Tag Archives: macroeconomics

end game (iii): if Biden wins…

August 27, 2020 By in administration economic strategy, economics, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

As I mentioned earlier in the week, the investment implications of a Trump reelection are straightforward. As an American, I’d be deeply shocked and disappointed by the implied repudiation of traditional American values. As an investor, I’d expect a continuation of the “flight capital” market we have been in for some time, with a return of the domestic economy-centric Russell 2000 names to the bear market they had been in for most of Trump’s time in office, until late March of this year.

I find the stock market consequences of a Biden victory much harder to handicap. My thoughts so far:

–the transition of power might not be smooth. Trump has already declined to say he will accept the election result if he loses. He has begun to disrupt mail service on the, perhaps mistaken, idea that this will suppress more votes for Biden than for him. More “dirty tricks” may be in the offing. He may also end up testing the limits of the law by pardoning himself for any crimes he may have committed before or while in office.

Worries about abuse of power may have some negative effect on stocks around election time. It’s equally possible, though, that, sensing defeat, traditional Republicans will distance themselves from Trump in advance (as some seem to me to be already doing this), signalling that party loyalists should no longer follow Trump, thereby minimizing the damage he might otherwise do. It’s hard to know, but it says volumes about Trump that musing about what amounts to a post-election coup attempt doesn’t sound totally crazy. Can we be even remotely similar to Moscow 1991?

–interest rates will likely remain low for a long time. This is a distinct plus for stocks, for three reasons: they will remain attractive vs. the two other liquid asset classes, cash and bonds; bonds are unlikely to fall in price because of rising short-term interest rates, a development that would lead investors of all stripes to rebalance away from stocks; and the cost of carrying the mammoth amount of debt run up under Trump–with more possibly needed to repair damage he has done–will remain low. In fact, as I’m writing this, there are reports that the Fed will soon announce its intention to retain near-zero interest rates for the next half-decade

–income taxes will certainly go up, both for wealthy individuals (this doesn’t matter so much for the economy as a whole because the rich don’t tend to change their spending very much as income goes up and down) and for corporations. This latter means the 50% or so of S&P earnings that come from US operations will fall by, let’s say 8%. The resulting 4% drop in overall earnings is not good, but it comes closer to being a rounding error in analysts’ estimates than a serious shortfall. In today’s volatile stock trading, it amounts to maybe two or three down sessions in a row

–on the other hand, there’s lots of low-hanging economic fruit begging to be picked. The Trump economic program is a hodge-podge of wackiness, whose effect has been to please rich donors but to retard overall GDP growth, not foster it. Closing the borders to immigration, for example, shrinks GDP expansion by more than a third. Placing tariffs on imports has squeezed real incomes; retaliation has decimated the revenues of exporters, especially farmers. Trump’s central concept–restore low-wage manual labor jobs to the US while driving computer and engineering firms out of the country because they employ non-white foreigners–is about as loony as it gets. So too encouraging Detroit to keep on making gas-guzzlers while the rest of the world turns electric. Hard to quantify, but just ending insane programs has got to be good

–there are thornier issues to face, as well. Trump left actual tax reform both out of the name and the provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which did nothing to address sweetheart industry tax breaks that have long since passed their sell-by date. National infrastructure is four years older and creakier without having been touched …nor have Social Security or Medicare problems been addressed

–then there’s other senseless Trumpish stuff, like the ultra-strange attack on the viability of major domestic research universities, a national treasure, by denying deep-walleted foreigners access to them. The point is there are enough shoot-yourself-in-the-foot Trump things to just stop doing, for the resulting positives to dwarf the losses from a higher corporate tax rate and reversal of the tax giveaway to the rich.

my preliminary conclusion

Delegitimize white racists and let foreign workers back in and the country will be on the road to economic expansion again. No more crazy gains like in 2020 so far, but a shot at +10%. Maybe all the running next year will be in domestic consumer names.

the Trump economy

June 16, 2020 By in economics, macroeconomics, Trump's economics, Uncategorized Tags: , 3 Comments

Recent election polling seems to show that potential voters don’t approve of anything in the Trump administration except its handling of the economy. One might argue that in comparison with supporting white racism, subverting the Justice Department, causing tens of thousands of Americans to die needlessly from the coronavirus and trying to corrupt the military, blunting economic growth is the least bad thing Trump has done.

It appears, however, the common belief is that Trump has actually done good things for US economic growth during his time in office and that on economic grounds he would be a better presidential choice than Joe Biden. (Personally, I think it’s a sign of the extreme poverty of domestic politics that the Democrats can’t come up with a better candidate than Biden but that’s another issue.) My opinion is that Trump is worse than economically clueless; I think he has been doing potentially incalculable damage to the long-term economic prospects of the country. If so, why don’t people realize this?

I think the explanation is in the financial results of Walmart (WMT), the largest retailer in the US. WMT’s target market is Americans of average and somewhat below average income. The company started in the midwest. Political action by incumbent retailers in California and the Northeast have limited its exposure to those areas. So it’s a reasonable thermometer for economic health in the rest of the country.

EPS growth for WMT over the past seven years is as follows:

year yoy eps growth

2019 +6.3%

2018 +11.1%

2017 +2.3%

2016 -5.5%

2015 -9.9%

2014 -0.8%

2013 +1.8%.

Note: Like many retailers, WMT’s fiscal year runs from February through January of the following calendar year. So, for example, what I’ve labeled as 2019 is actually 2/19 – 1/20.

What I read from these numbers is that recovery from the financial crisis of 2007-09 didn’t reach the large chunks of America that WMT services until almost eight years after the overall economy bottomed. This coincided with Trump’s election.

Did Trump cause this pickup or is it simply the “trickle down” of recovery to a a part of the country neither major party cared that much about? I don’t see anything in Trump’s past or present performance record to make me think it’s the former.

depreciating the dollar

March 2, 2020 By in administration economic strategy, currency effects, currency markets, deprecating currency, economics, macroeconomics, reserve currency, Strategy, Trump's economics, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

When a country is having economic problems–slow growth, outdated industrial base, weak educational system, balance of payments issues–there are generally speaking two ways to fix things:

–internal adjustment, meaning fixing the domestic problems through domestic government and private sector action, and

–external adjustment, meaning depreciating the currency.

The first approach is the fundamentally correct way.  But it requires skill and demands a shakeup of the status quo.  So it’s politically difficult.

Depreciating the currency, on the other hand, is a quick-fix, sugar-high kind of thing, of basically trying to shift the problem onto a country’s trading partners.  The most common result, however, is a temporary growth spurt, a big loss of national wealth, and resurfacing of the old, unresolved problems a few years down the road–often with a bout of unwanted inflation.  The main “pluses” of depreciation are that it’s politically easy, requires little skill and most people won’t understand who’s at fault for the ultimate unhappy ending.

Examples:

the Great Depression of the 1930s;

the huge depreciation of the yen under PM Abe, which has impoverished the average Japanese citizen, made Japan a big tourist destination (because it’s so cheap) and pumped a little life into the old zaibatsu industrial conglomerates.

 

It’s understandable that Donald Trump is a fan.  It’s not clear he has even a passing acquaintance with economic theory or history.  And in a very real sense depreciation would be a reprise of the disaster he created in Atlantic City, where he freed himself of personal liabilities and paid himself millions but the people who trusted and supported him lost their shirts.

Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, is harder to fathom.  She appears to be intelligent, thoughtful and a careful planner.  It’s difficult to believe that she doesn’t know what she’s supporting.

 

 

 

Hong Kong riots

December 11, 2019 By in China, Hong Kong, macroeconomics, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 1 Comment

a brief-ish history

During the first part of the 19th century the UK’s stores of gold and silver were being depleted (in effect contracting the country’s money supply) to pay for tea imported from China.  London suggested to Beijing that they barter opium from the British colony India instead.  Beijing sensibly refused.  So in 1841 the British army invaded China to force the change.  The UK seized Hong Kong to use as a staging area and kept it once China submitted to its demands.  During a second Opium War (1856-60), launched when China again balked at the mass shipment of narcotics into its territory, the UK seized more land.

In 1898, China granted the UK a 99-year lease over the area it occupied.  This legalized the status of Hong Kong, which remained under the practical control of the “hongs,” a newer form of the old British opium companies, for much of the 20th century.

In the late 1970s Deng Xiaoping made it clear that the lease would not be renewed but that Hong Kong would remain a Special Administrative Region, with substantial autonomy, for fifty years after its return to China on June 30, 1997.  (For its part, the UK parliament decided Hong Kongers would find the climate of the British Isles inhospitable.  So these soon-to-be-former British subjects would be issued identity cards but no other legal protections–citizenship, for example–within the Commonwealth on the handover.  This is a whole other story.)

Hong Kong’s importance today…

The conventional wisdom at that time was that while Hong Kong China’s main goal in triggering the return was to set the stage for the eventual reintegration of (much larger) Taiwan, where the armies of Chiang Kaishek fled after their defeat by Mao.

Today Hong Kong is much more important, in my view, than it was in the 1980s.  Due, ironically, to the sound, and well-understood worldwide, legal framework imposed by the UK, Hong Kong has become the main jumping-off point for multinationals investing in China.  It’s also an international banking center, a transportation hub and a major tourist destination.  Most important for investors, however, is that its equity market not only has greater integrity than Wall Street but is also the easiest venue to buy and sell Chinese stocks (Fidelity’s international brokerage service is the best in the US for online access, I think, even though the prices in my account are invariably a day–sometimes three–old).

…and tomorrow

Mr. Trump has begun to weaponize US-based finance by denying Chinese companies access to US capital markets, US portfolio investors and, ultimately, the dollar-based financial system.  China’s obvious response is accelerate its build up of Hong Kong as a viable alternative in all three areas.  As with the tariff wars, Trump’s ill thought out strategy will most likely galvanize these efforts.

the riots…

Hong Kong has 27 years left to go as an SAR.  For some reason, however, Xi seems to have decided earlier in 2019 to begin to exert mainland control today rather than adhering to the return agreement.  His trial balloon was legislation under which political protesters in Hong Kong whose statements/actions are legal there, but crimes elsewhere in China, could be arrested and extradited to the mainland for prosecution.  This sparked the rioting.  These protests do have deeper underlying causes which are similar to those affecting many areas in the US.

…continue to be an issue

The recent change in Hong Kong’s stock listing rules (to allow companies whose owners have special, super voting power shares) and the subsequent fund raising by Alibaba seem to me to show that Beijing wants Hong Kong to become the center for international capital-raising by Chinese companies.  From this perspective, Xi’s failure to minimize disruptive protests by withdrawing the extradition legislation quickly is hard to understand.

One might argue that Xi, like Trump, is trying to reestablish an older order, purely for the political advantage it gives.  In China’s case it entails reviving the Communist Party’s traditional power base, the dysfunctional state-owned enterprises that Deng began to marginalize in the late 1970s with his move toward a market-based economy (i.e., “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”).   I find it hard to believe that Beijing is as impractical and dysfunctional as Washington, but who knows.

My bottom line:  I think the Hong Kong situation is worth monitoring carefully as a gauge of how aggressively China is going to exploit the opening Trump policies have haplessly given it to replace the US as the center of world commerce–sooner than anyone might have dreamed in 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trumponomics—good for the economy?

December 3, 2019 By in administration economic strategy, economics, foreign trade, government economic policy, macroeconomics, Strategy, Trump's economics, Trump, taxes and trade, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Supporters of Donald Trump tend to excuse his white nationalism, his erratic policymaking, the paucity of his factual knowledge, the whiff of sadism in his treatment of immigrants, the apparent promotion of family business interests…by saying that at least he’s good for the economy.  They typically cite low unemployment, GDP growth and the stock market as proof.

Is that correct?

Yes, unemployment is low.  Yes, the economy is growing at trend–after receiving a boost from fiscal stimulation (the corporate tax cut) last year.  And the stock market did rally on the announcement of Trump’s election victory.  (We can quibble about stock market performance:  though significantly higher today, the US was pretty much the worst market in the world in 2017, when virtually everybody was up–and more than us; since the 20% boost in US corporate after-tax income it’s up another 10%–much better performance than markets where the tax rate has remained unchanged).

But I think this rationalization, offered typically by wealthy beneficiaries of income tax changes, simply deflects attention away from administration policies that can potentially do severe long-term damage to US prospects.  Here are a few:

–tariff wars.  Tariffs can be an important way to give industries of the future breathing room to develop, by insulating them from more sophisticated foreign competition.  The administration, however, is protecting low value-added manual labor jobs against competition from more efficient firms in China.  These tariffs have the perverse effect of retarding manufacturing development here while forcing China to turn to higher value-added work.  The latter is a perennial stumbling block for developing countries, so the excuse of Trump tariffs to force the move to higher value-added industry is a rare gift to Beijing.

In addition, the US has been a prime destination for multinationals’ advanced manufacturing because of the large local market and the experienced workforce.  The possibility of tariffs–and their apparently unpredictable implementation–has stopped this flow.

–retaliatory tariffs.  Tariffs don’t go unanswered. China responded to US levies by shifting purchases of soybeans to Brazil and other countries.   As/when tariff wars end, the soybean market will most likely not revert to the status quo ante; once in the door, other, arguably more dependable, suppliers will doubtless retain market share.  By the way, when the administration withdrew from the TPP, it also made US soybeans more expensive in another Pacific market, Japan.

–restrictions on immigration.  The solution for tech companies who are unable to hire foreign scientists to work in the US because they can’t get visas is to move R&D operations to, say, Canada.  Also, the administration’s white supremacism has made foreigners question whether they will be safe in the US as tourists or students, hurting both industries.  Chinese citizens may also feel it’s unpatriotic to travel here.  A bigger worry:  will this force US-based multinationals to begin to regard themselves as no longer American?

–zero/negative interest rates.  This is a weird situation in financial markets, which, to my equity-oriented mind, is bound to end badly. Ultra-low rates are also trouble for risk-averse savers, including traditional pension plans.  In the US, downward pressure on rates comes both from foreign bond arbitrage and administration demands that the Fed offset tariff damage to growth with looser money policy.

 

Meanwhile, what’s not being addressed:  infrastructure, health care including drug prices, education, retraining displaced workers (where we’re worst in the OECD)