Category Archives: Banks

US corporate tax reform (iii)

November 23, 2016 By in Banks, deferred taxes, income tax rates, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

For years ago I wrote in detail about today’s topic, which is deferred taxes.

The basics:

–deferred taxes are an accounting device that reconciles the cheery face a company typically present to shareholders with the more down-at-the-heels look it gives the IRS, while accurately reporting to both parties the cash taxes paid

–look at the cash flow statement, which, as the name implies, shows the cash moving in and out of the company or in the income tax footnote to get the particulars for a firm you may be interested in.

accounting for a loss

The issue I’m concerned about in this post is what happens when a company makes a loss.

reporting to the IRS

The income statement  for the IRS looks like this:

pre-tax income (loss)      ($100)

income tax due                          0

after-tax income (loss)     ($100).

reporting to shareholders

Financial accounting books, in contrast, look like this:

pre-tax income (loss)         ($100)

deferred tax, at 35%                 $35

after-tax income (loss)        ($65).

what’s going on

The financial accounting idea, other than to cosmetically soften the blow of a loss, is that at some future date the company in question will again be making money.  If so, it will be able to use the loss being incurred now to offset otherwise taxable future income.  Financial accounting rules allow the company to take the future benefit today.

It’s important to note, however, that the deferred tax is an estimate of future tax relief, based on today’s tax rates.

why does this matter?

Profits add to shareholders’ equity; losses subtract from it.  Under the GAAP accounting used for reports to stockholders, a loss-making company only has to write down its shareholders’ equity (aka net worth, book value) by about two-thirds of the actual loss.  To the casual observer, and to the value investor using computer screening, it looks stronger than it probably should.

Financial stocks typically trade on price/book.  This is also the sector that took devastatingly large losses during the financial crisis (that they caused, I might add).

Suppose the corporate tax rate is reduced to 15%.

This diminishes the value of any tax loss carryforwards a firm may have.  It also may require a substantial writedown of book value, making that figure more accurate.  But the writedown may also underline that the stock isn’t as cheap as it appears.

 

ZipCap

May 21, 2015 By in Banks, Industry Analysis, internet, Investment firms Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

ZipCap, short for Zip Code Capital, is a San Diego-based startup alternative lender featured in the Business section of today’s New York Times.  It provides low-cost loans to local businesses that aren’t able to get credit from traditional banks–presumably either because they’re not (or not very) profitable or because they don’t have a good enough financial handle on their enterprise to know whether they make money or not.

ZipCap helps a client business form an “Inner Circle” of customers who pledge to buy a minimum amount of stuff from the client over a specified period.  ZipCap lends against that commitment.  In the case of the restaurant/coffee house featured in the NYT article, 130 entities pledged to spend $475 each ($61,750 in total) over the following year.  That got Beezy’s Cafe a $10,000 loan at 3.99%.

If all of this were new spending, my back-of-the-envelope guess is that it would bring in $40,000 or so in fresh operating income, far in excess of what would be needed to repay the debt.  For Beezy’s to be better off simply from forming the Inner Circle, a quarter of the pledges would have to be new spending, or about $2.50 a week per Inner Circle member.  That figure would need to be adjusted up if not everyone keeps his word.

 

It seems to me, from the limited data in the NYT and on the ZipCap website, that ZipCap isn’t really about lending.

It’s not a social service, either.  Chances are that Beezy’s would be better off getting, say, business students from a local college to create financial tracking to help figure out what makes money for the cafe and what doesn’t.

What ZipCap does do, I think, is provide a socially acceptable, non-toxic way for a struggling business to proclaim that, though it might appear to be thriving, it isn’t   …and, at least implicitly, that it won’t be around for long unless it gets more community support.

Of course, there may be unintended consequences of the Inner Circle creation.   Assuming the extra spending doesn’t come out of thin air, IC creation at Cafe A may force Cafe B to close its doors.  Or it may make it extra hard for a new Cafe C to get started.

It will also be interesting to see how ZipCap deals with rising interest rates, as and when they occur.

 

cooling the Chinese stock market fever

April 17, 2015 By in "naked" short selling, Banks, China, commodies speculation--stabilizing or destabilizing?, Investment firms, Margin, securities markets, short selling, stock market Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In the 1990s, Alan Greenspan, the head of the Fed back then, famously warned against “irrational exuberance” in the US stock market, but did nothing to stop it   …this even though he had the ability to cool the market down by tightening the rules on margin lending.  This is the stock market  analogue to raising or lowering the Fed Funds rate to influence the price of credit, but has never been used seriously in the US during my working life.

The  Bank of Japan has no such compunctions.  It has been very willing to chasten/encourage speculatively minded retail investors by tightening/loosening the criteria for borrowing money to buy stocks.

 

We have no real history to generalize from in the case of China.  But moves in recent weeks by the Chinese securities markets regulator seem to indicate that Beijing will fall into the stomp-on-the-brakes camp.

Specifically,

–at the end of last month, the regulator allowed (ordered?) domestic mutual funds to invest in shares in Hong Kong, where mainland-listed firms’ shares are trading at hefty discounts to their prices in Shanghai

–highly leveraged “umbrella trusts” cooked up by Chinese banks to circumvent margin eligibility requirements have been banned,

–a new futures product, based on small and mid-cap stocks, has been created, offering speculators the opportunity to short this highly heated sector for the first time, and

–effective today, institutional investors in China are being allowed to lend out their holdings–providing short-sellers with the wherewithal to ply their trade (although legal, short-selling hasn’t been a big feature of domestic Chinese markets until now, because there wasn’t any easy way to obtain share to sell short).

What does all this mean?

The simplest conclusion is that Beijing wants to pop what it sees as a speculative stock market bubble on the mainland.  It is possible, however, that more monetary stimulus–to prop up rickety state-owned enterprises or loony regional government-sponsored real estate projects–is in the pipeline and Beijing simply wants to dampen the potential future effects on stocks.

I have no idea which view is correct.

It’s clear, however, that Hong Kong is going to be a port in any storm, and that it is going to be increasingly used as a safety valve to absorb upward market pressure from the mainland.  So relative gains vs. Shanghai seem assured.  Whether that means absolute gains remains to be seen, although I personally have no inclination to trim my HK holdings.

 

 

peer-to-peer lending, the next big banking innovation

October 28, 2014 By in Banks, bond market, Industry Analysis, junk bonds, P2P lending, securities markets Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

the demise of the department store

The story of the big commercial banks over the last forty years is sort of like that of the department stores, only in slow motion.  In the case of the latter, entrepreneurs targeted the most profitable “departments” of the cumbersome retailing giants and competed against them with freestanding specialty store chains offering a wider selection, trendier products and lower prices.  Toys, consumer electronics, jewelry, household goods, cosmetics, and, of course, various types of apparel were all targeted.

The financial world, for some bizarre reason known only to itself, calls this process “disintermediation.”  It has been underway for almost a half-century.

Consider what a bank does for a living:

in the simplest terms, it borrows money from some people, paying, say, 2% interest, and lends it to others at, say, 8%.  It uses the difference (the spread) to cover costs and make a profit.

money market funds

The first big disintermediation came in the 1970s, with money market funds.  These substitutes for bank checking or savings accounts take deposits from customer and make short-term (meaning a few months) loans to governments and corporations.  The entire spread, less expenses, goes to the money market shareholder.  So in normal times, money market funds pay considerably higher interest than banks.  The banks’ only advantage has been government deposit insurance.

The emergence of the money market fund produced a massive shift of customer deposits away from banks.

junk bonds

The second was  junk bond funds.  The first junk bonds were “fallen angels.”  That is, they were issued with low coupons by companies whose businesses subsequently deteriorated.  As a result, their bond prices had dropped sharply (and therefore the bonds’ yields had risen to high levels).  Careful credit analysis would turn up either companies that were on the cusp of a favorable turn in their fortunes or others where the market had considerably overestimated the chances of default.

As they become popular, junk bond funds soon faced a shortage of suitable bonds to buy. This led to the creation of an original-issue junk bond market–or junk bonds as we know them today.  These bonds were direct competitors to the corporate lending operations of banks.  However, junk bond issuers offered lower interest rates plus fewer restrictive covenants to borrowers and they delivered the entire spread, less expenses, to the fund shareholders.

Again, there was a massive shift of profitable business away from banks.

peer-to-peer lending

We’re in the early days of a third big disintermediation.  Peer-to-peer lending is, I think, will end up replacing banks as makers of small personal and commercial loans.

As things stand now, P2P lenders are simply internet-based intermediaries.  They do credit analysis to determine an interest rate for a given loan, put potential lenders and borrowers together and take a fee.  As I see them, they’re very much like the creators of money market funds or junk bond funds, only targeting a different “department” of the banks.  In the junk bond case, though, the “department” quickly morphed into something else.  That could easily happen with P2P, as well.

What’s most interesting about peer-to-peer to me is that the leading firms are preparing to go public by issuing common stock.

More when IPO dates are closer.

 

new money market fund regulations

July 24, 2014 By in Banks, bond market, Books, Industry Analysis, Investment firms, money market funds, securities markets, Uncategorized Tags: , Leave a comment

Yesterday, the SEC announced new rules for US money market funds, which in the aggregate hold $2.6 trillion in investors’ money.  Of that amount, two-thirds is in funds catering to institutions and high net worth individuals; one-third is in funds serving the mass market.

Why the need for new rules?  

Two reasons:

–today’s aggregate money market assets are large enough to be a risk to the overall financial system if something goes badly wrong, and

–the funds are typically sold as being just like bank deposits, only with higher yields.  However, like most Wall Street claims that  “x is just like y, only better,” it’s not really true.  The differences only become important in times of market stress, when normally sane people do crazy things, and when “yes, but…” is a sign for panic to begin.  So there’s a chance that “badly wrong” can happen.

The differences?    …bank deposits are backed by government insurance that insulates depositors from investment mistakes a bank may make.  Also, the Fed stands ready to rush boatloads of cash to a bank if withdrawals exceed the money a bank happens to have on hand.  Money market funds have neither.

Yet many holders are unaware that it’s possible for a money market fund’s net asset value to fall below the customary $1.00 per share, or that a fund might be overwhelmed by redemptions and forced to sell assets at bargain-basement prices to meet them.

the fix

Fixing this potential vulnerability has two parts:

–giving the finds the ability to halt or postpone redemptions during financial emergencies, and

–requiring funds to have floating net asset values, not the simple $1.00 a share.  This would mean marking each security to market every day.  …which would likely require hiring a third-party to price securities that didn’t trade on a given day.

The first of these would avoid the government having to step in the case of a run on a fund.  The second should reinforce that money market funds aren’t bank deposits.

the new rules

Of source, the organizations that sell money market funds have been strongly opposed to anything that would ruin their “just like…, but better…” sales pitch.  Their lobbying has blocked action for years.

So it should be no surprise that yesterday’s SEC action was a compromise measure:

–all funds will be able to postpone redemptions in time of emergency, but

–only funds that cater to big-money investors will have to maintain a variable NAV.

Personally, I don’t understand why money market funds that serve ordinary investors should be exempt from having to calculate a true daily NAV.  You’d think that this is the group that most needs to understand that the (remote) possibility of loss is one of the tradeoffs for getting a higher yield.  Arguably, sophisticated investors already know.  But the financial lobby is incredibly powerful in Washington, and this may have been the price for getting anything at all done.