Month: September 2016

Redacted Version of the September 2016 FOMC Statement

Redacted Version of the September 2016 FOMC Statement

July 2016 September 2016 Comments
Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that the labor market strengthened and that economic activity has been expanding at a moderate rate. Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in July indicates that the labor market has continued to strengthen and growth of economic activity has picked up from the modest pace seen in the first half of this year. FOMC shades GDP up.? They have groupthink and confirmation bias, and thus interpret noise as signal.
Job gains were strong in June following weak growth in May. On balance, payrolls and other labor market indicators point to some increase in labor utilization in recent months. Although the unemployment rate is little changed in recent months, job gains have been solid, on average. Shades up their view on labor.
Household spending has been growing strongly but business fixed investment has been soft. Household spending has been growing strongly but business fixed investment has remained soft. No change.
Inflation has continued to run below the Committee’s 2 percent longer-run objective, partly reflecting earlier declines in energy prices and in prices of non-energy imports. Inflation has continued to run below the Committee’s 2 percent longer-run objective, partly reflecting earlier declines in energy prices and in prices of non-energy imports. No change.
Market-based measures of inflation compensation remain low; most survey-based measures of longer-term inflation expectations are little changed, on balance, in recent months. Market-based measures of inflation compensation remain low; most survey-based measures of longer-term inflation expectations are little changed, on balance, in recent months. No change.? TIPS are showing higher inflation expectations since the last meeting. 5y forward 5y inflation implied from TIPS is near 1.65%, uunchanged from July.
Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability. Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability. No change. Any time they mention the ?statutory mandate,? it is to excuse bad policy.
The Committee currently expects that, with gradual adjustments in the stance of monetary policy, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace and labor market indicators will strengthen. The Committee expects that, with gradual adjustments in the stance of monetary policy, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace and labor market conditions will strengthen somewhat further. No change.
Inflation is expected to remain low in the near term, in part because of earlier declines in energy prices, but to rise to 2 percent over the medium term as the transitory effects of past declines in energy and import prices dissipate and the labor market strengthens further. Inflation is expected to remain low in the near term, in part because of earlier declines in energy prices, but to rise to 2 percent over the medium term as the transitory effects of past declines in energy and import prices dissipate and the labor market strengthens further. No change. CPI is at +1.1% now, yoy.
Near-term risks to the economic outlook have diminished. The Committee continues to closely monitor inflation indicators and global economic and financial developments. Near-term risks to the economic outlook appear roughly balanced. The Committee continues to closely monitor inflation indicators and global economic and financial developments. Interesting change.? Indicates that near-term risks have risen in their view.? I think the risks are higher than they do, but I don?t see it has shifted in the last two months.
Against this backdrop, the Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 1/4 to 1/2 percent. Against this backdrop, the Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 1/4 to 1/2 percent. No change.
  The Committee judges that the case for an increase in the federal funds rate has strengthened but decided, for the time being, to wait for further evidence of continued progress toward its objectives. New sentence.? Makes a bow to the hawks, but does not go with them, forgetting monetary policy lags.
The stance of monetary policy remains accommodative, thereby supporting further improvement in labor market conditions and a return to 2 percent inflation. The stance of monetary policy remains accommodative, thereby supporting further improvement in labor market conditions and a return to 2 percent inflation. No change.? They don?t get that policy direction, not position, is what makes policy accommodative or restrictive.? Think of monetary policy as a drug for which a tolerance gets built up.
In determining the timing and size of future adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will assess realized and expected economic conditions relative to its objectives of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation. In determining the timing and size of future adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will assess realized and expected economic conditions relative to its objectives of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation. No change.
This assessment will take into account a wide range of information, including measures of labor market conditions, indicators of inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and readings on financial and international developments. This assessment will take into account a wide range of information, including measures of labor market conditions, indicators of inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and readings on financial and international developments. No change.? Gives the FOMC flexibility in decision-making, because they really don?t know what matters, and whether they can truly do anything with monetary policy.
In light of the current shortfall of inflation from 2 percent, the Committee will carefully monitor actual and expected progress toward its inflation goal. The Committee expects that economic conditions will evolve in a manner that will warrant only gradual increases in the federal funds rate; the federal funds rate is likely to remain, for some time, below levels that are expected to prevail in the longer run. However, the actual path of the federal funds rate will depend on the economic outlook as informed by incoming data. In light of the current shortfall of inflation from 2 percent, the Committee will carefully monitor actual and expected progress toward its inflation goal. The Committee expects that economic conditions will evolve in a manner that will warrant only gradual increases in the federal funds rate; the federal funds rate is likely to remain, for some time, below levels that are expected to prevail in the longer run. However, the actual path of the federal funds rate will depend on the economic outlook as informed by incoming data. No change.? Says that they will go slowly, and react to new data.? Big surprises, those.
The Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and of rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction, and it anticipates doing so until normalization of the level of the federal funds rate is well under way. This policy, by keeping the Committee’s holdings of longer-term securities at sizable levels, should help maintain accommodative financial conditions. The Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and of rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction, and it anticipates doing so until normalization of the level of the federal funds rate is well under way. This policy, by keeping the Committee’s holdings of longer-term securities at sizable levels, should help maintain accommodative financial conditions. No change.? Says it will keep reinvesting maturing proceeds of agency debt and MBS, which blunts any tightening.
Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Janet L. Yellen, Chair; William C. Dudley, Vice Chairman; Lael Brainard; James Bullard; Stanley Fischer; Loretta J. Mester; Jerome H. Powell; Eric Rosengren; and Daniel K. Tarullo. Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Janet L. Yellen, Chair; William C. Dudley, Vice Chairman; Lael Brainard; James Bullard; Stanley Fischer; Jerome H. Powell; and Daniel K. Tarullo. Note that the permanent members are all on board with the dovish policy.? I?m surprised that Bullard is with them.
Voting against the action was Esther L. George, who preferred at this meeting to raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 1/2 to 3/4 percent. Voting against the action were: Esther L. George, Loretta J. Mester, and Eric Rosengren, each of whom preferred at this meeting to raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 1/2 to 3/4 percent. Three regional Fed Presidents voted to tighten policy.? 9-3 votes or higher disagreements are relatively rare, since votes have been announced since the mid-1980s.

 

Comments

  • The FOMC tilts closer to tightening, though they changed their risk statement to neutral.
  • Interesting to see such a large dissent. That is a relatively rare occurrence.
  • Policy continues to stall, as the economy muddles along.
  • But policy should be tighter. Savers deserve returns, and that would be good for the economy.
  • The changes for the FOMC?s view are that GDP and labor indicators are stronger. The FOMC has groupthink and confirmation bias, and thus interpret noise as signal.
  • Equities and bonds rise. Commodity prices rise and the dollar falls.? Everything is a little looser.
  • The FOMC says that any future change to policy is contingent on almost everything.
  • The key variables on Fed Policy are capacity utilization, labor market indicators, inflation trends, and inflation expectations. As a result, the FOMC ain?t moving rates up much, absent much higher inflation, or a US Dollar crisis.
Estimating Future Stock Returns, June 2016 Update

Estimating Future Stock Returns, June 2016 Update

ecphilosopher-data-2016-q2

This is my quarterly update on how much the market is likely to return over the next 10 years. ?At the end of the last quarter, that figure was around 6.54%/year. ?For comparison purposes, that is at the 77th percentile of outcomes — high, but not nosebleed high, which to me, is when the market is priced to?return 3% or less. ?That’s when you run.

Adding in quarter to date movements, the current value should be near 6.3%/year (79th percentile).

With all of the hoopla over how high the market is, why is this measure not screaming run? ?This is because average investors, retail and institutional, are not as heavily invested in the equity markets as is typical toward the end of bull markets. ?There are many articles calling for caution — I have issued a few as well.

From an asset-liability management standpoint, bull markets get particularly precarious when caution is thrown to the wind, and people genuinely believe that there is no alternative to stocks — that you are missing out on “free money” if you are not invested in stocks.

We aren’t there now. ?So, much as I am not crazy about the present state of the credit cycle (debts rising, income falling), there is still the reasonable possibility of more gains in the stock markets.

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For more on this series, see the first four articles in this search, which describe the model, and its past estimates.

Dead as a Severed Horse’s Head

Dead as a Severed Horse’s Head

Photo Credit: Swampier
Photo Credit: Swampier

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Six years ago, I reviewed a book?The Club No One Wanted To Join. ?It was a poorly done book written by a bunch of people who were swindled by Bernie Madoff. ?Now, I?didn’t want to be unsympathetic — after all, they were cheated. ?But they missed many signals that tipped off others, and could have tipped off them to the fraud. ?Worse, they tried to argue that since many top-performing mutual funds had total returns similar to that of Madoff, there was no way anyone could have figured out that it was a scam. ?They neglected to note that Madoff’s returns were ultra-smooth, while the returns of the mutual funds were not. ?Big difference.

There’s one more thing: many of them gave in to the idea that they had found a hole in the system. ?Far from it being “The Club No One Wanted To Join,” rather, it was their own secret private club that they were smart enough to join when fate smiled on them, and they got their opportunity.

Tonight, I am talking about a different sort of scam that sucked in a different class of people. ?This scam was a corporation where the management took a?firm into bankruptcy that could easily pay its debts, at least in the short-run. ?The management likely conspired with the bondholders against its shareholders, seemingly in an effort to gain a greater reward from the bondholders who would own the firm post-bankruptcy than they could from operating the firm outside of bankruptcy. ?The name of this firm is Horsehead Holdings [ZINCQ].

For background, you can read this?article in the New York Times. ?For the ultimate result of the bankruptcy, you can read this article in the Wall Street Journal:?Zinc Producer Horsehead Cleared to Exit Bankruptcy.

I’m not writing about?this to give a blow-by-blow description of how the bondholders and management cheated shareholders out of their ownership interests, though I will touch on that at points. ?I am writing about this to respond to those who wrote to me in the midst of the bankruptcy trial to try to gain some coverage of what was going on.

Over 20 people wrote to me and almost 100?journalists/media in an attempt to create “viral” coverage of the trial, and if nothing else, bring public attention to the travesty that was the bankruptcy process. ?As it is, I wrote one paragraph on the matter, but I didn’t see anything from any major publication until after the trial completed. ?I did mention to a number of the writers that efforts to get coverage would not affect the outcome of the bankruptcy court; it is relatively insulated from public opinion, as it should be.

(As an aside: if you write such a letter to journalists, or me, try to stay on topic. ?It is not relevant to call the bondholders “greedy,” that they are a hedge fund, or talk about their prior dealings with Collateralized Debt Obligations that failed during the recent financial crisis.)

Aleph Blog is mostly about risk control. ?As I read the letters from the shareholders who were watching their ownership rights be destroyed, I noted a few things that might have enabled some of them to avoid much of the unfavorable outcome:

  • Buying a levered highly cyclical company.
  • Relying on the insights of bright investors who buy concentrated stakes ?in a few companies.
  • Not diversifying enough.

Let me take these in order:

Buying a levered highly cyclical company

If you look at the risk of owning a single company, there are two ways where a company can affect the degree to which a change in sales can raise the profits of the company. ?The first way is to choose a production method that has high fixed costs and low variable costs, which is typically true of cyclical companies. ?The second way is to borrow money. ?Both methods magnify returns, right or wrong.

Typically, you only do one at a time. ?Supermarkets are stable, so they often borrow more to lever up returns. ?Mining companies, among other industries that require heavy capital investment, are anything but stable booms and busts are common and follow product prices.

Horsehead Holdings had a high degree of leverage from both debt and being in a cyclical industry. ?It ran into a scenario where the price of its main product, zinc, fell hard. ?At the time before they filed for bankruptcy, management could legitimately say to themselves, “If the price of zinc remains this low we will shortly be insolvent, particularly if our new processing plant doesn’t work out.”

Now, the bankruptcy code is a rather flexible beastie. ?It allows for a management team to file before things are at their worst so that they can try to preserve a better outcome for the company. ?My suspicion is that management’s motives were mixed when they filed — they wanted the best deal they could get for themselves, but may have assumed that there wasn’t much life left to the equity anyway. ?Who could have predicted that the price of zinc would rally back so much, such that the company could have survived in its pre-bankruptcy state?

Now, has this ever happened to me? ?Not exactly, but there are other ways that managements can dispose of a company to the detriment of the stockholders. ?I lost money on C. Brewer Homes when management did a leveraged buyout when the stock price was unduly depressed. ?Enough stock was in the hands of arbs that the deal went through. ?Oh, and if you want another one, there was the loss on National Atlantic Holdings which I described in ugly detail in this article.

The main point is this: don’t assume that management will act in the interests of stockholders, particularly in a stressed situation. ?The leverage and cyclicality of Horsehead Holdings set up the possibility of that occurrence, and the fall in the price of zinc triggered it.

Relying on the insights of bright investors who buy concentrated stakes ?in a few companies

I respect both Mohnish Pabrai and Guy Spier. ?They are bright guys, and from what I can tell at a distance, ethical too. ?They were big holders of Horsehead Holdings, and I’m sure they had good reasoning behind their decisions. ?But, even excellent investment managers aren’t infallible. If you are just picking one of their ideas, that could be a rocket to the sky — or the ground, while their portfolio as a whole might do well.

Also, they will make their decisions with some lead time over you if the data shifts. ?Any investment advisor you mimic is not required to tell you when they change their mind, aside from required filings with the SEC… which are delayed, and sometimes don’t cover everything.

Has this happened to me? ?Yes it has. ?I have sometimes invested partly ?on who is invested in a company, though never to the point of not?doing my “due diligence.” ?But aside from some early failures 20+ years ago, it never hurt me much because I was never guilty of:

Not Diversifying Enough

A number of the people emailing me said they put more than half their savings into Horsehead Holdings. ?If you are going to engage in such risky behavior, you need to know more than everyone else investing in the stock. ?No exceptions. ?I agree with investing in a concentrated way, but?my view of that for average people is no positions larger than 5% of your capital. ?That is plenty concentrated enough.

I have one holding that is 13% of my assets — a private company that I know exceptionally well. ?My house is another 13%. ?After that, my next largest holding is 3% of my assets. ?I believe in the assets that I buy, but I concentrate enough by only owning individual stocks, and very little in the way of pooled investment vehicles.

With 75% of my assets in risk assets, I take enough risk. ?I don’t have to amplify that by taking disproportionate security-specific risk. ?(The stock portfolios that I provide for clients have 35 or so stocks in them… given that I tend to concentrate in a few industries, that takes reasonable rsk.)

Summary

Again, my sympathies to those who lost on Horsehead. ?I can’t do anything about those losses. ?At least you have the opportunity to sue the?management of the company. ?It certainly seems like the management team cheated the stockholders, though I can’t say for sure.

What I can help are future investors, and my counsel is this: Diversify! ?You are your own best defender, so don’t merely mimic bright investors; do your own due diligence. ?Be wary of investing in cyclical companies with high debt levels. ?Don’t implicitly trust that management teams will act in your interest. ?And finally, diversify, as it protects against failures in other areas.

PS — I looked through my notes of the past. ?I did look at Horsehead Holdings, and I passed on it. ?That said, I don’t know why… hopefully it was for a good reason, though I expect that I didn’t have room for another cyclical company, and not another one in base metals.

How High Are We?

How High Are We?

I’ve said this before, but I like it when research destroys a preconceived notion of mine. ?Today’s post stems from an exchange that I had with Jackdamn (what a name) on Stocktwits, talking about a chart created by?dshort.

S&P 500 Percent Off High Since March 9, 2009. Chart by Doug Short. $SPX $SPY $DIA

? Jack Damn (@jackdamn) Sep. 3 at 09:39 AM

I responded:

@jackdamn over a 7.5 year period, how frequently do you get 5-10%. 10-15%, 15-20%, 20%+ drawdowns? This graph looks tame to me. $$

? David Merkel (@AlephBlog) Sep. 5 at 02:52 PM

To which he responded: That’s a great question. ?And it is a great question, but I’m not going to answer it directly here… because I think I am answering a better question.

Let me take you through my thought process, because I went through four different ways of trying to answer the question before settling on the better question, and getting the answer.

How do you summarize an area of a price graph in order to make comparisons of different periods? ?How do you determine when the market has been near highs for a long time, or far away for a long time? ?How does the intensity/distance below the high matter? ?If you are looking at troughs, where does one begin and another end?

I started by trying to identify the troughs individually, and the difficulty was trying to establish that in a mechanical way that did not require interpretation. ?I stumbled around playing with minimum periods between troughs, recovery levels before a new trough could start, moving averages to establish when a new trough was genuinely significant. ?Sigh.

I tried a lot of different things, and I could create rules that mostly made the troughs look decent, but I could never get it to be fully mechanical or lack arbitrariness. ?Why this trough?and not that? ?The same criticisms can be applied to dshort’s graph as well.

I finally pulled out of my mental gymnastics when I concluded: couldn’t I just take the area under the maximum line in percentage terms and use that as a measure, say over a 200-day period? ?200 days is arbitrary, and so is the measure, but that is less than most of the measures that I considered, and at least this one corresponds to a relatively simple calculation.

So if you look at the red line in my graph above, you will note that it has dipped below 2.0?five times in the last 66 years, in 1954, 1959, 1964, 1995 and 2014. ?These observations followed periods where the markets moved to new highs rather smartly and without a lot of downside volatility. ?Then there were 3 times that the measure peaked?higher than 64, in 1975, 2003 and 2009. ?These times followed incredible market falls, and were great times to be putting money into the market.

Below you can see ?a table of values for how often the measure is below a given threshold. ?It’s only above 64 about 5% of the time, and below 2 about 3.5% of the time. ?My main thought is this measure is this: high values of the measure probably are a “buy signal.” ?Low values of the measure aren’t necessarily a “sell signal.”

That signals are asymmetric should not be surprising. ?The largest factor in most long-term market moves, the credit cycle, is also asymmetric. ?It’s like my continuing series, Goes Down Double Speed. ?Bull markets have shallower moves and longer duration, the same way that the bull phase of the credit cycle goes. ?Extend credit, extend credit, extend credit… loosen standards, loosen standards, loosen standards… tighten spreads, tighten spreads, tighten spreads, etc. ?Then in the bear phase it is DENY CREDIT!! TIGHTEN STANDARDS!! SHEPHERD LIQUIDITY!! SURVIVE!! ?Short and sharp. ?Painful. ?Prices are lower, and yields higher at the end.

To close this off, where is this indicator now? ?It’s around 8, which is near the 40th percentile… kind of a blah figure, not saying much of anything… which is good in its own way. ?The market meanders and hits a few new highs, sags a little, comes back, hits a few new highs, etc. ?Not many people believe in it, but we are inches off the highs. ?Odds are we go higher from here, but not aggressively higher.

One final note: we are in the fourth and final phase of the credit cycle now, so don’t get too aggressive. ?Debt is getting higher inside nonfinancial corporations. ?Be wary, and do your fundamental due diligence on balance sheets.

Percentile DFHI200MS
1% 1.33
5% 2.42
10% 3.21
20% 4.50
30% 5.73
40% 8.18
50% 11.67
60% 17.42
70% 27.47
80% 36.52
90% 49.83
95% 63.10
99% 83.08
The Cash Will Prove Itself

The Cash Will Prove Itself

Photo Credit: Renegade98 || What was it that Buffett said 'bout swimmin' naked?
Photo Credit: Renegade98 || What was it that Buffett said ’bout swimmin’ naked?

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It?s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked.

— Warren Buffett, credit Old School Value

When I was 29, nearly half a life ago, Donald Trump was a struggling real estate developer. ?In 1990, I was still trying to develop my own views of the economy and finance. ?But one day heading home from work at AIG, I was listening to the business report on the radio, and I heard the announcer say that Donald Trump had said that he would be “the king of cash.” ?My tart comment was, “Yeah, right.”

At that point in time, I knew that a lot of different entities were in need of financing. ?Though the stock market had come back from the panic of 1987, many entities had overborrowed to buy commercial real estate. ?The major insurance companies of that period were deeply at fault in this as well, largely driven by the need to issue 5-year Guaranteed Investment Contracts [GICs] to rapidly growing stable value funds of defined contribution plans. ?Outside of some curmudgeons in commercial mortgage lending departments, few recognized that writing 5-year mortgages with low principal amortization rates against long-lived commercial properties was a recipe for disaster. ?This was especially true as lending yield spreads grew tighter and tighter.

(Aside: the real estate area of Provident Mutual avoided most of the troubles, as they sold their building that they built seven years earlier for twice what they paid to a larger competitor. ?They also focused their mortgage lending on small, ugly, economically necessary properties, and not large trophy properties. ?They were unsung heroes of the company, and their reward was elimination eight years later as a “cost saving move.” ?At a later point in time, I talked with the lending group at Stancorp, which had a similar philosophy, and expressed admiration for the commercial mortgage group at Provident Mutual… Stancorp saw the strength in the idea, and still follows it today as the subsidiary of a Japanese firm. ?But I digress…)

Many of the insurance companies making the marginal commercial mortgage loans had come to AIG seeking emergency financing. ?My boss at AIG got wind of the fact that I was looking elsewhere for work, and subtly regaled me of the tales of woe at many of the insurance companies with these lending issues, including one at which I had recently interviewed. ? ?(That was too coincidental for me not to note, particularly as a colleague in another division asked me how the search was going. ?All this from one stray comment to an actuary I met coming back from the interview…)

Back to the main topic: good investing and business rely on the concept of a margin of safety. ?There will be problems in any business plan. ?Who has enough wherewithal to overcome those challenges? ?Plans where everything has to go right in order to succeed will most likely fail.

With Trump back in 1990, the goal was admirable — become liquid in order to purchase properties that were now at bargain prices. ?As was said in the Wall Street Journal back in April of 1990, the article started:

In a two-hour interview, Mr. Trump explained that he is raising cash today so he can scoop up bargains in a year or two, after the real estate market shakes out. Such an approach worked for him a decade ago when he bet big that New York City’s economy would rebound, and developed the Trump Tower, Grand Hyatt and other projects.

“What I want to do is go and bargain hunt,” he said. “I want to be king of cash.”

That’s where?Trump said it first. ?After that he received many questions from reporters and creditors, because his businesses were heavily indebted, and?property values were deflated, including the properties that he owned. ?Who wouldn’t want to be the “king of cash” then? ?But to be in that position would mean having sold something when times were good, then sitting on the cash. ?Not only is that not in Trump’s nature, it is not in the nature of most to do that. ?During good times, the extra cash that Buffett keeps on hand looks stupid.

Trump did not get out of the mess by raising cash, but by working out a deal with his creditors in bankruptcy. ?Give Trump credit, he had convinced most of his creditors that they were better off continuing to finance him rather than foreclose, because the Trump name made the properties more valuable. ?Had the creditors called his bluff, Trump?would have lost a lot, possibly to the point where we wouldn’t be hearing much about him today.

Trump escaped, but most other debtors don’t get the same treatment Trump did. ?The only way to survive in a credit crunch is plan ahead by getting adequate long-term financing (equity and long-term debt), and keep a “war kitty” of cash on the side.

During 2002, I had the chance to test this as a bond manager. ?With the accounting disasters at mid-year, on July 27th, two of my best brokers called me and said, ?The market is offered without bid.? We?ve never seen it this bad.? What do you want to do??? I kept a supply of liquidity on hand for situations like this, so with the S&P falling, and the VIX over 50, I put out a series of lowball bids for BBB assets that our analysts liked.? By noon, I had used up all of my liquidity, but the market was turning.? On October 9th, the same thing happened, but this time I had a larger war chest, and made more bids, with largely the same result.

That’s tough to do, and my client pushed me on the “extra cash sitting around.” ?After all, times are good, there is business to be done, and we could use the additional interest to make the estimates next quarter.

To give another example, we have the visionary businessman Elon Musk facing a?cash crunch?at Tesla?and?SolarCity. ?Leave aside for a moment his efforts to merge the two firms when stockholders tend to prefer “pure play” firms to conglomerates — it’s interesting to look at how two “growth companies” are facing a challenge raising funds at a time when the stock market is near all time highs.

Both Tesla and Solar City are needy companies when it comes to financing. ?They need a lot of capital to grow their operations before the day comes when they are both profitable and cash flow from operations is positive. ?But, so did a lot of dot-com companies in 1998-2000, of which a small number exist to this day. ?Elon Musk is in a better position in that presently he can dilute?issue shares of Tesla to finance matters, as well as buy 80% of the Solar City bond issue. ?But it feels weird to have to finance something in less than a public way.

There are other calls on cash in the markets today — many companies are increasing dividends and buying back stock. ?Some are using debt to facilitate this. ?I look at the major oil companies and they all seem to be levering up, which is unusual given the recent trajectory of crude oil prices.

We are in the fourth phase of the credit cycle now — borrowing is growing, and profits aren’t. ?There’s no rule that says we have to go through a bear market in credit before that happens, but that is the ordinary?way that excesses get purged.

That is why I am telling you to pull back on risk, and review your portfolio for companies that need financing in the next three years or they will croak. ?If they don’t self finance, be wary. ?When things are bad only cash flow can validate an asset, not hopes of future growth.

With that, I close this article with a poem that I saw as a graduate student outside the door of the professor for whom I was a teaching assistant when I first came to UC-Davis. ?I did not know that is was out on the web until today. ?It deserves to be a classic:

Quoth The Banker, ?Watch Cash Flow?

Once upon a midnight dreary as I pondered weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of accounting lore,
Seeking gimmicks (without scruple) to squeeze through
Some new tax loophole,
Suddenly I heard a knock upon my door,
Only this, and nothing more.

Then I felt a queasy tingling and I heard the cash a-jingling
As a fearsome banker entered whom I?d often seen before.
His face was money-green and in his eyes there could be seen
Dollar-signs that seemed to glitter as he reckoned up the score.
?Cash flow,? the banker said, and nothing more.

I had always thought it fine to show a jet black bottom line.
But the banker sounded a resounding, ?No.
Your receivables are high, mounting upward toward the sky;
Write-offs loom.? What matters is cash flow.?
He repeated, ?Watch cash flow.?

Then I tried to tell the story of our lovely inventory
Which, though large, is full of most delightful stuff.
But the banker saw its growth, and with a might oath
He waved his arms and shouted, ?Stop!? Enough!
Pay the interest, and don?t give me any guff!?

Next I looked for noncash items which could add ad infinitum
To replace the ever-outward flow of cash,
But to keep my statement black I?d held depreciation back,
And my banker said that I?d done something rash.
He quivered, and his teeth began to gnash.

When I asked him for a loan, he responded, with a groan,
That the interest rate would be just prime plus eight,
And to guarantee my purity he?d insist on some security?
All my assets plus the scalp upon my pate.
Only this, a standard rate.

Though my bottom line is black, I am flat upon my back,
My cash flows out and customers pay slow.
The growth of my receivables is almost unbelievable:
The result is certain?unremitting woe!
And I hear the banker utter an ominous low mutter,
?Watch cash flow.?

Herbert S. Bailey, Jr.

Source: ?The January 13, 1975, issue of Publishers Weekly, Published by R. R. Bowker, a Xerox company.? Copyright 1975 by the Xerox Corporation. ?Credit also to?aridni.com.

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