Tag Archives: Financial Times

the threat in Trump’s deficit spending

February 12, 2019 By in Bond Environment, bond vigilantes, corporate income tax reform, corporate tax reform in the US, government economic policy, income tax rates, stocks vs. bonds, Strategy, taxes, Treasury bonds, Trump, taxes and trade, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

In an opinion piece in the Financial Times a few days ago, Gillian Tett points to and expands on a comment in a Wall Street advisory committee letter to the Treasury Secretary.  Although it may not have implications for financial markets today or tomorrow, it’s still worth keeping in mind, I think.

The comment concerns the changes in the income tax code the administration pushed through Congress in late 2017.  Touted as “reform,” the tax bill is such only because it brings down the top domestic corporate tax rate from 35%, the highest in the world, to about average at 21%.  This reduces the incentive for US-based multinationals (think: drug company “inversions”) to recognize profits abroad.  But special interest tax breaks remained untouched, and tax reductions for the ultra-wealthy were tossed in for good measure.  Because of this, the legislation results in a substantial reduction in tax money coming in to Uncle Sam.

Ms. Tett underlines the worry that there are no obvious buyers for the trillions of dollars in Treasury bonds that the government will have to issue over the coming years to cover the deficit the tax bill has created.

 

A generation ago Japan was an avid buyer of US government debt, but its economy has been dormant for a quarter-century.  Over the past twenty years, China has taken up the baton, as it placed the fruits of its trade surplus in US Treasuries.  But Washington is aggressively seeking to reduce the trade deficit with China; the Chinese economy, too, is starting to plateau; and Beijing, whatever its reasons, has already been trimming its Treasury holdings for some time.

Who’s left to absorb the extra supply that’s on the way?   …US individuals and companies.

 

The obvious question is whether domestic buyers have a large enough appetite to soak up the increasing issue of Treasuries.  No one really knows.

Three additional observations (by me):

–the standard (and absolutely correct, in my view) analysis of deficit spending is that it isn’t free.  It is, in effect, a bill that’s passed along to be paid by future generations of Americans–diminishing the quality of life of Millennials while enhancing that of the top 0.1% of Boomers

–historically, domestic holders have been much more sensitive than foreign holders to creditworthiness-threatening developments from Washington like the Trump tax bill, and

–while foreign displeasure might be expressed mostly in currency weakness, and therefore be mostly invisible to dollar-oriented holders, domestic unhappiness would be reflected mostly in an increase in yields.  And that would immediately trigger stock market weakness.  If I’m correct, the decline in domestic financial markets what Washington folly would trigger implies that Washington would be on a much shorter leash than it is now.

 

slowdown in China

January 23, 2019 By in China, Chinese GDP, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

In the late 1970s Deng Xiaoping was forced to tackle the gigantic mess that central planning had made of the Chinese economy during Mao’s rule.  The problem:  highly inefficient, loss-making, corruption-infested, Soviet-style (feel free to add more negative, hyphenated adjectives) state-owned enterprises dominated the industrial base.  The products were poor;  the books more fiction than not.  Deng’s solution was to adopt Western-style capitalism under the banner of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”  This meant pulling the plug on bank credit and political favor for state-owned enterprises and redirecting support toward the private sector.

The result has been 30+ years of economic growth so strong that it has vaulted China from nowhere into first place among world economies.  In fact, the PRC is now 10%+ larger than #2, the US, using Purchasing Power Parity as the yardstick.

According to an astute observer of China, Nicholas Lardy, writing in the Financial Times, however, current Chinese leader Xi Jinping has not simply been cracking down on the cumulative excesses of the private sector over the past couple of years.  He has also reversed Deng’s policy in favor of building up the state-owned sector again.  Lardy thinks this decision is reducing China’s annual GDP growth rate by a whopping two percentage points.

I’m not sure why this is happening.  But for China, the highest economic principle has never been about achieving maximum sustainable GDP growth.  Rather, it’s whatever is necessary to maintain the Communist Party in power.  Reduction in GDP growth is a secondary concern.

 

I don’t know how this affects China’s stance in tariff negotiations with the US, especially since White House economists seem to be suggesting that the US economy is already beginning to contract under the weigh of current tariffs plus the government shutdown   (increased tariffs slated for March will only deepen any decline).  From a longer-term point of view, though–and assuming Chinese policy doesn’t change–for a company to simply have exposure to China will no longer be any guarantee of success.

 

where to from here?

March 29, 2018 By in currency effects, currency markets, economics, reserve currency, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

I’m not a big fan of Lawrence Summers, but he had an interesting op-ed article in the Financial Times early this month.  He observes that, unnoticed by most domestic stock market commentators, the foreign- exchange value of the dollar has steadily deteriorated since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.  Currency futures markets are predicting a continuing deterioration in the coming years.  He thinks the two things are connected.  I do, too.

To my mind, what is happening  on Wall Street recently is that currency market worry is now seeping into stock trading as well.  If someone forced me to pick a catalyst for this move (I would prefer not to), I’d say it was the possibility, introduced in the press investigation of Cambridge Analytica, that what we’ve believed to be Mr. Trump’s uncanny insight into human motivation (arguably his principal redeeming feature) may be nothing more than his reading a script CA has prepared for him.  This would echo the contrast between the role of successful businessman he played on reality TV vs. his sub-par real-world record (half the return of his fellow real estate investors while assuming twice the risk).

 

The real economic issue is not Mr. Trump’s flawed self, though.  Rather, it’s the idea that public policy in Washington generally, White House and Congress, seems to have shifted from laissez faire promotion of businesses of the future to the opposite extreme–protecting sunset industries at the former’s expense.   In this scenario, overall growth slows, and the country doubles down on areas of declining economic relevance.

We’ve seen this movie before–in the conduct of Tokyo, protecting the 1980s-era businesses of the descendants of the samurai while discouraging innovation.  The result has been over a quarter-century of economic stagnation + a collapse in the currency.

 

More tomorrow.

the Toys R Us Chapter 11 filing

September 21, 2017 By in Private equity, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Toys R Us (TRU) is no longer a publicly traded company.  After a very rocky period of being buffeted by Wal-Mart, Target, and with Amazon beginning to pile on, TRU was taken private in 2005.

Its fortunes haven’t improved while in private equity hands.  In addition, as private equity projects usually do, TRU acquired a huge amount of debt, as well.  In a situation like this, suppliers are typically very antsy about the possibility of a bankruptcy filing.  That’s because trade creditors have little standing in bankruptcy court; they usually can’t get either their merchandise back or payment on any receivables due.

When a reent press report appeared that TRU was considering Chapter 11, suppliers apparently refused to send any more merchandise to TRU on credit, demanding payment in full upfront instead.  The company didn’t have the cash available to pay for enough merchandise to fill its stores in advance of the all-important holiday season.   So it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

None of this is particularly strange.  Years ago, one of my interns did a study that showed that even in the early 1990s TRU was losing market share to WMT and TGT, and was making due mostly by taking share from mom and pop toy stores.  Then the last mom and pops closed their doors and TRU’s real trouble began.

What dd surprise me was the report in today’s Financial Times that the company’s notes due in 2018 were trading at close to par a couple of weeks ago–vs. $.28 on the dollar now.

How could this be?  Holders were apparently betting that TRU would limp through the holidays and then refinance its 2018 debt obligations–allowing these “investors” to collect a coupon and exit if they so chose.

The fact that professional investors would commit money to this threadbare investment thesis shows how desperate for yield they are in fixed income land at present.  As/when rates begin to rise, things could easily get ugly, fast.

economics in the US vs. identity

May 3, 2017 By in robots, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

The Financial Times has recently added an interesting new Opinions columnist, Rana Foroohar.  In her column yesterday, she writes that while the Democrats believe that they lost the presidential election because of misogyny and racism, the more likely cause is wage stagnation and job insecurity.  In other words, long-time Democrats voted Republican in the last election in spite of the victors’ abhorrent social views, not because of them.  Further, she implies that by continuing to seek favor from large corporates as well as by taking up the former Republican mantle of mindless legislative obstruction, the Democratic party risks further establishing itself as part of the economic problem, not the solution.

Clearly, the Democratic leadership doesn’t believe this, although personally I think Ms. Foroohar is correct.  Moreover, as Ms. Foroohor notes, the issue of job insecurity and wage stagnation is a dynamic one, not static.  As recent research from the University of Cambridge suggests, and the emergence of self-driving cars illustrates, the range of human tasks subject to replacement by machines is continuing to expand, putting more blue-collar jobs as well as some white-collar occupations as risk.

So this central issue is not going to go away.  It’s going to get bigger.

 

Social issues aside, a stock market investor must, I think, address two questions:

–how to participate through stock selection in the substitution of hardware/software capital for labor, and

–how closely continuing political dysfunction in the US resembles the situation in Japan thirty years or so ago, in which a foolish political defense of the status quo in the face of structural change has resulted in a decades-long impairment of GDP growth there.