Tag Archives: business

Stephen King on productivity and monetary policy

August 26, 2016 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

The Stephen King I’m writing about is an economic advisor to HSBC who was formerly the bank’s chief economist.  He’s one of the most interesting economists I’m aware of.  For instance, he was one of the first to warn of excesses in the US housing market a decade ago, and perhaps the most vocal in doing so.

Last week he weighed in on the issue of productivity in an Opinion article in the Financial Times.  His main points:

1. The current low level of productivity–+1% yearly in the US, flat to down elsewhere–may not be due to lack of infrastructure spending (Lawrence Summers) or that most productivity-enhancing inventions have already been made (Robert Gordon).  It may be instead that we’re seeing now is normal.  It’s the generation that rebuilt after WWII, creating high growth in productivity in the process, that’s the outlier.

2.  If #1 is true, then many of the mainstays of orthodox macroeconomic policy need to be reexamined.  In particular,

–if the world is being flooded with money, then capital is equally available at cheap prices to high productivity enterprises and low ones.  The result may be that the very process thought to be increasing economic growth is neutralizing the competitive advantage of high-productivity enterprises

–in a low-inflation, low-productivity world, interest rates will be “dragged down to incredibly low levels,” meaning recession-fighting monetary expansion may be difficult to achieve

–cultural expectations built over the past half century of ever increasing prosperity may prove to be too high.  This would be trouble for, say, pension or social security schemes around the world whose ability to deliver promised benefits assumes the robust real economic growth of the past can be extrapolated into the future.

3.  The ability of governments to create inflation may become increasingly important, as a means of keeping nominal GDP growth above zero during an economic downturn.  Monetary theorists around the globe have assumed that doing so involves only the simple expedient of increasing the money supply.  The past eight years in the US, however, have shown that creating inflation is much easier to theorize about than to do.

 

His overall conclusion:  the Lawrence Summers idea of secular stagnation–which can be addressed through increased infrastructure spending–is a much cheerier outlook than it appears at first blush.

Caesars Entertainment and private equity

August 22, 2016 By in Private equity, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

I’ve been wanting to write about what might be called the private equity paradigm for some time. On the other hand, I don’t see any way for me as a portfolio investor to make money from research I might do–other than to keep as far away from private equity deals as possible–so I haven’t done as meticulous job of research on this post as I would if it involved a stock I might buy.  So regard this more of a preliminary drawing than as a finished picture.

When a private equity firm acquires a company, it seems to me it does five things:

–it cuts costs.  The experience of 3G Capital seems to show that typical mature companies are wildly overstaffed, with maybe a quarter of employees collecting a salary but doing no useful work.  Private equity also uses its negotiating power to get better input pricing, although it passes on little, if any, of the savings

–it levies fees to be paid to it for management and other services

–it increases financial leverage, either through taking on a lot of bank debt, or, more likely, issuing huge swathes of junk bonds.  An equity offering may happen, as well

–it dividends lots of available cash generated by operations and/or sales of securities to itself, thereby recovering much/all of its initial investment

–it then sits back and waits to see whether (mixing my metaphors) this leveraged cocktail to which it now has only limited financial exposure, sinks or swims.

 

Caesars Entertainment has added a new twist to this paradigm.  In 2013, its private equity masters seem to have decided that sink was the more likely outcome.  Rather than simply accept this fate, they began preparing a lifeboat for themselves by whisking away valuable assets from the subsidiary that is liable for the company debt into another one.  In January 2015, after this asset shuffling was done, they put the debt-laden subsidiary into bankruptcy.

Junk bond holders sued.  Litigation has been protracted and has reportedly cost $100 million so far.

Media reports indicate that the case is now approaching resolution–either through negotiation or court ruling.  My no-legal-background view (I was a prosecutor in my early days in the Army, but that says more about the Uniform Code of Military Justice back then than about me) is that:  these asset transfers can’t be legal; and the junk bond loan agreements should have had covenants that explicitly bar such action.  So I’m not sure what has taken this long.

Whatever the outcome of the case is, I think it will shape the nature of private equity from this point forward.

 

 

 

Intel (INTC) and ARM Holdings (ARMH)

August 18, 2016 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

chipmaking rivalry

The big division in the chip-making industry over the past 15-20 years has been between giant vertically integrated makers like INTC, Texas Instruments … which manufacture chips designed in-house and smaller digitally-oriented design firms who rent structural intellectual property from ARMH, modify it and have chips made in third-party contract fabrication factories like those run by TSMC.

INTC’s advantages have been the raw power of its chips and its manufacturing superiority.  Users of the ARMH framework tout the elegance of their designs that enables output to be smaller, use less electricity and generate less heat.

disruption by iPhone

The balance of power began to shift away from INTC and toward the ARMH camp when INTC decided not to make chips for the iPhone.  It may be that INTC management thought smartphones were a flash in the pan, as urban legend has it, or it may simply have been that INTC knew its chips ran too hot and used too much power for Apple to be satisfied with them.  In any event, INTC has been trying to reinvent itself since then, by improving its chip design while maintaining its manufacturing edge.

On the latter front, INTC continues do well; on the former, not so much.  Despite a lot of design effort, its low-power, low-heat solutions for the smartphone world haven’t been good enough to gain much traction.

This itself threatens the manufacturing operation.  As INTC steadily shrinks the size of its chips, each silicon wafer processed becomes capable of yielding more output.  At some point, INTC’s factories are potentially going to be capable of churning out more chips than the company can reasonably expect to sell to its PC and server customers.  The capital equipment used in chip making is so expensive–$3 billion+ today, maybe $10 billion+ for the fabs of a few years from now–that the factories have to run at high utilization rates to be profitable.  INTC has already said that next-generation (extreme ultraviolet lithography) technology is too expensive for even INTC to invest in by itself.

Hence the deal with ARMH.

three other points:

–presumably working with ARMH-based firms will help INTC fine-tune its manufacturing processes for mobile and the Internet of Things

–this may be the first step in closer cooperation between the two companies

–the arrangement has been announced very quickly after Softbank agreed to acquire ARMH.  Are the two connected?  If so, Masayoshi Son may have plans for much greater integration of the two rival firms.

 

 

 

 

the Federal Reserve and the election

August 4, 2016 By in Federal Reserve, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

The Fed is in an awkward position.

From a monetary stimulus perspective, the US has been in the equivalent of hospital intensive care for eight years.  In fact, by some measures the amount of stimulus being applied to the economy today is greater than it was during the depths of the 2008-2009 recession.

On the other hand, there’s the cautionary tale of Japan, which has been in quasi-recession for almost three decades.  At least part of this is due to three instances–one monetary, two fiscal–where the Land of Wa withdrew stimulus prematurely and nipped recovery in the bud.  Japan’s history also seems to show that reversing a policy mistake once made doesn’t undo all the damage of having made it in the first place.  This is the cause of the Fed desire to err on the side of having too much stimulus or having it for too long.

The Fed knows, too, that the legislative and executive branches in Washington are dysfunctional–that there’s no hope of government spending that would attack pockets of economic weakness through, say, programs to retrain workers displaced by technological advance or on repairing aging infrastructure.  This is despite the fact that extra dollops of monetary stimulus only improve the overall economic tone of the country and are less and less effective at addressing specific issues of great concern like chronic unemployment and bad roads.  On the other hand, the Fed is enabling this craziness by monetary accommodation.

On top of all this, the Fed is hemmed in by the presidential election cycle.  It typically does not want to make a move that could be interpreted as an attempt to influence the November election, either by lowering rates to make the economy seem more vigorous (favoring the incumbent) or raising them to make it seem less so (favoring the challenger).  In today’s case, of course, it has no scope to do the former.  And the Republicans are the party that wants to eliminate the Fed as an independent body (a lunatic move, from an economic standpoint).

So, what is the Fed going to do?

Its recent rhetoric says it wants to raise rates again before yearend.  There are three scheduled meetings left in 2016:  September, November and December.  It would seem to me that acting after either of the first two amounts to meddling in the election.  That leaves either an unscheduled meeting in August or the scheduled one in December.

 

 

 

labor force participation in the US

June 30, 2016 By in employment, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

A little more than a week ago, the government released a report by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers on the declining labor force participation among prime-age men.  “Prime-age” is defined as being between 24 and 54.

The gist of the report:

–the US has seen a continuing, steady falloff in labor force participation by prime-age men since the 1960s

–the trend is similar in other advanced countries, but more severe in the the US than anywhere other than in Italy

–the decline comes across all age groups and ethnicities, although the worst experience is among black men

–education plays a part.  In 1964, labor participation among men with a college degree was 98%; last year the figure was 94%.  In 1964, the rate among men with less education was 97%; last year it was 83%

–relative wages for less-educated men have fallen as well, from 80% of the college graduate wage in the 1970s to 60% now

–the mechanism for the decline in participation appears to be that jobs are eliminated during recession, with only some of the positions restored during the ensuing recovery

Two other points:

–the average country in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development = advanced nations) spends 6x the percentage of GDP that the US does on job search and job retraining for people out of work.  That puts the US at the bottom of the OECD pile.  If the unemployment people are anything like the VA, the situation is even worse than the figures imply.

–an unusually large number of US males have been in jail at one time or another in their lives.  They have a particularly hard time finding jobs afterward.

My thoughts:

–the situation described in the report is obviously not new, but, worldwide, we may have reached a tipping point in voter discontent

–economic theory maintains that the best position for a country is to allow free trade.  It stresses, however, that for this openness to create real benefits, governments must step in when globalization causes job losses to retrain displaced workers and reintegrate them into the workforce.  That’s the part Washington seems to have systematically ignored.

The poor employment situation for large chunks of the population is not going to go away by itself.  The solution is probably not to elect a latter-day Ned Ludd, however.  The government shakeup in the UK that appears to be happening in the wake of the “Leave” vote on Brexit may end up being a template for the US as well.