chit clubs

In the mid-1980s, I managed a number of stock portfolios in the Pacific Basin for TIAA-CREF–basically everything except Japan. Mainland China wasn’t yet open to foreigners but could be reached through Hong Kong. The largest market in my area of responsibility was Australia, followed by Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand. In theory, I was also supposed to cover Indonesia and India. But threats from the head of the BJP and what to me was the dubious nature of financial reporting in both India and Indonesia told me zero weightings for both countries was the best strategy.

Thailand, it turned out, was then a hotspot for a set of Ponzi schemes, known as chit clubs. The most famous was organized by Madam Chamoy, who was reputed to have close ties to the semi-divine royal family. Cub members would come together periodically to meet with Chamoy’s representatives, who would collect deposits and give receipts or “chits,” promising ultra-high interest rates (doubling your money in not much more than a year), to be achieved through investments made via Madam Chamoy’s supposed connections with the royals. The most important proviso: if you ever withdrew money by cashing in a chit, you were banned from making further chit deposits.

Ultimately, some people did redeem, causing the chit clubs to implode. But, for a long time, redemptions were small, and were more than covered by new deposits.

Madoff and the Wilpons

Bernie Madoff is the US equivalent of Madam Chamoy. In fact, in the Madoff case, Harry Markopolos, a financial analyst, tried many times–chronicled in his book No One Would Listen, a True Financial Thriller–to turn Madoff in, but was ignored by the SEC. According to the book, Markopolos had worked for a firm where Madoff made an investment pitch. Afterward, the principals told Markopolos to figure out an investment scheme that would duplicate the Madoff returns. After a lot of work, Markopolos concluded that using public markets there was no way to get the numbers Madoff claimed to have achieved.

Madoff, as I recall from news accounts, said that he screened potential marks very carefully. He would reject anyone he thought might be smart enough to figure out the fraud. …which brings us to the Mets and their plan to pay Bobby Bonilla.

Bobby Bonilla

In 2000, the Wilpons decided to buy out the remaining $5.9 million the Mets owed to Bobby Bonilla. Instead of a cash payment, the parties agreed to pay Bonilla a bit less than $1.2 million, once a year, on July 1, for 25 years, starting in 2011.

The Wilpons had already “passed” the Madoff intelligence test and had become clients. In fact, newspaper reports say the Mets fired the accounting official who insisted Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme and urged the club to withdraw its money. And when the list of Madoff accounts was ultimately published, the Wilpons/Mets figured prominently by number of accounts–not necessarily meaning the most money, however.

How did the Wilpons get the the apparently wacky formula they used to pay Bonilla? Who knows? However,,,,

,,,suppose the Wilpons deposited $4 million with Madoff. At 12% interest, that would rise to about $12 million by 2011, or enough to generate slightly more in interest income from then on than the $1.2 million needed to pay Bonilla. So the Wilpons would put away $4 million for Bonilla instead of $6 million. and would still have the $4 million principal amount (worth maybe $1.3 million in year 2000 dollars) remaining in the account a quarter-century down the road. (Where did I get the 12% interest? It was the smallest number that worked.)

In other words, in the Wilpons’ dream world, they’d be paying a bit less than half in real terms of what the original contract called for.

I’m writing this after seeing the news that Comcast (CMCSA) is reorganizing itself into two separate entities: the cable networks and the entertainment assets. To be clear, I don’t know that much about Comcast, other than being a customer and owning the stock indirectly through index funds, But I imagine the split is a response to the stock price being cut in half over the past handful of years, a period during which the S&P 500 is ahead by about 65%.

There are successful multi-generational family-owned company. Walmart (WMT) is a prime example, in my view (WMT is also the only domestic consumer-oriented stock I own in my actively-managed portfolio). The Walton family owns a bit less than half the company through trusts.

I see three general worries with family-owned companies:

–as people grow wealthier, they tend to become more risk-averse. So they tend to defend the status quo rather than take the risks involved in innovating

–having the family surname may be as important at promotion time as being a strong manager, or even more so. The same coin, but the other side: the company may have as a high-level priority keeping family members employed, no matter what their skill level or work ethic.

–in really bad times, I doubt the company will use Chapter 11 to reorganize, since that would disenfranchise the founding family, as well as put aunts, uncles and cousins on the unemployment like.

It may be that none of this bad stuff will happen. And we certainly don’t want to be holding stock in a company headed for Chapter 11. On the other hand, the market will presumably demand compensation, through a lower PE multiple, for taking the extra risks..

The terms of a preliminary post-war treaty seem to be relatively clear. As former president Obama has put it, they’re similar to the deal he made with Iran in 2015, only a little worse–this even though Trump repudiated the Obama agreement as insufficient during his first term. Put another way, the bombings and killings have most likely put the US in a worse position than before they started.

Iran will apparently also receive $300 billion in, essentially, reparations as the price for opening up the Strait of Hormuz again. The money is reported to be coming from third parties, not the US. While this may be true in some highly technical sense, my guess is that those third parties have been told they’ll be compensated by Washington for their outlays. I can’t imagine they won’t demand to be paid in advance.

How will this affect the US stock market? These are my thoughts:

–any effects will be indirect–through the hit to consumer spending–since the entire oil and gas sector is only about 3% of the index, or 2/5 of the weighting of Nvidia, the S&P 500’s largest member. So there’s no need today to have an opinion. You can neutralize the sector by holding the market weight, or simply have nothing in the sector at all, since a 20% upward move in oil and gas stocks, with everything else flat, would only clip 0.4% from the portfolio’s return.

–the price of crude oil, and ultimately the price of products refined from oil, will drift down to their pre-war levels, or slightly above.

–the fragility of the global oil supply chain that the war illustrates will accelerate the move toward other energy sources, even in the US, where the administration is opposed, in true Luddite style. This will sooner or later (my bet is way sooner) make sources of heavy, tar-like crude no longer economically viable (think, Venezuela, where the US oil majors are not keen at all to develop that country’s reserves).

–presumably, the ease with which Iran shut off a major supply route for crude through the Strait of Hormuz has been a big shot in the arm for alternative energy sources.

–the apparent lack in Washington of effective pre-strike planning, intelligence or logistics is probably not a plus for the US brand. …nor is the culling of women and people of color from the armed services, in support of the administration’s vision of white male culture.

–and the lack of any opposition from Congress, on either side of the aisle, to the administration’s moves is arguably doing the most damage. This implies that the multiple investors are willing to pay for $US earnings should be lower than has been the norm since WWII. And, of course, those profits themselves are weaker than normal, given tariffs and government efforts to shrink the workforce.

In a normal business cycle, investors, US and foreign, portfolio and corporate, would already be rotating away from tech. They’d be rooting through the bargain bin of domestic-oriented consumer firms, in vintage Warren Buffett style. …and in particular, for strong brand names and distribution networks, on the idea that one would be buying at a steep discount intellectual property that took many years–and lots of advertising expense–to establish (a geekish note: except in the case of acquisition, none of this appears only on the income statement as a cost, but nowhere on the balance sheet as an asset). We’re now the country of sub-par growth, ICE, murdered protesters, foreign prison camps, however. So it’s no longer clear what those brands are worth.

As a result, we continue to be in a stock market that favors industry rather than consumer, firms with $US costs and foreign currency revenues, and intellectual property that can be quickly shifted outside the US. This continues to be so, even though this idea is already pretty long in the tooth. Valuation spreads would in most other circumstances have already prompted, I think, rotation away from the AI names.

I think the question of how long the current situation can last is the most important one in today’s US stock market. For what it’s worth, I think the mid-term election in November is the next possible trigger for a change in portfolio strategy.

PS: In my investing career, which began in late 1978, shockingly long ago, I can think of three periods when political developments made a difference for financial markets:

–the revaluation of the Japanese yen in the 1980s,

–the formation of the EU in the 1990s, and

–Brexit, which occurred in 2020, after a vote in favor in 2016.

So thinking of the rise of Trumpism as a market-moving event isn’t without precedent.

In some sense, the sands have already begun to shift. Over the past three months Nasdaq has outperformed the EAFE index of foreign stocks by a lot–enough that the US is no longer the laggard to the rest of the world’s stock markets that it has been since early 2025.

There have also been significant turns of the wheel within NASDAQ itself. The latest is the move from software to the firms that make semiconductors and their suppliers. Customer demand for memory chips is so high that the makers are saying that, although they are all adding capacity, supply won’t be able to meet the current level of demand for three or four years. Two reasons: the fabs themselves are complex things and take several years to come online; and ASML, the principal manufacturer of the machines inside them, tries to avoid boom/bust in its own business by keeping its output at a steady pace rather than expanding capacity during industry upturns (thus avoiding the worst negative effects of the inevitable subsequent bust periods).

The next large stock market rotation, as I see it, should be a move into firms that either serve domestic consumers, or have global brands that also allow them to sell to the rest of the world as well. One set of potential buyers for these consumer-oriented stocks would be portfolio investors like you and me. Another would be multinationals, domestic or foreign, who, in Warren Buffett fashion, would recognize the potentially immense value of intangibles like brand names and distribution networks.

I decided to begin to nibble at stocks like this early in 2026. Continuing weakness in this arena, however, told me that I was at the very least too early (a technical portfolio term meaning “wrong!“). Two factors working against the move: the domestic economic weakness created by tariffs + shrinkage of the workforce; and the reputational damage done to the US brand name by ICE and, more recently, the bungled war against Iran.

$300 billion+ (about 1% of domestic GDP) in reparations later, Iran is in the rear-view mirror. Within six months, the negative effects of administration policies will have been around long enough to also be in the base against which future earnings will be judged.

Arguably, then–and absent any new negatives from Washington–at some point investors will begin to trim their IT overweights and move money into domestic GDP-sensitive names.

This is a potential issue to be aware of, I think, but one that it’s way too soon to act on. An odd thing has just happened a couple of towns over from where we live, however. There was just a special election in that affluent right-leaning community to vote on a Republican-backed proposal that in future town elections candidates need not disclose their party affiliation on the ballot. The proposal was rejected.

Two companies that I’m aware of, Super Micro Computer (SMCI) and Redwire (RDW)–I have a small position in the second and have consciously avoided the first–have announced new two-part capital raisings.

In the case of SCMI, it intends to raise $7 billion. $5 billion of that will be a traditional underwritten issue of stock. The remaining $2 billion will be direct sales of stock by SMCI into the market. There’s a wrinkle to the underwriting, however. $1.25 billion will be common stock; the $3.75 billion bulk of the offering, however, will be a convertible preferred, whose terms have not yet been announced.

RDW plans to raise $500 million through direct sales of stock into the market.

I can’t recall ever having seen a structure like this before. And now there are two that I’m aware of, and maybe more, since I make no claims to be surveying the entire stock market.

Why are these popping up now?

The as-close-to-tautology-as-you-can-get answer is that the companies need money. I presume that both would prefer to make a traditional underwritten offering of common shares but that there isn’t enough professional investor appetite for that.

Neither issuer will do the direct sales themselves; both are hiring professional brokers to do that for them.

I’m assuming that both companies would prefer to do a regular underwriting, where they transfer issuance risk by selling the shares to a brokerage syndicate at a fixed price right before the stock begins to trade. If so, no one is willing to do this at all for RDW and underwriters are only willing to take on $1.25 billion in straight equity from SCMI. I’m assuming that the $3.75 billion in convertible preferred is going to specialists who will hedge out everything except the preferred dividend. This payment is an after-tax expense for SCMI, which will presumably be taxed at a lower rate than bond interest. Convertible debt would likely have been a better option for SCMI. If so, choosing to go with a preferred shows where the market power lies.

What does all this mean?

The bullish take would be that these companies are still apparently able to raise large amounts of money.

The bearish is that concept alone is no longer enough to get investors to pile in.

Normally, I think this would be a signal to roll out of IT and into more defensive sectors like consumer staples, supermarkets and other mid- to low-end retail, pharma… But the negative effects on the domestic economy from ICE, tariffs and the war with Iran all argue against this. Still, my guess is that for now it’s better to be closer to the index weightings today than to have enormous bets in any direction.