Category Archives: Asian economic development

Japan as a possible future for the US

November 24, 2015 By in Abenomics, Asian economic development, economics, Japanese development, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Japan, in my subjective view

As I wrote yesterday, the Japanese economy continues to limp along at about stall speed, hugging closely to the 0% line between growth and contraction.  There are several reasons for this, in my :

–an aging population

–strong social prejudice against accepting women as working professionals (meaning Japan wastes potentially half its workforce)

–strong aversion to foreigners that manifests itself as an unwillingness to allow immigration

–therefore, a shrinking workforce

–money-based politics that fiercely defends the status quo

–veneration of age as the source of wisdom, meaning that older managers can’t/won’t solicit/accept suggestions from younger, more technically competent, subordinates

–a docile electorate

the US is the same, in…

–an aging population

–lingering discrimination against women

–growing political (shoot-yourself-in-the-foot) pressure to limit immigration overall, and especially by high skilled professionals from Asia

–money-based politics that defends the status quo, seen, among other places, in failure to reform the federal tax code (Japan and the US have the highest rates in the OECD)

the US differs, in…

–having a younger population than Japan, meaning we have time to make changes–and the example of the fate of Japan to motivate us to do so

–a better record on hiring women (not a high bar, though)

–political and cultural embracing of youthful entrepreneurs and disruptive ideas

summing up

The US has younger population tan Japan and a more vigorous economy, but is carrying similar dead-weight in the forces of the status quo, typified by politics in Washington.

In the past 25 years, Japanese voters have voted on two occasions to toss the dominant Liberal Democratic  Party out of office and replace it with the Democrats (formerly the Social Democrats, and the Socialists before that).  Both occasions triggered bitter intra-party warfare about who should receive credit for the victory.  Nothing got done, so voters quickly reselected the LDP, as the lesser of two evils.

Hopefully, we can do better than that.

 

Japan in recession …again

November 23, 2015 By in Abenomics, Asian economic development, economics, Japanese development Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Assuming we take the simple, but commonly accepted, definition of recession as two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth as our measure–and there’s no real reason not to, I think–Japan slipped back into recession during its last fiscal quarter.  The reason:  in Groundhog Day-like fashion, the Tokyo government tightened fiscal policy prematurely earlier in the year, producing the same negative result for the third time in recent memory.

Three observations:

–the Japan experience is the reason Janet Yellen is so wishy-washy about raising interest rates in the US

–in a certain sense, technical recession isn’t as bad a thing for Japan as it wold be for, say, the US or China.

How so?

GDP growth comes from two sources:  having more people working, or having existing workers perform their jobs more efficiently.  Unlike the view (often) expressed by one of my Depression-era former bosses, productivity increases don’t come from imposing sweat shop working conditions.  They come from investment in education, training and productivity-enhancing equipment.

In Japan’s case, the domestic working population peaked around 1995 and has been falling by about 0.5% per year since.  One obvious solution to this problem would be to allow foreign workers to immigrate.  But, although there has been some slight movement lately, Japan’s borders remain rigidly closed to outsiders.

Productivity?   From 1950 – 19980, Japan was a productivity wonder.  However, Japan has struggled to keep up with the more intensive pace of change since then.  Why?  I think the rigidly hierarchical nature of company social interaction in traditional Japanese companies stifles the voice of innovation from younger employees.

Let’s say, though, that somehow Japan achieves productivity increases of +1% annually despite the “no comments; just follow orders” attitude of top managements.  I think that’s too much, but let’s go with it.  If so, the overall economy needs half that figure to overcome the decline in the workforce.  Real GDP growth has a trend ceiling of +0.5%.

So, the maximum sustainable rate of GDP expansion in Japan is barely north of zero.  It shouldn’t be surprising, then, if that figure spends considerable time south of breakeven.  As long as the numbers don’t get too negative, Japan will continue to stumble along on its journey to economic insignificance.

–what makes Japan important, interesting …and scary for the US and the EU is that we’re seeing a possible future for us in the Japan of today.

More on this tomorrow.

will the poor performance of Energy, Materials and Industrial sectors derail the S&P 500?

October 6, 2015 By in Current Market Thoughts, Energy, Japanese development, Portfolio management, securities markets, stock market, Strategy Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

In the course of doing a performance attribution for the S&P 500 year-to-date last week, I noted that the S&P 500 ex Energy, Materials and Industrials, is pretty close to flat so far this year on a total return basis.

But is it correct to conclude that the “healthy” sectors of the S&P will continue to be relatively immune to the economic illness caused by the price collapse of global mining commodities?   …or will they eventually be dragged down if, as I expect, commodity weakness continues for an extended period of time.

This isn’t as silly a question as it might seem at first.

In the early 1990s I was asked by the board of the company I worked for to present my views on the stock market in Japan at that time.  I created a presentation that divided the Topix index, which was trading at about 70x earnings, into three parts:

–highly speculative property-related companies that were trading at around 500x earnings and made up 10% of the market

–export-oriented industrials, such as the autos or tech companies like Canon, which were trading at 15-20x earnings and made up 30% of the market, and

–everything else, which made up 60% of the market and traded at around 25x.

I said what I believed:  that, while the index might do poorly as the speculatives came back to earth and the bulk of the market went sideways, the export-oriented stocks were cheap and would go up significantly in price–not only in yen but in dollars, too.  My model was the behavior of the US market throughout the second half of the 1970s, when former speculative favorites, the Nifty Fifty, were crushed while everything else went up.

An aside: a famous finance academic on the board, who made it clear he had not sought the opinion of a mere “practitioner” like me, objected that the low dividend yields of Japanese stock proved they remained wildly overvalued.  A little embarrassed (for him), I had to explain that Japanese tax laws did not provide the same preference for dividend income that the IRS did. In fact, dividend income was subject to income tax at an extremely high rate (up to 90%) in Japan.  Because of this, taxable investors (the majority at that time) had a very strong preference for (untaxed) capital gains.  Companies tended to make negligible cash payouts and to use stock dividends as a substitute.

Embarrassingly (for me), it turned out that my reasonable analysis was completely wrong.  Yes, the exporters were cheap, but for the next decade they significantly underperformed similar-quality companies elsewhere in the world.  In this case, the general economic funk that engulfed the Japanese economy hurt the stocks of all firms listed there.  There was no escape.

my thoughts

Thee aren’t a whole lot of relevant examples of this kind of situation to generalize from.  (Another might be the worldwide collapse in the price of mining commodities and of commodities stocks from 1982-86, which did not impede the upward progress of global stock markets from mid-1982 on.)

My hunch is that the contamination of “good” stocks in 1990s Japan is more a function of the continuing economic malaise in that country than of anything else.  What’s somewhat troubling is that the US today is very similar demographically to Japan back then, when lack of workforce growth was a significant contributor to Japan’s stagnation.  We have the same woes of extremely low interest rates and an impotent legislative arm tied to the status quo and unwilling to use fiscal policy to bolster the economy–another set of lead weights dragging Japan down.

 

At the end of the day, I’d argue that the US is inherently a much more dynamic country than others in the developed world.  Also, I see the commodities collapse as much more like an external shock than a sign of weakness in the domestic economy in the way the property collapse in Japan was.  So I see the chances that commodities/commodity stock softness will cripple the rest of the US stock market as low.  But there are enough similarities between us today and Japan 25 years ago to make me vaguely uneasy.

 

 

 

Janet Yellen, this week and last

September 25, 2015 By in China, Current Market Thoughts, Portfolio management Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Fridays are strange days on Wall Street.  That’s because, unless they’re super-confident, short-term traders don’t like to hold a large inventory of securities over a weekend.  Too much time for bad stuff to happen.  So they sell enthusiastically on Friday afternoons.

There’s certain sense to this behavior.  For them two days+ may be a long holding period.  Also, companies and people, particularly sneaky ones, like to save bad news up for late Friday afternoon or the weekend, when they think no one is paying attention.  This lessens the pain, they think.  Often, it has the opposite effect, however, since anyone who’s been around for a while knows what a late-Friday press release invariably contains.

 

So in one sense it’s not a great surprise that the huge effort–enough to send her staggering off the stage–Janet Yellen put out yesterday to explain that, yes, the US economy is in great shape and, yes, the Fed is going to take the first baby steps to get the country out of interest rate intensive care (IRIC (?)–although it may be too late for this acronym) before New Year’s eve had no lasting positive effect on stock prices today.

The reason is that, aside from robots designed to react to newsfeeds, everyone knew that already.  In fact, her announcement on Thursday the 15th that the Fed Funds rate would stay at zero for now wasn’t a shock, either.  Futures markets had been putting the odds of a rate hike in September at less than one in three.

Yet the stock market took something Ms. Yellen said last week the wrong way.  If it wasn’t the interest rate announcement, what was it?

Actually, I think there are two things, one said and one not.

The first, and more important, in my view, is the unspoken but strongly held belief by the nation’s finest economists that if we have to depend on the White House and Congress for economic support, we’re doomed.  That’s because monetary possibilities to plug up a hole in the bottom of the boat are all used up.  The federal arsenal now contains only fiscal policy—changes in government regulation of business, or in spending priorities or in taxes.  The Fed knows it isn’t going to get bailed out by Washington if it raises rates too soon–something that has gotten many nations into trouble in the past.  Therefore, it has to err on the side of caution, even if that’s unhealthy to do.

We all sot of know this, but it’s not a plus to be reminded that as a nation we’re stuck in at best second gear as long as Washington dysfunctions its way through life.

The second, the one said, is that developments in China have the potential to hurt US growth enough to tip us over the edge.  I don’t think the effect on the stock market is so much about the details.  It’s the headline that matters–that the US is no longer so large that we’re impervious to what may happen in any other single country.  It conjures up thoughts of the post-WWI, when the UK passed the mantle of world economic leadership to the US, except that we’re now in the role of the UK.

Again, everyone sort of knew this was happening.  But having it confirmed by our foremost economists is another thing.

To put this in stock market terms, I don’t think Ms. Yellen is calling into question the market’s ideas about current earnings as about the multiple those earnings are worth.

 

 

 

thinking about China: deflating a stock market bubble

August 27, 2015 By in Asian economic development, characteristics of their financial markets, China, Current Market Thoughts, economics, emerging markets Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

For most of the 30 years I’ve been watching China-related securities, the mainland stock markets have been an afterthought for virtually all foreign investors.  The same for the authorities in Beijing, as far as I can see.  They seem to have regarded the equity markets as a vehicle for funding moribund state-owned enterprises that no bureaucrat in his right mind would give money to.

The mainland markets have gradually morphed over the past decade into something more interesting, as smaller, more innovative firms elbowed their way in.  But the market remains very hard for foreigners to gain access to, and is arguably still not worth the trouble.  The real action remains in Hong Kong.

 

Last year, faced with a bubble in the domestic property market created by a flood of investment money with no place else to go, Beijing decided to redirect this flow of funds to the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets.

In solving one problem, however, Beijing created another.

The issue was partly that the mainland exchanges were going through the roof in US-internet-bubble fashion.  In addition, however, the rise was fueled in large part by borrowed money.  Worse, this consisted not only of official margin lending but also by huge amounts of sub rosa margin disguised as either uncollateralized borrowing or debt secured by businesses or property.  No one knew how large this total debt was–only that it was gigantic, and that inexperienced retail equity investors had leveraged themselves to the sky because they had taken government encouragement as a guarantee against losses.

 

As/when the market peaks and begins to decline, margin loans come due.  When speculators can’t add more money to margin accounts (as is inevitably the case), this triggers forced margin selling that feeds on itself and turns into an avalanche of downward pressure.  Once selling starts, it can be almost impossible to stop.  Of course, as soon as potential buyers realize what’s going on, they withdraw and wait for the market to hit bottom.

This precarious development in Shanghai/Shenzhen is not a unique phenomenon.  The same thing happened in 1985 in Singapore/Malaysia, in 1987 in Hong Kong, and in 1997-98 in many smaller Asian markets.  In hindsight, Beijing could possibly have averted the crisis by raising margin requirements and by cracking down on unofficial margin loans by financial institutions.  But it didn’t.

Beijing seems to me, however, to have followed the standard protocol for dealing with a mammoth overhang of margin selling and restoring order to the market, namely:

  1.  identifying and cutting off borrowing sources

2.  prohibiting short sellers from exacerbating the problem by speculative selling

3.  buying enough stock, either directly or indirectly, to reduce forced selling to a level that the market can handle unaided

4.  allowing the market, once functioning again, to clear by itself.

The way I look at it, we’re in #4 now.

One other comment:

in the US, the rise and fall of the stock market is regarded as the most powerful leading indicator of future economic performance.  I don’t think that what’s going on in Shanghai/Shenzhen stock trading has much macroeconomic significance.  Rather, the China stock market fall is an obstacle that every emerging market encounters on the way to stock market maturity.