Image Credit: Aleph Blog with help from FRED || Look at the mortgage rates fly!

Okay, you might or might not remember the last piece. But since that time, 30-year mortgage rates have risen more than 1%. Is the Fed dawdling? Maybe, but the greater threat is that they become too aggressive, and blow up the financial economy, leading us into another decade-long bout of financial repression.

As it stands right now, mortgage rates are in a self-reinforcing rising cycle, and it will not end until the Fed raises the Fed funds rate until it inverts the Treasury yield curve. But if I were on the FOMC, I would ignore inflation and the labor markets, and I would watch the financial economy to avoid blowing things up.

The FOMC won’t do this. They are wedded to ideas that no longer work, or may never have worked, like the Phillips Curve. They imagine that the macroeconomic models work, when they never do. They forget what Milton Friedman taught — that monetary policy works with long and variable lags. Instead, in tightening cycles, the FOMC acts as if there are no lags. And, in one sense, they are correct. The financial economy reacts immediately to FOMC actions. The real economy, with inflation and unemployment, may take one or two years to see the effects.

And because the FOMC forgets about the lags, they overshoot. The FOMC, far from stabilizing the economy, tends to destabilize it. We would be better off running a gold standard, and regulating the banks tightly for solvency. Remember, gold was never the problem — bad bank regulation was the problem.

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One more thing — the Fed needs to be quiet. The chatter of Fed governors upsets the markets, as do Fed press conferences and the dot-plot. The Fed was most effective under Volcker and Martin. They said little, and let their actions be known through the Fed’s Open Markets Desk. That allowed the Fed to surprise and lead the markets. The current Fed (since Greenspan) made the mistake of following the markets. Following the markets exacerbates volatility, and promotes oversupplying liquidity.

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At present I am pretty sure 30-year mortgage rates will rise to 6%, and maybe 7%. No one is panicking enough on this, so it will likely go higher. MBS hedging is a powerful force, and will continue until people no longer want to buy houses at such high interest rates.

Photo Credits: Jen and www.david baxendale.com with help from pinetools || The casino is exciting. The scale is honest and unrelenting.

I want to give an update to one of the major concepts of Ben Graham, in order to make it fit the modern era better. Ben Graham said:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/831517-in-the-short-run-the-market-is-a-voting-machine quoted from The Intelligent Investor

So let me modify it: In the short run, the market is a casino, but in the long run, it is a scale. Is this an improvement? Probably not, but speculation has become so rampant that it may be a necessary modification to change voting machine to casino.

The voting machine makes sense, but typically we think of voting as being democratic. We only get one vote per person. Markets are different. Someone who brings a little money to the market will not have the same influence as the one who brings a lot of money to the market. Thus my analogy of the casino, though typically casinos will place limits on how much the casino will wager. They want to avoid random large losses so that they can live to extract money from rubes for many years to come. The winner can brag that he “broke the bank,” but the casino survived to play on.

Bill Hwang and his CFO were formally charged with fraud today. What did they do? They synthetically borrowed a lot of money from investment banks to own huge amounts of a few companies. Their buying pushed the prices of the stocks higher, allowing them to borrow more against the positions. But eventually as the stocks they owned had some bad results, the margin calls on his positions wiped him out as the stock prices fell. The scale trumped the casino.

The same is true of crypto and meme stocks. Cryptocurrencies require a continuing inflow of real cash (admittedly fiat money) in order to appreciate. If people stop buying crypto on net, and that may be happening now, cryptocurrencies will decline. The scale says crypto is a zero — no intrinsic value. The casino begs for more people to bring real money to buy fake money.

That applies to meme stocks as well. You can throw a lot of money at a stock and it will rise. But for it to stay there or rise further, it will need increasing free cash flows to validate the value of the firm.

Going back to crypto, it lacks any link to the real economy. Crypto will only become legitimate when you can buy groceries and gasoline at a fixed amount of bitcoin that varies less than the same price in US dollars.

As a final note on the Scale versus the Casino, I give you Elon Musk. He borrows against his shares of Tesla to buy Twitter.

He either did not realize or ignored the fact that he could lose his stake in Tesla if the price of Tesla falls enough. Do you really want the margin desk to control your fate? This may not totally impoverish Musk, but it is not impossible that he could the entirety of his holdings of Tesla in order to keep his holdings of the unprofitable Twitter. All it would take is for short sellers to push Tesla below $740, and then the margin desk starts selling his shares into a falling market. Momentum, aided by an agreement leading to forced selling.

The market abhors a vacuum. So it is for those who assume that things will continue to go right for them.

Photo Credit: John.U || Look at all those eggs in one basket! The owner *is* watching it carefully, right?

Jason Zweig recent wrote an article on owning stock in the company that you work for. Then today in his WSJ newsletter he asked the following question:

What’s the most concentrated investment position you’ve ever had? (In other words, what single investment made up the greatest proportion of your portfolio?) Did it work out well or poorly? What did you learn from it?

I have one article to answer both questions called Life with Wife. It’s a cute article which runs through two times in my life where I had an overly concentrated investment position. The first one was regarding The St. Paul (acquired by The Travelers), where I took my first big bonus, and put it all into shares of The St. Paul. I got derided for doing that by my colleagues in the investment department, but with a AA balance sheet, trading at 55% of tangible book value, and 8x forward earnings, I felt I had a reasonable provision against adverse deviation — a margin of safety. If you read the article, you will see that I almost doubled my money in six months, then sold. At the peak it was half of my net worth, and I had a mortgage then.

So should you invest in your own company? Well, are you working for Tesla or Enron? I am being facetious here, as the guys at Enron thought they were working for a cutting-edge company like Tesla. But any analyst worth his salt would have seen that free cash flow at Enron was deeply negative.

I have a neighbor who is a Tesla mechanic. As I was mowing my lawn one day, he waved me over. He wanted advice. He hinted to me how much his Tesla shares were worth. He had consulted an investment advisor who had told him to sell the wad, and the advisor would create a growth and income portfolio allowing him to retire (he is in his 60s). But he was conflicted, because Tesla was doing so well. He asked me what I would do if I was in his shoes. (Note: the TSLA shares were likely 95% of his net worth.)

I said, “Do half, or sell 10-20% per year over time, until you do sell half.” Doing that frees you from the binary decision that you might regret. After selling half, if the price goes up, you still have more capital gains. If the price goes down, you sold some at a good time. You can be happy with yourself no matter what. I have no idea what my neighbor did. Hopefully he sold some.

The second situation in Life with Wife regarded my only significant private equity position, Wright Manufacturing, which makes the best commercial lawn mowers in the world. At that point, my holdings were 15% of my net worth, with no mortgage. The founder was throwing everything into growth, and sacrificing safety. If he hadn’t been my friend, I probably would not have invested with him. As it was, when I sold half, I had recouped my investment. After the Life with Wife article, I bought out several of the founder’s relatives, ending up with 2.2% of the company. I’ve made 5x on my money here, with distributions, and using the very thin “market” for shares. One of the founder’s sons leads the company now, and he is a far better manager than his father. I like this company, and am more likely to buy more than to sell at this point.

But at this point, it is only 10% of my net worth. I may offer to buy more, but I am thinking about it. It trades at 6x earnings, with a stronger balance sheet than the founder worked with, and a stronger competitive position. The most recent price is still below where I sold it to the second largest shareholder. Price discovery is tough when there are only 20 shareholders, and new shareholders may only enter at the pleasure of the board of directors.

Closing

So, over my life, I have reduced the relative amount at risk on my biggest positions. Does that make sense? Of course — I have less time to make up for mistakes as I grow older. The only people who should be taking high risks when they are old are who are ultra-rich. If they fail, they will still have enough for a moderate existence.

Be careful with concentrated positions. You need certainty about safety most, earnings second, and growth third. Otherwise you are a gambler, and most gamblers lose.

Photo Credit: House Photography || I always read a lot when I was young

This a is follow-up to When I was a Boy… which I wrote ~5 1/2 years ago. It is also a response to an article posted by Jason Zweig, who I have talked with once or twice, and emailed a little more than that. In that article, he asks the question:

How did you learn how to invest? Did you take a class, play a stock-market game in school, have a friend or family member as a mentor?

How Should Kids Learn to Invest?

If you read the original article, you would know that my original start was from two gifts of stock that male relatives in my extended family gave me in the 1960s. They picked two high-fliers — Litton Industries and Magnavox. Bought and held, by the mid-1970s both generated >80% losses when they were bought by another company.

Did I ever play the stock market game in school? Yes, once when I was in seventh grade (early 1973). Our school decided to play around and do an intersession between the two semesters. It was a two week course called “Bulls and Bears. How this Little Piggy Went to Market.” My favorite science teacher was teaching it. I realized that the game was utterly short-term and so I put all of my play money into AT&T warrants, knowing that if AT&T stock rose, the warrants would zoom up. Was I a smart kid, or what?

What. Well, AT&T when nowhere for those two weeks, and the same for the warrants. They were at the same price at the contest end, thus losing the commissions on both sides, and this was when commissions were high, prior to deregulation.

The three main things that taught me about investing were watching Wall Street Week with my Mom, borrowing books on investing at the Brookfield library, and reading the Value Line subscription that she purchased.

I probably read 10 books on investing before I was 18. Louis Rukeyser was an affable guide to the markets, including the elves, the guests, etc. (As an aside, Frank A. Cappiello, Jr. was a founding member of the Baltimore Security Analysts Society, and a frequent guest on his show. After all, where is Owings Mills, Maryland?)

With Value Line, I began to understand how corporations worked. The one-page descriptions of companies were just big enough to give me a good idea of what was going on, while not over-taxing a kid 12-21 years old.

I remember as a student at Johns Hopkins earning 16% on my money market fund in my freshman year.  I was only at Hopkins for three years 1979-1982, but those were tough years, particularly in the Midwest “Rust Belt.”  My father’s business earned little, but my Mom’s investing paid off.  Though not “working” she was making more off the family portfolio than my Dad was earning off his business.  As it was, to help my family then, I paid the last semester of tuition.  (My Mom later paid me back for that.)  I came back home in 1982 with $5 in my pocket.  Then I learned that I overdrew my bank account, costing me $10.

Oh, one more thing the clever and distinguished Carl Christ, who signed my Master’s Thesis at Hopkins, taught a class on investing in my junior year. I learned a lot, but the main thing I remember was writing a research report on a firm that made specialty paper — James River. My mother had owned it for a long time, but had sold her stake at an opportune time. When I wrote the report, she did not own it, and the stock had fallen from where she sold it. Dr. Christ had never heard of James River, an was fascinated at what was at that time a midcap firm in a underfollowed industry. I got an “A.” When I showed the report to my Mom, she bought it again, and made money of it.

Also, in my senior year, I wrote my thesis on stock splits. As I said there:

This brings me to my conclusion: stock splits are a momentum effect, but it is larger when companies are still have a cheap valuation. Perhaps splits have no effect on stock performance — it is all momentum and valuation. To me, that is the most likely conclusion, and my thesis anticipated quantitative money management by 10+ years.

On Stock Splits

In the summer of 1982, I remember sitting down with Value Line in my family’s living room (quiet place, no TV) and selecting a paper portfolio of 40-50 stocks. I went through all 1700 stocks. I recorded the prices in the Milwaukee Journal, and then went to Grad School at UC-Davis. Over the next year the stocks in my “portfolio” appreciated at double the rate of the market. At that time, I was a TA for a Corporate Financial Management class. I showed it to the professor, and he said, “Oh, you have a beta of two.” I said, “No, this portfolio has stocks that are not as risky as the market. This is alpha, not beta.”

Several years later, I participated in the Value Line Investing Contest. I placed in the top 1%, but not good enough to win.

When my dissertation committee dissolved, I was forced to abandon my Ph. D. I took three actuarial exams on the fly in early 1986 and passed. I had an informational interview at Pacific Standard Life which sponsored the exams, and they hired me on the spot. (My boss’ secretary told me that the boss said, “No one can pass the first three exams on the first try.” Then a fellow employee told me later, “You didn’t negotiate hard enough. They would have hired you regardless.”)

When I worked for Pacific Standard Life, and later AIG, I got investment-related projects, because I was the one actuary that understood investing. During this time, I was managing my own portfolio, sometimes better, sometimes worse. I bought stocks, and mutual funds investing outside the US. I had a CTA in my portfolio. I tried investing in spectrum with the FCC, but that was a bomb. I settled on small cap value investing in the mid-1990s, which was a bad era for small cap value. Still, I managed to keep pace with the S&P 500.

In 2000, I had an email exchange with Kenneth Fisher (yes, the big guy of Fisher Investments). This led to he creation of my eight rules. As I wrote on portfolio rule three:

Let me give you a little history of how the eight rules came to be. In 2000, I had an e-mail discussion with Kenneth Fisher. I explained to him what I had been doing with small-cap value, and how I had done well with it in the 90s. He told me to forget everything that I’ve learned, especially the CFA syllabus, and look for the things that I can do better than anyone else. We exchanged about five or so e-mails; I appreciate the time he spent on me.

So I sat back and thought about what investments had worked best for me in the past. I noticed that when I got the call right on cyclical industries, the results were spectacular. I also noticed that I lost most when investing in companies that didn’t have good balance sheets, no matter how “cheap” they were in terms of valuation.

I came to the conclusion that size and value/growth were not the major determinants of my investing success. Instead, industry selection played a large role in what went right and wrong with my investment decisions. So, I decided to formalize that. I would rotate industries with a value bias. But that would have other impacts on how I invested. One of those impacts is rule number three.

Over the next ten years, I tore up the pavement, and would have been in the top percentile of mutual fund managers. And so I opened my own shop in 2010, to find for the next eleven years that value investing was overrated.

My life is bigger than my little company. I am a happy man. I know Jesus Christ; I have eternal life. Have there been disappointments? Of course. The one main positive I can say about my investing is that I rarely have big losses on any security. This is not due to stop losses; I pay attention to balance sheets and the cyclicality of markets.

Even at the age of 61, I am still learning. I am not a boy, obviously, but I am still absorbing new ideas. To all who read me, be life-long learners. I am closer to the end to my life than my beginning, but invest! Take your opportunities to learn and capitalize on them!

And remember, Judgement Day is coming. Are you ready? Investments will help you for now, but will be useless in the hereafter.

Picture Credit: Kailash Gyawali || There are times when despair is rational

“There are two hard things in trading — buying higher, and selling lower.”

Currently I am selling out my position in an illiquid stock. I am patient, but I can tell that my selling is having an impact on the market.

Back when I was a corporate bond manager, I quickly learned that I had to scale in and out of positions. Even for the most commonly traded bonds, the market isn’t that liquid. While not lying to the brokers, learning to disguise your intentions, or at least frame them properly took some effort. One method I commonly used worked like this: “We need some cash. If you have someone wanting to buy $2-5 million, we will offer these at the 10-year Treasury + 150 basis points, $6-10 million T10 + 140 bps, and if they want to buy the whole wad (say 20-30 million), T10 + 125 basis points. Prices would ascend with size in selling. Prices would descend with size in buying, particularly for troubled bonds that we liked.

Usually the brokers appreciated the supply or demand curves that I gave them. Frequently I ended up selling the “the wad,” which we were usually selling because our credit analyst had a reason.

But life is not always so happy. Sometimes you have an asset that either you or the organization has concluded is a dud. Many people think it is a dud. How do you sell it? Should you sell it?

There are options: you could hold an auction, but I will tell you if you do that, play it straight. Your reputation is worth far more than if the auction succeeds or not. You can set a reservation price but if the auction doesn’t sell, you will lose some face.

Or you can test the market, selling in onesies an twosies ($1-2 million) seeing if there is any demand, and expand from there if you can.

What I tended to do was go to my most trusted broker on a given bond and say, “I don’t have to sell this, but we need cash. Could you sound out those who own the bonds and see what they might like to buy a few million?” If we get an interested party, we can sound them out on buying more a an attractive price.

But life can be worse, imagine trying to sell the bonds of Enron post default. Yes, I had to do that. And I had to sell them at lower and lower prices. (Kind of like the time I got trapped with a wad of Disney 30-year bonds.)

And there is the opposite. You want to have a position in an attractive company, and you can’t get them at any reasonable price. You could give up. You could “do half.” Or you could chase it and get the full position, only to regret it.

If you invest with an eye toward valuations, this will always be a challenge. All that said, if you focus on quality, these issues probably won’t hurt you as much.

In any case, do what must be done. If something must be bought, buy it as cheaply as possible. If something must be sold, sell it as dearly as you can. Hide your intentions, while offering deals. In doing so, you may very well realize the most value.

I don’t watch movies much. Usually I think they are a waste of time. Recently I watched the movie Belle with my wife, and we both enjoyed it. This was the first film we had watched in a theater together in 35+ years. Anyway, here is my review of the movie Belle.

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There are a number of reasons why the reviews for Belle are all over the map.  I saw both the Japanese version with English subtitles on a small screen, and the English dub at a theater.  I read a lot of manga and manhua, and occasionally I watch anime, but less so because it eats up too much time.

The reason I think the reviews vary so much relates to personality differences and willingness to think deeply.  If you ever look at comment threads on manga sites, you will run into a lot of shallow people who only can appreciate action-packed manga, don’t understand what the victory conditions are for the main character, and cannot wrap their minds around people who don’t act the way they would act.

The plot of Belle revolves around two people, Suzu (Belle) and Kei (The Dragon), who have been hurt so badly in their lives that they have cut off as many people as they possibly can in order to avoid future hurt.  Now, is this an attractive pair to build a movie around? No, and that is the design of the movie, to make you sense the alienation.  Another aspect of the alienation is the characterization of rural Japan, where transportation options are becoming scarcer; travel to school is arduous for Suzu. 

The movie implicitly asks a bunch of questions.  Is what you are assuming true or not?  Suzu assumes that the beautiful and talented girl Luka is happy, popular, and stuck-up.  Suzu assumes her Dad doesn’t care, and also Shinobu, whom she wishes would be her boyfriend.  She assumes that Luka likes Shinobu. She assumes that people would not like Belle if she openly revealed who she was.  Yet later in the movie she realizes that all of those assumptions are wrong.

The most fundamental question of the movie is “Who are you?” Who is Belle? Who is the Dragon?  Everyone wants to know who they are in the real world.  So, does the metaverse U create a new you?  Though Suzu gets fame, and Kei gets infamy via U, if anything, U intensifies their problems, which need to be solved in real life. U seems to work at the beginning, but it doesn’t truly pay off.

One theme for both Suzu and Kei is that their mothers died.  Suzu’s mother died rescuing an unknown girl from drowning, saying, “I have to go or she’ll die,” and then drowns after saving the girl. There is a parallel near the end of the movie, where Suzu knows that she has to find Kei or he might die, and saves him at the risk of her own life. She gets hurt in the process and does not die.  This is a story of becoming brave enough to love. The Dragon saves Belle in U.  Suzu saves Kei in the real world.

The final theme is singing.  When Belle sings in U it affects people, as many have felt loss and rejection.  This is a change for Suzu, who loved to sing with her mother, but could not sing after her mother died. A turning point of the movie comes when Shinobu says to her when she wants to rescue Kei, “How can you get through to them if you are not yourself?” She then realizes that she needs to sing inside U not as the beautiful Belle, but as ordinary Suzu.  And after that she once again can happily sing on her own wherever she is.

It is well-known that when the Japanese version of Belle (w/English subtitles) premiered at Cannes, it received a 14-minute standing ovation, which is rare.  If the international film community thought it was that good, it probably is stupendous.  To that end, ignore the shallow comments of those that did not understand the movie.

Image Credit: Aleph Blog with help from FRED || Believe it or not, I used FRED before it was a web resource — it was a standalone “bulletin board” that I woul dial into on my computer modem

I’ve talked about this here:

• Estimating Future Stock Returns, December 2021 Update
• Time for Another Convexity Crisis?
• The First Priority of Risk Control (2009, this tells the story of what I did during the 1994 crisis.)

And recently I have tweeted about it.

Mortgage rates are surging faster than expected, prompting economists to lower their home sales forecasts https://t.co/IiX2gPlAnI 1994 scenario re-occurring. Falling prepayments makes MBS lengthen, leading indexed bond managers to sell low-coupon MBS forcing rates still higher

— David Merkel (@AlephBlog) March 22, 2022

We may be in the 1994 scenario where mortgage durations are extending, dragging the long end of the yield, as those that hedge duration are forced to sell, setting up a self-reinforcing move up in yields.

— David Merkel (@AlephBlog) March 22, 2022

The MBS coupon stack is a lot flatter in 2022 than in 1994. There is more than 4X the mortgage debt now than in 1994. Lots of pent-up negative convexity. I lived through that in 1994, and made money off it.

— David Merkel (@AlephBlog) March 22, 2022

Then from the piece Classic: Avoid the Dangers of Data-Mining, Part 2

“In 1992-1993, there were a number of bright investors who had “picked the lock” of the residential mortgage-backed securities market. Many of them had estimated complex multifactor relationships that allowed them to estimate the likely amount of mortgage prepayment within mortgage pools.

Armed with that knowledge, they bought some of the riskiest securities backed by portions of the cash flows from the pools. They probably estimated the past relationships properly, but the models failed when no-cost prepayment became common, and failed again when the Federal Reserve raised rates aggressively in 1994. The failures were astounding: David Askin’s hedge funds, Orange County, the funds at Piper Jaffray that Worth Bruntjen managed, some small life insurers, etc. If that wasn’t enough, there were many major financial institutions that dropped billions on this trade without failing.

What’s the lesson? Models that worked well in the past might not work so well in the future, particularly at high degrees of leverage. Small deviations from what made the relationship work in the past can be amplified by leverage into huge disasters.“

Finally from the piece What Brings Maturity to a Market:

Negative Convexity: Through late 1993, structurers of residential mortgage securities were very creative, making tranches in mortgage securitizations that bore a disproportionate amount of risk, particularly compared to the yield received. In 1994 to early 1995, that illusion was destroyed as the bond market was dragged to higher yields by the Fed plus mortgage bond managers who tried to limit their interest rate risks individually, leading to a more general crisis. That created the worst bond market since 1926.

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I am not saying it is certain, but I think it is likely that we are experiencing a panic in the mortgage bond market now. Like 1994, we have had a complacent Fed that left policy rates too low for too long. Both were foolish times, where policy should have been tighter. This led to massive refinancing of mortgages, and many new mortgages at low rates.

But when that happens with most mortgages being low rate, if the Fed hints at or starts raising rates, prepayments will fall and Mortgage-Backed Securities [MBS] will lengthen duration while falling in price. Bond managers, most of whom are indexed and want a fixed duration, will start selling long bonds and MBS, leading long rates to rise, and the cycle temporarily becomes self-perpetuating.

This is likely the situation that we are in now, and it very well may make the Fed overreact as they did in 1994. All good economists know the monetary policy acts with long and variable lags. But the FOMC for PR reasons acts as if their actions are immediate. Thus they become macho, and raise their rates too far, leading to a crash. (Can we eliminate the Fed? Gold was better, if we regulated the banks properly. Or, limit the slope of the yield curve.)

I’m planning on making money on the opposite side of this trade if I am right. I will buy long Treasuries after the peak. I am watching this regularly, and will act when it is clear to me, but not the market as a whole, which in late 1994 to early 1995 did not know which end was up.

Anyway, that’s all. The only good part of this environment is that my bond portfolios are losing less than the general market.

Image credit: All images belong to Aleph Blog

This should be a brief post. At the end of 2021, the S&P 500 was poised to nominally return -1.53%/year over the next 10 years. As of the close yesterday, that figure was 0.73%/year.

The only period compares with this valuation-wise is the dot-com bubble. We are near dot-com level valuations, in the 98th percentile. And if you view the 10-year returns from the worst time of the dot-com bubble to now, you can see that the results they obtained are worse than what I forecast here.

Of course, a lot of what will happen in nominal terms will rely on the actions of the Fed. Will the Fed:

• Allow a real recession to clear away dud assets that are on life support from low rates? (Collapsing the current stock/junk bubble.. they would never do this unless their hands were tied.)
• Risk the 1994 scenario where the compressed coupon stack in the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities [RMBS] market begins a self-reinforcing interest rate rise cycle on the long end as mortgage rates rise, prepayments drop, mortgage durations extend, leading to bond managers selling RMBS and long bonds with abandon to bring their duration risk down. The Fed chases the yield curve up, and the stock and housing markets both fall. The Fed chokes on their policy, and gives up tightening to save both markets.
• Or, if not the 1994 scenario, does the Fed dare to stop tightening before the yield curve inverts, and just wait for a flat curve to do its work? (Nah, that would be smart. The Fed always inverts the curve to prove their manliness, and blows some part of the market up in the process.)
• Or do they just accept financial repression, and punish savers to benefit wage earners (Will it really work? Dubious.), as the Fed keeps their policy rate low.

I posed those scenarios to Tom Barkin, President of the Richmond Fed when he came to speak to the CFA Institute at Baltimore last week. He gave answers that were either evasive, or he didn’t get it.

Anyway, this is an awkward market situation, but the one thing that is clear to me is that investors should be at the lower end of risk for their asset allocation.

PS — As for me, I am living with value stocks, small stocks, and international stocks. Very little in the S&P 500 here.

Photo Credit: atramos || Inflation isn’t the most organized phenomenon, and investors often all want to be on the same side of the boat…

I have a very irregular series called, “Problems with Constant Compound Interest.” Part of the idea of that series is that it is difficult to assure growth in capital in any sort of constant way. The simple models of the CFPs, and even actuaries that assume constant or near constant growth are ultimately doomed to fail if they try to exceed growth in nominal GDP by more than 2%/year.

Because of the oddities in the current market environment, current interest rates and inflation have decoupled. They are separate processes. We all want to build value in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, but how do you do that in an environment where price to free cash flow multiples are sky high, nominal interest rates are low, and the prices of most commodities are high as well (leaving aside gold as an oddity). Mindless stock bulls talk of TINA [There Is No Alternative (to buying stocks)], as if there is no limit to how high stock prices can go when interest rates are low. I want to tell you about TIN. There Is Nothing (worth buying). This is the nature of financial repression.

If you invest in short bonds, you get gouged by current inflation. If you buy long bonds, you run the risk that the Fed might start monetizing Treasury debt directly, and inflation really runs. With stocks you run the risk of any hiccup in the global economy (when is the omega variant coming so that we can move on to Hebrew letters?) can derail the market, particularly if it leads to higher interest rates.

The Fed has gotten its wish and is forcing an asset bubble on the US to aid growth, however fitfully. All of the relationships of the present to the future are out of whack, because interest rates are too low. But if intermediate interest rates rose to the level of nominal GDP growth, we would see deficits grow even more rapidly as the US government would refinance at higher rates. The Fed is stuck in a doom loop of its own design ever since Alan Greenspan got the great idea to cut short recessions too soon. That has led us into a liquidity trap designed by the Fed.

As I said to one of my clients this week (a bright man), “If you are not bewildered, you are not thinking.” About the only idea I can think of for investing at present is the intersection of high quality and low-ish valuations. As it says in Ecclesiastes 11:2 “Give a serving to seven, and also to eight, For you do not know what evil will be on the earth.” Diversify among safe-ish investments, with a few cyclicals that will do well if things run hot, and stable businesses, if things do not.

That’s all.

Image credit: All images belong to Aleph Blog

This should be a brief post. At the end of the third quarter, the S&P 500 was poised to nominally return -0.64%/year over the next 10 years. As of the close today, that figure was -1.83%/year, slightly more than the -1.84%/year at the record high last Friday.

The only period compares with this valuation-wise is the dot-com bubble. We are above dot-com level valuations. And if you view the 10-year returns from the worst time of the dot-com bubble to now, you can see that the results they obtained are milder than what I forecast here.

Of course, a lot of what will happen in nominal terms will rely on the actions of the Fed. Will the Fed:

• Allow a real recession to clear away dud assets that are on life support from low rates? (Collapsing the current asset bubble)
• Change the terms of monetary policy, and start directly monetizing US Treasury debt? (Risking high inflation)
• Continue to dither with financial repression, leaving rates low, not caring about moderate inflation, with real growth zero-like. (Zombie economy — this is the most likely outcome for now)

In some ways the markets are playing around with something I call “the last arbitrage.” Bonds versus Stocks. The concept of TINA (There is no alternative [to stocks]) relies on the idea that the Fed will be the lapdog of the equity markets. If stocks are high, the Fed is happy. Phrased another way, if the Fed maximizes wealth inequality, it is happy.

And the Fed will be happy. They live to employ thousands of macroeconomists who would have a hard time finding real employment. These economists live to corrupt our understanding f the macroeconomy, justifying the actions of the Fed. The Fed just wants to scrape enough seigniorage to pay the staff, and keep Congress and the Administration mollified. All taken out of the hides of those who save.

So with the last arbitrage… interest rates have to stay low to keep the stock market high, even if it means slow growth, and moderate and growing inflation. The likely change promulgated by the Fed today, raising the short rate by 0.75% in 2022 will likely flatten the yield curve, leading to a crisis of some sort, and push them back into QE and near-zero short rates. The stock market will have a pullback and a rally, but what of inflation? How will people act when there is no way to save for the short-run, without inflation eating away value?

Brave new world. The Fed is stuck, and we are stuck with them. Gold does nothing, and would be a kinder mistress than the Fed. Better to live within strict limits, than the folly of an elastic currency. But as is true with all things in America, we are going to have to learn this the hard way.

PS — As for me, I am living with value stocks, small stocks, and international stocks. Very little in the S&P 500 here.