populations, people living longer, a dearth of unskilled jobs?

Is it nonstop deflation?

Many economists predict years of global deflation based on this premise. They say that you should buy bonds at any price. It’s a compelling argument. I think we’re going to learn a lot of really interesting things about money velocity in the coming years.

The Trade

Like tech in the ‘90s and energy in the 2000s, health care has been and will be the trade of the 2010s. You have the happy accident of huge technological advances and a government that seems willing, for the time being, to pay for it all. You hear some squawking about the cost of some treatments, but seriously, if you can cure cancer for $250,000, who is going to say no? Especially when that person’s chemotherapy, radiation, and hospital bills could easily exceed $2,000,000.

Lots of folks thought that Obamacare would tomahawk the health care sector. In classic market fashion, it has done the exact opposite. The insurers in particular have been the biggest beneficiary. You probably saw the recent Aetna/Humana merger.

People have tried for years to short biotech. Hasn’t been fun for them.

People have funny attitudes about death, you know. You ask someone if they’d like to live to 100, 120. “Noooooo,” they say. “I wouldn’t want to just sit in a chair.” Me, personally, I’d be okay with sitting in a chair. But the point of these treatments is that you can be active into your 100s. What then?

“I don’t know…” they say.

Are you kidding me? Forever young, my man. I’m 41, and I look a lot younger than my parents at the same age (sorry, Mom and Dad). I’m still DJing parties, for crying out loud.
Still don’t get the point of Snapchat, though.

Jared Dillian

The article The 10th Man: The Biggest Trade Ever (No Exaggeration) was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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It’s Not Over Until the Fat Lady Goes on a P/E Diet

By John Mauldin

For the vast majority of investors, portfolio returns are generated by the equity markets or at a minimum heavily influenced by the equity markets. We have enjoyed an almost six year bull market run in the stock market, which has helped heal portfolios after the devastating market crash of the Great Recession. So much so that many prominent market analysts have proclaimed the beginning of a new secular bull market.

If we have indeed entered such a new phase, we need to recognize it for what it is, because – as I’ve written for 17 years – the style of investing that is appropriate for a secular bull market is almost the exact opposite of what is appropriate for a secular bear market. I think that most analysts would agree with that last statement.

The disagreements would revolve around whether we are in a secular bull or a secular bear market.
Thus the answer to the seemingly arcane question of whether we are in a secular bull or bear market makes a great difference in the proper positioning of your portfolios. And getting it wrong can have serious consequences.

Towards the latter part of the ’90s and especially in the early part of last decade, I was rather aggressively asserting in this letter that we should look at whether we are in a secular bull or bear market – not in terms of price but in terms of valuation. Early in that period, Ed Easterling of Crestmont Research, who was then based in Dallas, reached out to me; and we began to collaborate on a series of articles on the topic of secular bull and bear markets, a series that we want to continue today. Longtime readers know that I’m a big fan of Ed’s website at www.CrestmontResearch.com. It’s a treasure trove of fabulous charts and data on cycles and market returns. Ed has been working on a video series (we will offer a few free links below) to explain market cycles.

I want to provide a little current context before we jump into the argument about whether we are in a secular bull or bear market. For some time now, I’ve been saying that the US economy should bump along in the Muddle Through range of about 2% GDP growth. The risk to that forecast is not from something internal to the United States but from what economists call an exogenous shock, that is, one from outside the US. In particular I have said that a crisis in both Europe and China at the same time would be very negative for both US and global growth.

We now see potential crises in both regions. It would be convenient if they could arrange not to have them at the same time. But those who are paying attention to global markets are certainly experiencing a bit of market heartburn as they watch both China and Europe manifest the volatility that they have over the last few weeks. I will become far less sanguine about the US economy if full blown crises develop in those two regions.

There are observers who think the Greek crisis will be contained, and then there are equally astute but pessimistic observers, like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who wrote this week about the potential for a full-scale European meltdown. His recent column entitled “Europe Is Blowing Itself Apart over Greece – and Nobody Seems Able to Stop It” is reflective of those who think the European monetary experiment is problematic. It now appears that Tsipras has essentially caved on a number of issues in order to get a deal. The deal he has proposed reads almost exactly like the one the Greek referendum overwhelmingly rejected.

My own personal view is that, if this deal is agreed upon, it simply postpones the crisis for a period of time, as Greece simply has no way to grow itself out of its debt dilemma. And it is not altogether clear that Tsipras can hold his coalition together, given the referendum. He might actually need the opposition to get this deal passed, which becomes problematical for him, as it might force him to call an election. But the banks would open, and Greek life would go on until the Greeks run out of money again in the sadly not too distant future, as there is no way on God’s green earth they can meet the growth requirements that this deal demands.

The monetary union is an absurd creation based on political hopes, not economic reality. Politics can keep it together for longer than it should otherwise exist, but unless the entire southern periphery of Europe turns German in character, the peripheral nations are going to suffer under a monetary policy not designed for their economies. That ill-fitting economic straitjacket is going to mean slower growth and higher unemployment and fiscal instability. How long will they endure that? So far, a lot longer than I thought they could, 15 years ago.
China’s stock markets are having a meltdown, although there has been a rebound the last few days as the Chinese government has stepped in with the decision to destroy their markets in order to save them. My friend Art Cashin commented that it is amazing what you can do if you tell people that they will either buy stocks and make them go up or get executed. It certainly clarifies your trading position.

Further, the Chinese government basically created a rule which said that anybody who owns more than 5% of any particular equity issuance is not allowed to sell for the next six months. Neither are directors, supervisors, or senior management of any public company. The government has evidently pressured banks into creating a buying consortium. Historians who are familiar with the stock market crash of 1929 will see an interesting parallel, illustrated in the chart below (sent to me by my friend Murat Koprulu).



Hundreds of Chinese stocks have been taken off the market because they are essentially locked limit down or because company management simply halted trading in their shares, as there seemed to be no bottom to the pricing. That is an interesting way to run a supposedly liquid equity market exchange. And it creates an overhang, in that, under the current rules of the exchange, those hundreds of stocks have to go back on the market within 30 days. Theoretically, they were falling in value, which was why they were taken off the market to begin with. Will their valuations somehow magically change?

I wonder if all the major indexing firms are happy with their recent decisions to include China as a major portion of their indexes, given that liquidity in their markets is available only when markets are going up. Just curious, but how in the Wide, Wide World of Sports do you price or even maintain an index if you can’t sell and have daily liquidity and price discovery? If 7% of your index is based on a valuation that is not real, what price do you then base daily liquidity on? The last trade? So the seller gets out at a price that might be significantly higher than what the issue would actually trade at? Who sues whom? Or maybe the issue then trades higher, not lower, so that the seller should have gotten more? Index fund managers have to be pulling their hair out over this one.

Is this collapse of the Chinese market just the result of irrational exuberance, or is there something more fundamental going on? We will have to watch the situation carefully in the coming weeks.
By the way, China is far more critical to the global economy than Greece is. So much so that I recently asked a number of my friends to give me their best thoughts on China. These are experts in markets, demographics, economics, geopolitics, and so on, all with specialties in China. I’ve compiled those thoughts along with my own and those of my co-author, Worth Wray, in an e-book called A Great Leap Forward? You can get it on Amazon, iTunes, and Nook for a mere $8.99. It is an easy read that will give you an understanding of China’s challenges, from the best China experts we could find. Now, let’s talk about where the market is going in the US.

Are We There Yet? Secular Stock Market Cycle Status
By John Mauldin and Ed Easterling

We were both talking about secular bear markets back in 1999 and 2000. It’s been 15 years. Aren’t we there yet? Isn’t the stock market rising?

Of course you’re getting impatient; so are we. When will the stock market shift from secular bear to secular bull – or did it already? The implications are significant. Through much of the 2000s and into the 2010s, individual and institutional investors have weathered quite a storm of low returns and high volatility. Are we done being battered? From today, can you reasonably expect above average secular bull returns like we saw in the 1980s and ’90s … or do we face another decade or longer of below average secular bear returns? [For a 3-minute video explaining the term secular, click this link.]

In short, we use secular to describe a particular valuation environment. If you use valuations as a tool for thinking about cycles, the cycles become much more clear and easily understandable. Simply using price gives you no objective criterion for determining where you are in a long term cycle. Within our longer term secular designations there can be numerous and significant cyclical bull and bear markets, which are determined by price and not valuations.

For years, analysts and pundits throughout the industry have agreed (though it took a number of years for many of them to come around) that the new millennium brought with it secular bear conditions. In the past few years, however, opinions have once again diverged. Notable heavyweights, including Guggenheim Investments, Raymond James, and BofA Merrill Lynch, are on the record that the stock market has now entered a long-term secular bull market. (They are certainly not the only ones, but they do provide nifty charts that make it easy to analyze their thoughts.)

As shown in Figure 1, Guggenheim clearly marks the transition point between the end of the secular bear that got underway in January 2000 and the start of the new secular bull market. They place that transition point at December 2010, so that by their reckoning the secular bear lasted eleven years and produced near zero annualized returns. Then, according to Guggenheim, a new secular bull market was unleashed with New Year 2011.

Figure 1. Guggenheim Secular Bull Started January 2010

From today, can you reasonably expect above-average secular bull returns like we saw in the 1980s and ’90s … or another decade or more of below average secular bear returns?

Now, four years and a cumulative +54% later, the Guggenheim chart appears to lead investors to expect a future of above-average secular bull returns. They are somewhat subtle about it: note the implicit investment advice in the upper-left area of the chart: “Investment strategies that work in bull markets may not be effective in flat or bear markets.”

To continue reading this article from Thoughts from the Frontline – a free weekly publication by John Mauldin, renowned financial expert, best-selling author, and Chairman of Mauldin Economics – please click here.

The article Thoughts from the Frontline: It’s Not Over Till the Fat Lady Goes on a P/E Diet was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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Shoot the Dog and Sell the Farm

By John Mauldin 

“If this were a marriage, the lawyers would be circling.”

The Economist, My Big Fat Greek Divorce, 6/20/2015

Greece is again all the buzz in the media and on the commentary circuit. If you’re like me, you are suffering terminal Greece fatigue. You just want Greece and its creditors to “do something already” rather than continually coming to the end of every week with no resolution, amid finger pointing and dire warnings from all sides about the End of All Things Europe – maybe even the world.

That frustration is a common human emotion. Perhaps the best and funniest illustration (trust me, it is worth a few minutes’ digression) is the story about one of my first investment mentors, Gary North, who was working in his early days for Howard Ruff in Howard’s phone call center before Gary began writing his newsletters and books. (Yes, I know I am dating myself, as this was the late ’70s and early ’80s, just as I was getting introduced to the investment publishing business. And for the record, I knew almost everyone in the publishing business in the ’80s. It was a very small group, and we got together regularly.)

Howard set up a phone bank where his subscribers could call in and ask questions about their investments and personal lives. One little lady had the misfortune to get Dr. Gary North on the line. (Gary was the economist for Congressman Ron Paul and went on to write it some 61-odd books, 13,000 articles, and more – all typed with one finger. He is a human word processing machine.)

This sweet lady lived way out in the country and was getting older. She asked Gary if he thought it would be a wise idea for her to move into the city (I believe it was San Francisco) to live with her daughter. Not knowing the answer, Gary helped her work out the pros and cons over the phone, and she decided to move. A few days later she called back and said that she couldn’t bring her dog with her because of the rules at her daughter’s apartment. It turns out she couldn’t live without her dog, so Gary helped her come to the conclusion that she could stay in the country.

A few days later she called him back asking whether she should change her mind, and Gary once again help her to come to a conclusion. This went on for several weeks, back and forth, move or not move, dog or no dog. Finally she called one last time. Gary, in utter exasperation and not being infinitely tolerant of indecisive people, said, “Look lady, just shoot the dog and sell the farm.” (For the record, I hope she didn't really shoot the dog. I like dogs.)

That is where most of us are with the Europeans and Greeks. I have devoted a great deal of space in this letter to Greece over the past five years and have visited the country and corresponded with many analysts and citizens about the situation. And while I want to briefly outline the Greek situation again today, as there are some subtle nuances to consider, I think this juncture is a teaching moment about the larger picture in Europe. In fact, watching this process, I have come to change my mind about the timing of what I see is the endgame for Europe and European sovereign debt. I think exploring that issue will make for an interesting letter.

Economic crises go through cycles. Here’s a chart from the clever folks at Valuewalk.com (via my friend Jonathan Tepper on Twitter).



https://twitter.com/valuewalk/status/612948290267688960

The Greek situation is presently caught in those two bubbles on the bottom. European leaders held summit meetings this week to consider new breakthrough concessions offered by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Let the champagne flow. Except those concessions were rejected, and the Greeks rejected the counteroffer as of this afternoon. But it’s not quite midnight yet.

Unfortunately, the wheel of debt never stops turning. If this solution is like countless others floated in the last five years, we will soon learn that it has no substance or simply won’t work. We will then reenter the crisis phase.

Every cycle breaks eventually. If you forget everything that’s happened to this point and re-imagine the crisis as an economic standoff between Greece and Germany, you have to say Germany will win. It outweighs tiny Greece in every possible category. The real question is why Germany let the fight go on this long. We will deal with that in a minute.

Note that this observation isn’t about which country should win; it is about who will win. Greece has some legitimate grievances. Unfortunately, these grievances aren’t going to matter in the end.

Poster Children for European Profligacy

My friend David Zervos of Jefferies & Co. has no doubt who will win. He sent me this note on June 17.

The bell is tolling for Alexis [Tsipras]. European leaders from all sides have abandoned him as he burns through every last bridge that was once in place. His only meeting of importance during this crucial week of negotiation is with Putin – which clearly does not inspire any confidence for a near term resolution. 

It is actually amazing that we have not seen any of the left-leaning party leaders from the rest of Europe running to Tsipras’ side as he truculently engages his paymasters. Where are all these European anti-austarians? Of course they are hiding from the Germans, hoping not to receive the same fate as Alexis. So there he sits, alone and under his last Soviet held bridge, just like Hemingway's Robert Jordan. He is waiting to cause just a little more damage before his time is up. 

In the end, there is no question that the Germans have executed a near flawless plan to humiliate and vilify Greece. The Greeks now stand as poster children for European profligacy. And they are being paraded through every town square in the EU, in shackles, as the bell tolls near the gallows for their leader. And to be sure, making an example of Greece is a probably the greatest achievement for the fiscal disciplinarians of Europe. Maastricht never had any teeth. But this exercise is impressive. It shows that fiscal excess will be squashed in Europe. The Portuguese, Spanish, and Italians are surely taking notice. And in the days that lead up to a Greek default on 30 June, and then more importantly on 20 July, these disciplinarians will surely display their power for all to see.

Oddly enough, I actually think this has been the German plan all along. With no real way to ensure fiscal discipline through the treaty, they resorted to killing one of their own in order to keep the masses in line. It explains why Merkel took out Samaras when she knew a more hostile government would surely emerge in Greece. This was masterful political manipulation.

The 1992 Maastrict Treaty created the European Union and led a few years later to the euro currency. Which I said at the time would be a disaster. And it has been. Leaders have been wrestling with its fundamental flaw almost from the beginning. The EU has no way to enforce fiscal standards on its member nations. The member nations likewise have no way to devalue the currency in their own favor. This can’t go on forever – and it won’t.

Germany, by virtue of its sheer size and its favored position in the bureaucratic scheme of things, grew wealthy partly by exporting to the European periphery: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. (The rest of their 40–50% of exports of GDP come from exporting to the rest of Europe and the world. They have benefited massively from a currency that has been and continues to be weaker than it would be if it were just a German currency.)

The peripheral countries essentially exported all their cash to Germany (and to some extent northern Europe) in exchange for German goods. When they ran out of cash, not just because of their purchase of export goods but because of the uncompetitive nature of their bureaucratic and labor systems and the rather large unfunded government expenditures, they wanted yet more cash to continue to spend on government services.

Germany and the rest of Europe offered vendor financing. German and the rest of European banks loaned money to Greeks so the Greeks could buy German goods and perpetuate their government spending habits. In the early part of the last decade, tt was a deal that was seemingly made in heaven as Greece got to borrow money at German rates and Germany got to sell products in a currency driven by the valuation of the peripheral countries.

This arrangement left Greece and the other PIIGS deep in debt. Much like the American homeowners who lived beyond their means, Greece found itself overleveraged and undercapitalized. And here we are.
To continue reading this article from Thoughts from the Frontline – a free weekly publication by John Mauldin, renowned financial expert, best-selling author, and Chairman of Mauldin Economics – please click here.

The article Thoughts from the Frontline: Shoot the Dog and Sell the Farm was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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The People’s Republic of Debt

By John Mauldin

It wasn’t that many centuries ago that China was the absolute economic center of the world. That center gravitated to Europe and then towards North America and has now begun moving back to China. My colleague Jawad Mian provided this chart showing the evolution of Earth’s economic center of gravity from 2000 years ago to a few years and into the future:



Most investors are well aware of the enormous impact China has had on the modern world. Thirty-five years ago China’s was primarily an agrarian society, with much of the nation trapped in medieval technologies and living standards. Today 500 million people have moved from the country to the cities; and China’s urban infrastructure is, if not the best in the world, close to that standard.

The economic miracle that is China is unprecedented in human history. There has simply been nothing like it. Deng Xiaoping took control of the nation in the late ’70s and propelled it into the 21^st century. But now the story is changing. Those who think that all progression is linear are in for a rude awakening if they are betting on China to unfold in the future as it has in the past.

Among the most important questions for all investors and businessmen is, how will China manage its future and the problems it faces? There are many problems, some of them monumental – and at the same time there is an amazing amount of opportunity and potential. Understanding the challenges and deciphering the likely outcomes is itself an immense challenge.

A Brand-New Book Available Online

My colleague Worth Wray and I have been investigating and writing about China for some time now. Today I’m announcing a book that we have written and edited in collaboration with 17 well-known experts on China. The book is called A Great Leap Forward? Making Sense of China’s Cooling Credit Boom, Technological Transformation, High Stakes Rebalancing, Geopolitical Rise, & Reserve Currency Dream, and we think it will help you to a solid understanding of both China’s problems and its opportunities. I know, the subtitle is a tad long, but the book does really cover all those aspects of today’s China.

Notice that there is a “?” after the title “A Great Leap Forward.” The first Great Leap Forward, initiated by Mao Tse-tung in the early ’60s, was an utter disaster. It devastated the nation, bankrupted the economy, and caused the deaths of tens of millions of people. Let’s review a little history from the introduction to the book:

When Chairman Mao decided in 1958 to transform China’s largely agrarian economy into a socialist paradise through rapid industrialization, collectivization, and a complete subjugation of the market to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) central planners, the widespread misallocation of resources led to the worst famine in recorded history and the outright collapse of China’s economy.

With very little capital at China’s disposal after its long civil war and even longer subjugation to foreign colonialists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mao decided the best way to fund the country’s rapid industrialization was for his government to monopolize agricultural production, use the nation’s bounty to support industrializing urban populations, and finance fixed-asset investments with crop exports.

1959 –– “Prosperity brought by the dragon & the phoenix”

Seeing grain and steel production as the essential elements of China’s rapid development, Mao boasted in 1958 that China would produce more steel than the United Kingdom within fifteen years.

1959 –– “Smelt a lot of good steel and accelerate socialist construction.”

Mao had very limited knowledge of agriculture or industrial production, yet he ruled China with an iron fist and silenced even well-intentioned opposition. China’s rural peasants were forced into collectives; households were torn apart; and private property rights were completely abolished. Mao ordered agricultural collectives to produce more grain while forcing farmers to employ less productive methods; he mobilized farmers to kill off “pests” like mosquitos, rats, flies, and sparrows (a campaign that upset the ecological balance in China’s farmlands); and insisted on a doubling of steel production to be achieved by diverting farmers with no industrial skill into operating poorly supplied backyard furnaces (which could not burn hot enough to produce high-quality steel).

1959 – Unskilled workers smelt steel in China’s backyard furnaces.

Steel production surged, and the economy appeared to boom… but at least half of that new production was unusable. A proliferation of crop eating locusts (after the sparrows had been killed off) and the diversion of farm workers to industrial and public works projects led to a collapse in crop yields. Still, local officials all over China falsified their production figures in an effort to win favor with Beijing (and to spare themselves Mao’s wrath), which led to larger and larger grain shipments to China’s cities… and smaller and smaller rations for those living in its agricultural collectives.

Instead of taking a Great Leap Forward to a harmonious industrial society….

1959 –– “The commune is like a gigantic dragon, production is noticeably awe-inspiring.”

Mao’s command and control system dismantled the Chinese economy, ruined millions of lives, and left an enormous share of China’s population disillusioned.

Industrialization failed. From 1958 to 1961, millions died of starvation and exhaustion across China’s countryside (independent estimates range from 30 million to 70 million, while the CCP still insists the death toll was only 17 million), and the People’s Republic remained a net exporter of grain. As Harvard economist Dwight Perkins remembers it, “Enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all.... In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster.

As production and productivity collapsed along with the CCP’s social contract, Mao struggled to retain power as a number of influential officials sought to implement more market oriented policies in response to the Great Famine. Fearing that growing opposition could lead the Party to reject its Marxist spirit (as the Soviet Union had done under Nikita Khrushchev a decade earlier), in 1966 Mao and his Red Guards launched the Cultural Revolution – a decade long series of purges intended to root out enemies of Communist thought lurking within the Party, cleanse Chinese society of many of its traditional values, eliminate elitist urban social structures, and renew the spirit of China’s Communist revolution.

1967 – “Scatter the old world, build a new world.”

Under Mao’s leadership, the Party destroyed cultural artifacts, banned the vast majority of books, dismantled the educational system, and silenced millions for thought crimes against the Party. In a devastating blow to China’s human capital, Mao ordered children of privileged urban families – including current President Xi Jinping, when his father, Xi Zhongxun, was purged – to relocate far away from their families to be re-educated through manual labor in China’s countryside. What may have been the most promising youth of that “Lost Generation” were deprived of their educations and forced into hardship.

1972 –– President Xi Jinping during the Cultural Revolution

Considering the legacy of the Great Leap Forward, the Great Chinese Famine, and the Cultural Revolution, it is an understatement to say that Mao’s hardline policies devastated the economy and left deep scars at all levels of Chinese society. After Mao’s death in 1976, it didn’t take long for the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping to win control of the Party and take China in a new economic direction –– though with essentially the same repressive political system.

And now young XI Jinping has come from experiencing the Cultural Revolution, getting ready to embark upon what we believe is something as equally as revolutionary as the first Great Leap Forward. The question mark is whether it will be another disaster or a decisive leap into a new future, perhaps even a new world order.

My friend Woody Brock reminds us in his latest PROFILE that the theory of growth in emerging markets dates from 1960, with the publication of Walt Whitman Rostow’s book The Stages of Economic Growth. Rostow gave us a description of five different stages that “mark the transformation of traditional, agricultural societies and modern, mass-consumption societies.”

To continue reading this article from Thoughts from the Frontline – a free weekly publication by John Mauldin, renowned financial expert, best selling author, and Chairman of Mauldin Economics – please click here.

The article Thoughts from the Frontline: The People’s Republic of Debt was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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Cleaning Out the Attic

By John Mauldin

Three weeks ago I co-authored an op-ed for the Investor’s Business Daily with Stephen Moore, founder of the Club for Growth and former Wall Street Journal editorial board member, currently working with the Heritage Foundation. Our goal was to present a simple outline of the policies we need to pursue as a country in order to get us back to 3–4% annual GDP growth. As we note in the op-ed, Stephen and I have been engaging with a number of presidential candidates and with other economists around the topic of growth.

We spent a great deal of time going back and forth on a variety of topics, trying to get down to a few ideas that we think make the most sense. I should note that few people will read the piece below without being upset by at least one of our suggestions. The goal was to not just list the standard Republican “fixes” but to actually come up with a plan that might garner support across the political spectrum on ways to address the critical problem of how to get the country back to acceptable growth.

Part of the challenge was reducing what could have been a book to just 800 words. Today’s letter will start with the actual op-ed, and then I will expand on some of the points. Readers and friends have been pressing me to offer some ideas as to what policies I think we should pursue, so here they are. I hope the op-ed will create some thoughtful response. It would be nice if we could get a few candidates to embrace some or all of what we are suggesting, even (or maybe especially) some of the more radical parts.
(I have made a few very minor edits to the op-ed.)

A Six Point Plan to Restore Economic Growth and Prosperity

By John Mauldin and Stephen Moore

The dismal news of 0.2% GDP growth for the first quarter only confirmed that the US is in the midst of its slowest recovery in half a century from an economic crisis. Could it be that at least some of the rage we've seen in the streets of Baltimore is a result of a paltry recovery that hasn't benefited low-income inner-city areas? We are at least $1.5 trillion a year behind where we would be with even an average post-World War II recovery.

While many blame a lack of sufficient demand and even insufficient government spending, our view is that the primary factors behind the growth slowdown are an increasingly intrusive regulatory environment, a confusing and punitive tax scheme, and lack of certainty over healthcare costs.

Each of these factors has contributed to a climate where growth is slow and incomes are stagnant. These are problems that cannot be solved by monetary and fiscal policy alone. To get real growth and increased productivity, we need to deal with the real source of economic progress: the incentive structure. The coming presidential race offers an opportunity for candidates to put forth concrete and comprehensive ideas about what can be done to create higher economic growth – as opposed to platitudes and piecemeal ideas that don't address the entire problem. The two of us have met with several candidates and discussed tax reform and other economic growth issues.

We offer here some solutions of our own for them to consider.

1. Streamline the federal bureaucracy. 

Government has become much like the neighbor who has hoarded every magazine and odd knick knack for 50 years. The attic and every room are stuffed with items no one would miss. The size of the US code has multiplied by over 18 times in 65 years. There are more than 1 million restrictive regulations. Enough already. It's time to clean out the attic. The president, with some flexibility, should require each agency to reduce the number of regulations under its purview by 20%, at the rate of 5% a year. And then Congress should pass a sunset law for the remaining regulations, requiring them to be reviewed at some point in order to be maintained. Further, if new rules are needed, then remove some old ones. Stop the growth of the federal regulatory code. We have enough rules today; let's just make sure they're the right ones.

2. Simplify and flatten the income tax. 

Make the individual income rate 20% (at most) for all income over $50,000, with no deductions for anything. Reduce the corporate tax to 15%, again eliminating all deductions other than what is allowed by standard accounting practice. No perks, no special benefits. Further, tax foreign corporate income at 5%–10%, and let companies bring it back home to invest here. This strategy will actually increase tax revenues.

3. Replace the payroll tax with a business transfer tax of 15% 

which will give lower income workers a big raise. Companies would pay tax on their gross receipts, minus allowable expenses in the conduct of producing goods and services. Nearly every economist agrees that consumption taxes are better than income taxes. Further, this tax can be rebated at the border, so it should encourage domestic production and be popular with union workers since it makes US products more competitive internationally.

To continue reading this article from Thoughts from the Frontline – a free weekly publication by John Mauldin, renowned financial expert, best selling author, and Chairman of Mauldin Economics – please click here.

The article Thoughts from the Frontline: Cleaning Out the Attic was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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Wall Street Double Talk and Double Opportunity of Falling Oil Price

By Tony Sagami

The stock market has developed a new type of love-hate relationship with the price of oil. In the past, falling oil prices were treated as an economic positive because they freed up more money for Americans to spend on other things, such as dining out or clothing. However, the steep plunge in oil prices has triggered a reverse psychology reaction on Wall Street: falling oil prices are bad because they signal a slowing global economy.

An even bigger head scratcher is the convoluted reaction that rising oil prices are good for the economy. Go figure.

Wall Street’s collective reaction, silly or not, is important because oil prices are what is currently driving the ups and downs of the stock market. And if you can divine the future direction of oil prices… you’ll find yourself on the right side of the stock market roller coaster.

What do I see when I connect the dots? That oil prices will fall even further.

Connecting the Dots #1: Helmerich & Payne. Helmerich & Payne is the largest lessor of oil rig drilling platforms in the US and recently announced that it would lay off up to 2,000 workers and chop its rig construction pace from four to two new oil rigs a month.

Moreover, Helmerich & Payne said that its active rig count has slid from 297 at the end of Q3 2014 to less than 200 today. “The rig count reduction thus far has been more swift than many expected,” said CEO John Lindsay.

And the price that H&P is receiving on that smaller amount of working rigs is falling. The daily revenue per rig is expected to average $27,000 to $27,500 this quarter, well below the $29,457 it received last quarter.

Connecting the Dots #2: Oil Pros Take Flight. For the week ending January 27, noncommercial traders increased their bets for oil prices to fall even more by adding 22,771 short contracts.

NOTE: Investors who use futures as hedges are called “commercial traders” while those who trade for speculation are called “noncommercial traders.”

The professional traders in the commodities pits make mistakes like the rest of us… but they’re right enough to make a living at it, so it’s dangerous to bet against them.

Connecting the Dots #3: Baker Hughes. In the last week of January, U.S. oil producers shut down 94 drilling rigs, which is the largest one week shutdown in 28 years!

That leaves 1,233 active rigs in North America—a three-year low.

Connecting the Dots #4: Supply Glut. The US Department of Energy reported that crude-oil stockpiles reached 406.7 million barrels in January, the highest level since the government started keeping records in 1982.

Higher supplies wouldn’t be an issue if demand were keeping pace, but thanks to improved drilling technology (fracking), the US is now awash in oil.

Connecting the Dots #5: USW Strike. Adding to the oil-patch pain, the strike of 3,800 members of the United Steelworkers union from nine refineries and chemical plants that process roughly 10% of US gasoline, diesel, heating oil, and jet fuel.

There are many ways to profit from falling oil prices, such as airlines and trucking stocks, but the most profitable is by betting against the companies that supply oil drilling equipment.

The Philadelphia Oil Services Index (OSX) is a price-weighted index composed of 15 companies that provide oil drilling and production services, oil field equipment, and support services.

If you’re confident that oil prices are headed lower, you can buy put options on the OSX index. And if you’re right… you’ll make a bundle. For example, my Rational Bear subscribers made over 200% in a few short weeks.

I’m not suggesting that you rush out and make big bets on oil prices tomorrow morning. As always, timing is everything, so wait for my next signal; but I am very confident that the profits of oil services companies are headed for the toilet.


Tony Sagami

30-year market expert Tony Sagami leads the Yield Shark and Rational Bear advisories at Mauldin Economics. To learn more about Yield Shark and how it helps you maximize dividend income, click here.

To learn more about Rational Bear and how you can use it to benefit from falling stocks and sectors, click here.

The article Connecting the Dots: Wall Street Double Talk and Double Opportunity of Falling Oil Price was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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Procter & Gamble, the Strong Dollar, and Pepto Bismol

By Tony Sagami

Applied Materials. Boeing. Coach. Ford. Intel. McDonald’s. Nike. Pfizer.

What do those household name companies have in common? Not much, other than that a huge part of the sales come from outside the US.

Really, really huge.

Collectively, the 500 companies in the S&P 500 get 46% of their sales and roughly 50% of their profits from outside the US. They are truly multinational giants.

Expanding your customer base is always a good thing, but doing business overseas is not without peril, and one of the under appreciated perils is the impact of currency movements. A stronger dollar can hurt companies that do a large share of their business overseas because sales in other countries translate back into fewer dollars.

Just ask Procter & Gamble, which reported their Q4 results last week.

P&G sold $20.16 billion of toothpaste, laundry detergent, diapers, toilet paper, and razor blades last quarter, but that was a 4% decline from the same period a year ago.

Worse yet, profits plunged by 31% to $1.06 per share, which was not only well below the $1.13 per share Wall Street was expecting but also a horrible 31% year over year drop. That’s bad.

What’s behind those terrible numbers? The U.S. dollar.

“The October-December 2014 quarter was a challenging one with unprecedented currency devaluations,” said CEO A.G. Lafley.

The US Dollar Index was up 13% in 2014 and is now near a 9-year high. That strong dollar is a big millstone around the neck of US exporters, whose products are now more expensive for foreign buyers as well as negatively affecting profits once those foreign sales are converted back into US dollars.

Worse yet, Lafley said the environment will “remain challenging” in 2015.

The US dollar is now at a 9 year high and threatening to go higher. Much, much higher. By historical standards, the US dollar is still cheap and expected to go higher by many observers, including Procter & Gamble.

P&G warned Wall Street that its 2015 sales will fall by another 5% and its 2015 profits will shrink by another 12%.

Think about those two numbers: 5% lower sales and 12% lower profits.

The strong dollar is a big problem for P&G because it gets roughly two thirds of its revenues from outside the US, so it’s more affected by the strong US dollar than most companies, but P&G is far from alone when it comes to currency woes.

The line of companies that have warned that the strong dollar is hurting their profits is getting longer and longer. Microsoft, Pfizer, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, United Technologies, Emerson Electric, 3M, and even Walmart have warned that the rising dollar is depressing their profits.

What does this mean to you? That a LOT more companies are going to report lower than expected sales and profits in 2015 and those that do will see their stock get hammered, just like P&G.

The problem is that Wall Street is blind to this profit-crushing trend.

In 2014, the S&P 500 companies collectively earned $117.02, and the median forecast of Wall Street strategists for 2015 S&P 500 earnings is $126, which is an optimistic 7.6% growth in earnings.

Unless you think that Procter & Gamble is an isolated island of trouble (and it’s not), you should be very worried that Wall Street is grossly underestimating the profit crushing impact of the strong dollar as well as grossly overestimating corporate America’s earnings growth.

That massive disconnect between reality and the Wall Street dream world is going to translate into some very tough times for stock market investors. If you haven’t added some defense to your portfolio… you may need lots and lots of a popular Procter & Gamble product: Pepto Bismol.


Tony Sagami

30 year market expert Tony Sagami leads the Yield Shark and Rational Bear advisories at Mauldin Economics. To learn more about Yield Shark and how it helps you maximize dividend income, click Here. To learn more about Rational Bear and how you can use it to benefit from falling stocks and sectors, Click Here.

The article Connecting the Dots: Procter & Gamble, the Strong Dollar, and Pepto Bismol was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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Income Inequality? American Savers Treated Like Dogs

By Tony Sagami

One of the hot political topics these days is income inequality, but one of the groups of Americans that’s the most mistreated by Washington DC is the millions of Americans who have responsibly saved for their retirement.

When I entered the investment business as a stock broker at Merrill Lynch in the 1980s, savers could routinely get 7-9% on their money with riskless CDs and short term Treasury bonds.

In fact, I sold multimillions of dollars’ worth of 16 year zero coupon Treasury bonds at the time. Zero coupon bonds are debt instruments that don’t pay interest (a coupon) but are instead traded at a deep discount, rendering profit at maturity when the bond is redeemed for its full face value.

At the time, long term interest rates were at 8%, so the zero coupon Treasury bonds that I sold cost $250 each but matured at $1,000 in 16 years. A government-guaranteed quadruple!

Ah, those were the good old days for savers, largely thanks to the inflation fighting tenacity of Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from August 1979 to August 1987.

Monetary policies couldn’t be more different under Alan “Mr. Magoo” Greenspan, “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellen. This trio of hear see speak no evil bureaucrats have never met an interest rate cut that they didn’t like and have pushed interest rates to zero.

The yield on the 30 year Treasury bond hit an all time record low last week at 2.45%. Yup, an all time low that our country hasn’t seen in more than 300 years!

These low yields have made it increasingly difficult to earn a decent level of income from traditional fixed-income vehicles like money markets, CDs, and bonds.

Unless you’re content with near-zero return on your savings, you’ve got to adapt to the new era of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy). However, you cannot just dive into the income arena and buy the highest paying investments you can find. Most are fraught with hidden risks and dangers.

So to fully understand how to truly and dramatically boost your investment income, you absolutely must look at your investments in a new light, fully understanding the new risks as well as the new opportunities. There are really two challenges that all of us will face as we transition from employment to retirement: longer life expectancies; and lower investment yields.

Risk #1: Improved health care and nutrition have dramatically boosted life expectancies for both men and women. We will all enjoy a longer, healthier life, which means more time to enjoy retirement and spend with friends/family, but it also means that whatever money we’ve accumulated will have to work harder as well as longer.

Today, a 65 year-old man can expect to live until age 82, almost four years longer than 25 years ago; the life expectancy for a 65 year old woman is also up—from 82 years in the early 1980s to 85 today.

The steady increase in life expectancy is definitely something to celebrate, but it also means we’ll need even bigger nest eggs.

Risk #2: Don’t forget about inflation. Prices for daily necessities are higher than they were just a few years ago and constantly erode the purchasing power of your savings.

The way I see it, your comfort in retirement has never been more threatened than it is today, and it doesn’t matter if you’re 20 or 70.

The rules are different, and you only have two choices:

#1. spend your retirement as a Walmart greeter (if you’re lucky enough to get a job!); or

#2. adapt to the new rules of income investing.

Today, the new rules of successful income investing consist of putting together a collection of income focused assets, such as dividend paying stocks, bonds, ETFs, and real estate, that generate the highest possible annual income at the lowest possible risk.

Even in an environment of near zero interest rates and global uncertainty, there are many ways an investor can generate a healthy income while remaining in control. Income stocks should form the core of your income portfolio.

Income stocks are usually found in solid industries with established companies that generate reliable cash flow. Such companies have little need to reinvest their profits to help grow the business or fund research and development of new products, and are therefore able to pay sizeable dividends back to their investors.
What do I look for when evaluating income stocks?

• Macro picture. While it’s a subjective call, we want to invest in companies that have the big-picture macroeconomic wind at their backs and have long-term sustainable business models that can thrive in the current economic environment.

• Competitive advantage. Does the company have a competitive advantage within its own industry? Investing in industry leaders is generally more productive than investing in the laggards.

• Management. The company’s management should have a track record of returning value to shareholders.

• Growth strategy. What’s the company’s growth strategy? Is it a viable growth strategy given our forward view of the economy and markets?

• A dividend payout ratio of 80% or less, with the rest going back into the company’s business for future growth. If a business pays out too much of its profit, it can hurt the firm’s competitive position.

• A dividend yield of at least 3%. That means if a company has a $10 stock price, it pays annual cash dividends of at least $0.30 a year per share.

• The company should have generated positive cash flow in at least the last year. Income investing is about protecting your money, not hitting the ball out of the park with risky stock picks.

• A high return on equity, or ROE. A company that earns high returns on equity is usually a better-than-average business, which means that the dividend checks will keep flowing into our mailboxes.

This doesn’t mean that you should rush out and buy a bunch of dividend-paying stocks tomorrow morning. As always, timing is everything, and many—if not most—dividend stocks are vulnerably overpriced.

But make no mistake; interest rates aren’t rising anytime soon, and the solid, all weather income stocks (like the ones in my Yield Shark service) will help you build and enjoy a prosperous retirement. In fact, you can click here to see the details on one of the strongest income stocks I’ve profiled in Yield Shark in months.


Tony Sagami

30 year market expert Tony Sagami leads the Yield Shark and Rational Bear advisories at Mauldin Economics. To learn more about Yield Shark and how it helps you maximize dividend income, click here.

To learn more about Rational Bear and how you can use it to benefit from falling stocks and sectors, click here.

The article Connecting the Dots: Income Inequality? American Savers Treated Like Dogs was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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EFPs and The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action

By Jared Dillian

Pretend you are a corn trader. As such, you have two choices: have a position in corn futures or own physical corn. It may seem silly to even consider owning physical corn, because corn futures are easy to trade—just click a button on your screen. But assume you have a grain elevator, and whether you own futures or physical corn is all the same to you. How do you decide which you prefer?

If one is mispriced relative to the other.

If you consider owning physical corn, you have to take into account the cost of storage and any transportation costs you may incur getting the corn to the delivery point. You also have to think of the cost of carrying that physical corn position, or the opportunity loss you incur by not investing the money in the risk-free alternative.

The thing is, there’s nothing keeping the spot and futures markets on parallel tracks, aside from the basis traders who spend their time watching when the futures get out of whack from the physical. That basis exists in just about every futures market, even in financial futures that are cash settled. In fact, that was pretty much my life when I was doing index arbitrage—trading S&P 500 futures against the underlying stocks. I was basically a fancy version of the basis trader in corn.

With stock index futures (like the S&P 500, or the NDX, or the Dow), the basis is slightly more complicated. Not only do you have to calculate the cost of carry—which is usually determined by risk free interest rates and the stock loan market for the underlying securities—but you also have to take into account the dividends that the underlying stocks pay out. Remember, futures don’t pay dividends, but stocks do. At Lehman Brothers, we had a guy whose sole job was to construct and maintain a dividend prediction model for the S&P 500.

So far, so good. However, one of the first things I learned about on the index arbitrage desk was EFP, which stands for Exchange for Physical—a corner of the market almost nobody knows about.

Basically, we could take a futures position and exchange it for a stock position at an agreed-upon basis with another bank or broker. Interdealer brokers helped arrange these EFP trades. The reason so few people know about them is probably because, historically, the EFP market has been very sleepy. The most it would usually move in a day was 15 or 20 cents in the index, or in interest rate terms, a few basis points.

Now it is moving several dollars at a time.

A Basis Gone Berserk

Back when I was doing this about ten-plus years ago, we had a balance sheet of about $8 billion, which is to say that we carried a hedged position of stocks versus S&P 500 futures (also Russell 2000 futures, NASDAQ futures, etc.).

We did this for a few reasons. One, it was profitable to do so—the basis often traded rich so that by selling futures and buying stock and holding the position until expiration, we would make money. Also, by carrying this long stock inventory, we were able to offset short positions elsewhere in the firm and reduce the firm’s cost of funds. At Lehman and most other Wall Street firms, index arbitrage was a joint venture with equity finance.

During the tech bubble in 1999, the basis got very, very rich because money was plowing into mutual funds and managers were being forced to hold futures for a period of time until they were able to pick individual stocks.

During the bear market in 2008, the basis traded very cheap, up until very recently, because inflows into equity mutual funds were weak, and index arbitrage desks were willing to accept less profit on their balance sheet positions.

But now, the basis has gone nuts.

It always goes a little nuts toward year-end because banks try to take down positions to improve the optics of their accounting ratios. If you have fewer assets, your return on assets looks better. So when banks try to get rid of stock inventory into year-end, they buy futures and sell stock, pushing up the basis.

But now it has skyrocketed, and the cause seems to be the effects of regulation.

We’ve talked about this before, in reference to corporate bonds. Banks aren’t keeping a lot of inventory anymore, because there’s no money in it. The culprits here are a combination of Dodd-Frank and Basel III. There are all kinds of unintended consequences, and the EFP market going nuts is probably the least of it.

But even that is a big one. Basically, it has introduced significant costs (about 1.5% annually) to the holder of a long futures position, which includes everyone from indexers all the way down to retail investors. These are the sorts of things that don’t get talked about in congressional hearings. Did XYZ law work? Sure it worked. But now it costs you 1.5% a year to hold S&P 500 futures and roll them, and you can’t get a bid for more than $2 million in a liquid corporate bond issue.

It’s All About Liquidity

The liquidity issue is the biggest one, and the one I harp on all the time. Pre Dodd-Frank, the major investment banks were giant pools of liquidity. You wanted to do a block trade of 20 million shares? No problem. You wanted to trade $250 million of double-old tens? It could be done.

Not anymore. Liquidity has diminished in just about every asset class, from FX to equities to rates to corporates, because compliance costs have gone up and it’s expensive to hold more capital against these positions. Someday, someone might take up the slack, like second-tier brokers or even hedge funds.
But here’s the biggest consequence of the equity finance market blowing up: High-frequency trading (HFT) firms that aren’t self-clearing now find it difficult to trade profitably and stay in business. With fewer of them around, we will finally get an answer to the question whether they add to liquidity or not.

So if you talk to an index arbitrage trader about what is going on with the EFP market, he can tell you precisely why it is screwed up. It’s an open secret on Wall Street. Introduce a regulation over here, an unintended consequence pops up over there. Then there are more regulations to deal with the unintended consequences. Regulations have added 100 times the volatility to one of the most liquid and ordinary derivatives in the world—the plain vanilla EFP.

Less liquidity, more volatility—welcome to 2015.

Jared Dillian

The article The 10th Man: EFPs and The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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Beyond Tesla: The Huge Profit Potential of Lithium

By Tony Sagami

One of the stocks that I get the most questions about is Tesla. I’m not sure whether investor interest is due to the gorgeous lines of the Tesla Model S, its amazing high performance engine, the high flying stock, or the energy saving nature of all electric vehicles….. but Tesla is a very popular subject.

Tesla cars don’t just look fast; they are fast! The Tesla Model S can go from 0 to 60 mph in a stunning 5.9 seconds and travel up to an impressive 319 miles on a single charge.

The Tesla Model S is shockingly modestly priced by luxury car standards. The basic model has a MSRP of $69,900, but the price tag can quickly escalate to $100,000 with optional add ons. Of course, a cheapskate like me would never pay that much for a car—even an electric car—but lots of status-conscious consumers have.

And you won’t see me buying Tesla stock either. Even though it’s well off of its 52 week high, it’s still trading for almost 80 times earnings and 29 times book value.

However, a lot of technology is incorporated into electric vehicles. The most profitable way to invest in electric vehicles is not through Tesla stock, but instead from the industry that makes batteries possible.
I’m talking about lithium, one of the most valuable natural resources of the new electronic world thanks to its unique and extremely valuable characteristics:

• Lithium has such a low density that it floats on water and can be cut with a butter knife. And when mixed with aluminum and magnesium, it can form lightweight alloys that produce some the highest strength to weight ratios of all metals.
   
• Lithium tolerates heat better than any other solid element, melting at 357°F.

• Lithium batteries offer the best weight-to-energy ratio, making lithium batteries ideal for any application where weight is an issue, such as portable electronics.
   
• That same high energy density and low weight characteristic makes lithium batteries the best choice for electric/hybrid vehicles due to car gas mileage. A car’s biggest enemy is weight.
   
• Lithium has a very high electrochemical potential, meaning that it has excellent energy storage capacity.

Lithium is a key mineral of the future, but there are limited ways to invest in it because unlike other commodities, there is no vehicle to invest in the physical metal.

On top of that, few options exist to invest in it because the market is dominated by only a handful of producers: Chemical & Mining Company of Chile (SQM); FMC Corp. (FMC); Rockwood Holdings (ROC); and privately held Talison Lithium.

The Chemical & Mining Company of Chile is primarily a potash fertilizer company; FMC Corp. is a diversified chemical producer with a less than 15% of its revenues from lithium; and Talison is a privately held Chinese company.

That leaves Rockwood Holdings as the purest play on lithium by a wide margin, with close to a 50% share of the global lithium market. It’s the OPEC of lithium. It’s also trading around $80 a share right now… a lot cheaper than Tesla—the car and the stock!

Of course, timing is everything, so I’m not suggesting that you rush out and invest in lithium or any of the above stocks tomorrow morning. Instead, wait for my buy signal in Just One Trade.

Tony Sagami

30 year market expert Tony Sagami leads the Yield Shark and Rational Bear advisories at Mauldin Economics. To learn more about Yield Shark and how it helps you maximize dividend income, click here.

To learn more about Rational Bear and how you can use it to benefit from falling stocks and sectors, click here.

The article Connecting the Dots: Beyond Tesla: The Huge Profit Potential of Lithium was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.

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