COMPLACENCY BUBBLE

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Posted on 20th March 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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This is an interesting and crucial question. Usually, when the stock market drops significantly, the bond market benefits as people pile into Treasury bonds for safety. Some smart people think there is going to be a bond market crash. Will these people pile into stocks?

The problem is that Ben Bernanke and his band of merry money printers have bastardized our free market capitalist system with their manipulation of interest rates to enrich their benefactor banker class. By artificially driving down interest rates to below the rate of inflation they have created a bond bubble. By confiscating the wealth of savers through these negative real interest rates and providing free money to the Wall Street shyster class, they are also creating a stock market bubble. They are also trying to reinflate a housing bubble through foreclosure manipulation and Wall Street investor money forcing prices higher by creating an artificial lack of supply.

I agree with David Rosenberg. The bond bubble and the growing stock bubble are tied together and will likely implode simultaneously when Bernanke successfully ignites his desired inflation or his efforts fail and we fall into a deeper recession. Federal Express reported absolutely horrific results this morning, with their profits plunging by 31%. Do the earnings of the biggest freight carrier in the world plunge when the economy is growing?

We are clearly in a worldwide recession, despite the propaganda being spewed by the MSM. The bankers are coming for your cash. Bernanke is already absconding with 3% of it per year through his Fed created inflation. Stocks and bonds are priced for negative real returns over the next ten years. Cash under your matress or converted into gold and silver or guns and bullets is the best investment at this time.          

Bond crash dead ahead: tick, tick … boom!

Commentary: ‘Investors have no idea what’s about to happen’

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) – InvestmentNews latest cover is so powerful you can actually hear sirens atop a flashing neon billboard, megawarning in huge bold type: “Tick, Tick … Boom!”

A warning: InvestmentNews wants to make damn sure its readers, the 90,000 professional financial advisers who rely on timeliness and accuracy of every INews forecast: “What will your clients’ portfolios look like when the bond bomb goes off?” Get it? Not if but when it happens.

Yes, they do expect the bond bomb to explode and are publishing “a special report on the impending crisis in the bond market.”

Yes, you heard them. “Tick, Tick … Boom!” Wake up, it’s an “impending crisis,” dead ahead. And to punctuate their message, InvestmentNews added an alarming photo of an alarm clock with huge bells, wired to rolled up bonds looking like a stack of dynamite sticks. “Tick, Tick … Boom!”

InvestmentNews is not staffed by a bunch of not alarmists, quite the opposite — conservative, trustworthy and methodical. They know the 90,000 registered investment advisers that rely on them are in turn responsible for advising millions of Americans and managing trillions of retirement assets. Yes, their audience demands reliable forecasts.

So listen closely, we’ll summarize Andrew Osterland’s lead article “Fear Rising With Rates,” along with an interview with Bond King Bill Gross. And INews editorials on “repositioning client money” with “strategies for rising rates.” And a couple of opposing portfolio suggestions: “The case for, and against, stocks.”

The Bull says we’re on “the verge of an even bigger run-up. The bear warns, if you “goal is to avoid losses, stay out of equities altogether.”

Either way, the INews report reads like a Stephen King horror story, and in the background, you hear the ticking … ticking … louder … louder … Boom!”

Bond bubble, dangerous, big, doubled last four years

Since the crash four years ago investors have been wary of stocks and have been putting their money in bond mutual funds. INew’s interview with Gross noted that “assets in bond mutual funds have more than doubled to over $2 trillion.”

Gross reiterated Pimco’s “New Normal” warning: “The future for bonds is a lower-return future than investors have come to assume. Bond investors should be expecting 2% to 3% returns over the future years … bond returns will be lower than expected, but … still better than cash and will provide positive returns.”

Interesting that Gross also warned while interest rates will go up 10-15 basis points annually, “a big spike in interest rates is certainly a worry for bonds, but it wouldn’t be friendly for stocks, either.”

Latest stock bubble even more deceptive, more deadly

Over at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Peter Coy also picked up on the “imbalance between the Dow and the economy … Bond yields are so low that savers who used to keep their money in, say, Treasurys are being driven into the stock market in search of positive returns. They have no choice.”

Then he borrows economist Roger Farmer’s metaphor of “two staggering drunks connected by a long rope. Sometimes the stock market and the economy go in the same direction, sometimes not. But … it won’t go on forever.” The party will soon be over.

Why? Coy highlights the no-win scenarios of economist David Rosenberg: “If the economy slips into recession, even the Fed won’t be able to keep the market aloft. On the other hand, if the economy finally catches fire, investors will conclude that the Fed’s extreme unction will eventually be withdrawn. They’ll sell bonds in anticipation, driving up interest rates and possibly pushing down stocks.”

It gets worse. Rosenberg doesn’t like what’s dead ahead: “His worry is simply that no one else is particularly worried — that the stock market’s rise has been so steady, calm, and untroubled” and nobody seems concerned.

Which reminds him that “stock market volatility is back to the lows of 2006 and 2007 (right before, ahem, the biggest crisis since the Depression). Says Rosenberg: “If there’s a bubble right now, it’s in complacency.” Investors are in for a rude awakening.

Warning: ‘Investors have no idea about what’s about to happen’

Why are investors complacent? Why? Because “the public thinks bonds are safe, but they’re not … Bonds are a big problem, and most people don’t understand that yet,” said Harry Clark, chief executive of Clark Capital Management.” Deep inside, the public has a vivid memory of the $10 trillion market cap lost on Wall Street in the 2008 collapse. But after four years of being lulled into feeling safe in bonds, “they have no idea what’s about to happen to them.”

Listen to the warnings. Start planning now. You have no excuse. Something big is “about to happen” and you are not going to like it.

Fortunately for investors, InvestmentNews’ Osterland also couldn’t be more blunt: “Fear among financial advisers of a bond-market crash that could devastate the portfolios of millions of investors is growing amid improving economic news and rising U.S. bond yields,” as he also sees the “imbalance between the Dow and the economy” that BusinessWeek warns “won’t go on forever.”

But what’s really scary is not just rates going up, or bonds down, or stocks hitting a bear patch, or the economy stalling. No, what’s really scary is that investors are complacent, clueless, just don’t get it. As a result, when the ticking time bombs go off (not just the bond bomb and the rate bomb, but the stock bomb and the economy bomb) the volatility will go into a wild ride like a roller coaster that will trigger panic selling, even a full-blown crash, repeating the 2008 disaster.

“Buyer beware. There’s a big yellow sign saying, ‘Caution ahead.’ It’s not going to be pleasant when rates go up,” said David Sherman, president of Cohanzick Management.” In fact, downright insane, if you remember the last crash.

Market’s already turned … even brokers see worst-case scenario

InvestmentNews even added a warning from FINRA, the chief regulator of the brokerage industry: “Last month, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. took the unusual step of issuing an investor alert about the vulnerability of bonds and bond funds.”

Many economists believe that interest rates are not likely to get much lower and will eventually rise. If that is true, then outstanding bonds, particularly those with a low interest rate and high duration, may experience significant price drops as interest rates rise along the way.”

Get it? “Significant” interest rate increases … bond price crashing … rippling through the stock market, and the global economy. Investors have been lulled into complacency by Ben Bernanke’s long cheap money policy.

Warning, wake up plan ahead … your complacency, everyone’s complacency will soon end with a shock when rates jump … but by then it may be too late to plan ahead, because it will right here, right now.

Do the ticking math … tick … tick … tick … boom!

Osterland relies on some solid numbers to make his point that the market’s turning has already begun and will spiral down and out of control: “The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, just under 2%, is up more than 35% from the record low in July. Investors are almost certainly going to see negative real returns on their Treasury portfolios in the first quarter, a rare event that many feel has the potential to trigger a wider selloff in the market.”

And adding to the selloff risk, we’re coming into federal tax season and a couple more debt ceiling cliffs: “With the Federal Reserve keeping short-term rates near zero and long-term rates near historic lows with its bond-buying program, there’s little room for further price appreciation. That means … interest rates have nowhere to go but up.”

And unfortunately, he warns that “a rapid rise in interest rates would bludgeon many existing bond portfolios. Simple bond math holds that a 1-percentage-point rise in interest rates would result in a roughly 1% decline in prices for every year of a bond’s duration.” Yes, “bludgeon” your portfolio once rates start ratcheting up.

InvestmentNews takes its responsibility to America’s 90,000 professional financial advisers seriously and in this “Special Report: Tick, Tick … Boom!” it’s painfully clear it sees enormous danger ahead for a millions of complacent investors who “have no idea what’s about to happen to them. … Tick … Tick … Boom!”

 

CREDIT SUPERNOVA

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Posted on 31st January 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

Investment Outlook
February 2013

Credit Supernova!

 

William H. Gross

This is the way the world ends…
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Eliot
 
They say that time is money.* What they don’t say is that money may be running out of time.

There may be a natural evolution to our fractionally reserved credit system which characterizes modern global finance. Much like the universe, which began with a big bang nearly 14 billion years ago, but is expanding so rapidly that scientists predict it will all end in a “big freeze” trillions of years from now, our current monetary system seems to require perpetual expansion to maintain its existence. And too, the advancing entropy in the physical universe may in fact portend a similar decline of “energy” and “heat” within the credit markets. If so, then the legitimate response of creditors, debtors and investors inextricably intertwined within it, should logically be to ask about the economic and investment implications of its ongoing transition.

But before mimicking T.S. Eliot on the way our monetary system might evolve, let me first describe the “big bang” beginning of credit markets, so that you can more closely recognize its transition. The creation of credit in our modern day fractional reserve banking system began with a deposit and the profitable expansion of that deposit via leverage. Banks and other lenders don’t always keep 100% of their deposits in the “vault” at any one time – in fact they keep very little – thus the term “fractional reserves.” That first deposit then, and the explosion outward of 10x and more of levered lending, is modern day finance’s equivalent of the big bang. When it began is actually harder to determine than the birth of the physical universe but it certainly accelerated with the invention of central banking – the U.S. in 1913 – and with it the increased confidence that these newly licensed lenders of last resort would provide support to financial and real economies. Banking and central banks were and remain essential elements of a productive global economy.

But they carried within them an inherent instability that required the perpetual creation of more and more credit to stay alive. Those initial loans from that first deposit? They were made most certainly at yields close to the rate of real growth and creation of real wealth in the economy. Lenders demanded that yield because of their risk, and borrowers were speculating that the profit on their fledgling enterprises would exceed the interest expense on those loans. In many cases, they succeeded. But the economy as a whole could not logically grow faster than the real interest rates required to pay creditors, in combination with the near double-digit returns that equity holders demanded to support the initial leverage – unless – unless – it was supplied with additional credit to pay the tab. In a sense this was a “Sixteen Tons” metaphor: Another day older and deeper in debt, except few within the credit system itself understood the implications.

Economist Hyman Minsky did. With credit now expanding, the sophisticated economic model provided by Minsky was working its way towards what he called Ponzi finance. First, he claimed the system would borrow in low amounts and be relatively self-sustaining – what he termed “Hedge” finance. Then the system would gain courage, lever more into a “Speculative” finance mode which required more credit to pay back previous borrowings at maturity. Finally, the end phase of “Ponzi” finance would appear when additional credit would be required just to cover increasingly burdensome interest payments, with accelerating inflation the end result.

Minsky’s concept, developed nearly a half century ago shortly after the explosive decoupling of the dollar from gold in 1971, was primarily a cyclically contained model which acknowledged recession and then rejuvenation once the system’s leverage had been reduced. That was then. He perhaps could not have imagined the hyperbolic, as opposed to linear, secular rise in U.S. credit creation that has occurred since as shown in Chart 1. (Patterns for other developed economies are similar.) While there has been cyclical delevering, it has always been mild – even during the Volcker era of 1979-81. When Minsky formulated his theory in the early 70s, credit outstanding in the U.S. totaled $3 trillion.† Today, at $56 trillion and counting, it is a monster that requires perpetually increasing amounts of fuel, a supernova star that expands and expands, yet, in the process begins to consume itself. Each additional dollar of credit seems to create less and less heat. In the 1980s, it took four dollars of new credit to generate $1 of real GDP. Over the last decade, it has taken $10, and since 2006, $20 to produce the same result. Minsky’s Ponzi finance at the 2013 stage goes more and more to creditors and market speculators and less and less to the real economy. This “Credit New Normal” is entropic much like the physical universe and the “heat” or real growth that new credit now generates becomes less and less each year: 2% real growth now instead of an historical 3.5% over the past 50 years; likely even less as the future unfolds.

 
Not only is more and more anemic credit created by lenders as its “sixteen tons” becomes “thirty-two,” then “sixty-four,” but in the process, today’s near zero bound interest rates cripple savers and business models previously constructed on the basis of positive real yields and wider margins for loans. Net interest margins at banks compress; liabilities at insurance companies threaten their levered equity; and underfunded pension plans require greater contributions from their corporate funders unless regulatory agencies intervene. What has followed has been a gradual erosion of real growth as layoffs, bank branch closings and business consolidations create less of a need for labor and physical plant expansion. In effect, the initial magic of credit creation turns less magical, in some cases even destructive and begins to consume credit markets at the margin as well as portions of the real economy it has created. For readers demanding a more model-driven, historical example of the negative impact of zero based interest rates, they have only to witness the modern day example of Japan. With interest rates close to zero for the last decade or more, a sharply declining rate of investment in productive plants and equipment, shown in Chart 2, is the best evidence. A Japanese credit market supernova, exploding and then contracting onto itself. Money and credit may be losing heat and running out of time in other developed economies as well, including the U.S.

Investment Strategy
If so then the legitimate question is: how much time does money/credit have left and what are the investment consequences between now and then? Well, first I will admit that my supernova metaphor is more instructive than literal. The end of the global monetary system is not nigh. But the entropic characterization is most illustrative. Credit is now funneled increasingly into market speculation as opposed to productive innovation. Asset price appreciation as opposed to simple yield or “carry” is now critical to maintain the system’s momentum and longevity. Investment banking, which only a decade ago promoted small business development and transition to public markets, now is dominated by leveraged speculation and the Ponzi finance Minsky once warned against.

So our credit-based financial markets and the economy it supports are levered, fragile and increasingly entropic – it is running out of energy and time. When does money run out of time? The countdown begins when investable assets pose too much risk for too little return; when lenders desert credit markets for other alternatives such as cash or real assets.

REPEAT: THE COUNTDOWN BEGINS WHEN INVESTABLE ASSETS POSE TOO MUCH RISK FOR TOO LITTLE RETURN.

Visible first signs for creditors would logically be 1) long-term bond yields too low relative to duration risk, 2) credit spreads too tight relative to default risk and 3) PE ratios too high relative to growth risks. Not immediately, but over time, credit is exchanged figuratively or sometimes literally for cash in a mattress or conversely for real assets (gold, diamonds) in a vault. It also may move to other credit markets denominated in alternative currencies. As it does, domestic systems delever as credit and its supernova heat is abandoned for alternative assets. Unless central banks and credit extending private banks can generate real or at second best, nominal growth with their trillions of dollars, euros, and yen, then the risk of credit market entropy will increase.
The element of time is critical because investors and speculators that support the system may not necessarily fully participate in it for perpetuity. We ask ourselves frequently at PIMCO, what else could we do, what else could we invest in to avoid the consequences of financial repression and negative real interest rates approaching minus 2%? The choices are varied: cash to help protect against an inflationary expansion or just the opposite – long Treasuries to take advantage of a deflationary bust; real assets; emerging market equities, etc. One of our Investment Committee members swears he would buy land in New Zealand and set sail. Most of us can’t do that, nor can you. The fact is that PIMCO and almost all professional investors are in many cases index constrained, and thus duration and risk constrained. We operate in a world that is primarily credit based and as credit loses energy we and our clients should acknowledge its entropy, which means accepting lower returns on bonds, stocks, real estate and derivative strategies that likely will produce less than double-digit returns.

Still, investors cannot simply surrender to their entropic destiny. Time may be running out, but time is still money as the original saying goes. How can you make some?
(1) Position for eventual inflation: the end stage of a supernova credit explosion is likely to produce more inflation than growth, and more chances of inflation as opposed to deflation. In bonds, buy inflation protection via TIPS; shorten maturities and durations; don’t fight central banks – anticipate them by buying what they buy first; look as well for offshore sovereign bonds with positive real interest rates (Mexico, Italy, Brazil, for example).

(2) Get used to slower real growth: QEs and zero-based interest rates have negative consequences. Move money to currencies and asset markets in countries with less debt and less hyperbolic credit systems. Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Canada are candidates.

(3) Invest in global equities with stable cash flows that should provide historically lower but relatively attractive returns.

(4) Transition from financial to real assets if possible at the margin: buy something you can sink your teeth into – gold, other commodities, anything that can’t be reproduced as fast as credit. Think of PIMCO in this transition. We hope to be “Your Global Investment Authority.” We have a product menu to assist.

(5) Be cognizant of property rights and confiscatory policies in all governments.

(6) Appreciate the supernova characterization of our current credit system. At some point it will transition to something else.

We may be running out of time, but time will always be money.
Speed Read for Credit Supernova
1) Why is our credit market running out of heat or fuel?
a) As it expands at a rate of trillions per year, real growth in the economy has failed to respond. More credit goes to pay interest than future investment.

b) Zero-based interest rates, which are the result of QE and credit creation, have negative as well as positive effects. Historic business models may be negatively affected and investment spending may be dampened.

c)  Look to the Japanese historical example.
2) What options should an investor consider?
a) Seek inflation protection in credit market assets/ shorten durations.

b) Increase real assets/commodities/stable cash flow equities at the margin.

c) Accept lower future returns in portfolio planning.

William H. Gross
Managing Director
 
* The terms “money” and “credit” are used interchangeably in this IO.  Purists would dispute the usage and I would agree with them, arguing for the usage for simplicity’s sake and the evolving homogeneity of the two.
† Outstanding credit includes all government debt as well as corporate, household and personal debt. Does not include “shadow” debt estimated at $20-30 trillion.

INFLATION DRAGONS

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Posted on 3rd January 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

Gross is no chicken little. He runs the biggest bond fund in the world. When he says that inflation and currency debasement are in our future, you should listen.

Money for Nothin’
Writing Checks for Free

 

It was Milton Friedman, not Ben Bernanke, who first made reference to dropping money from helicopters in order to prevent deflation. Bernanke’s now famous “helicopter speech” in 2002, however, was no less enthusiastically supportive of the concept. In it, he boldly previewed the almost unimaginable policy solutions that would follow the black swan financial meltdown in 2008: policy rates at zero for an extended period of time; expanding the menu of assets that the Fed buys beyond Treasuries; and of course quantitative easing purchases of an almost unlimited amount should they be needed. These weren’t Bernanke innovations – nor was the term QE. Many of them had been applied by policy authorities in the late 1930s and ‘40s as well as Japan in recent years. Yet the then Fed Governor’s rather blatant support of monetary policy to come should have been a signal to investors that he would be willing to pilot a helicopter should the takeoff be necessary. “Like gold,” he said, “U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”

 
Mr. Bernanke never provided additional clarity as to what he meant by “no cost.” Perhaps he was referring to zero-bound interest rates, although at the time in 2002, 10-year Treasuries were at 4%. Or perhaps he knew something that American citizens, their political representatives, and almost all investors still don’t know: that quantitative easing – the purchase of Treasury and Agency mortgage obligations from the private sector – IS essentially costless in a number of ways. That might strike almost all of us as rather incredible – writing checks for free – but that in effect is what a central bank does. Yet if ordinary citizens and corporations can’t overdraft their accounts without criminal liability, how can the Fed or the European Central Bank or any central bank get away with printing “electronic money” and distributing it via helicopter flyovers in the trillions and trillions of dollars?
 
Well, the answer is sort of complicated but then it’s sort of simple: They just make it up. When the Fed now writes $85 billion of checks to buy Treasuries and mortgages every month, they really have nothing in the “bank” to back them. Supposedly they own a few billion dollars of “gold certificates” that represent a fairy-tale claim on Ft. Knox’s secret stash, but there’s essentially nothing there but trust. When a primary dealer such as J.P. Morgan or Bank of America sells its Treasuries to the Fed, it gets a “credit” in its account with the Fed, known as “reserves.” It can spend those reserves for something else, but then another bank gets a credit for its reserves and so on and so on. The Fed has told its member banks “Trust me, we will always honor your reserves,” and so the banks do, and corporations and ordinary citizens trust the banks, and “the beat goes on,” as Sonny and Cher sang. $54 trillion of credit in the U.S. financial system based upon trusting a central bank with nothing in the vault to back it up. Amazing!
 
But the story doesn’t end here. What I have just described is a rather routine textbook explanation of how central and fractional reserve banking works its productive yet potentially destructive magic. What Governor Bernanke may have been referring to with his “essentially free” comment was the fact that the Fed and other central banks such as the Bank of England (BOE) actually rebate the interest they earn on the Treasuries and Gilts that they buy. They give the interest back to the government, and in so doing, the Treasury issues debt for free. Theoretically it’s the profits of the Fed that are returned to the Treasury, but the profits are the interest on the $2.5 trillion worth of Treasuries and mortgages that they have purchased from the market. The current annual remit amounts to nearly $100 billion, an amount that permits the Treasury to reduce its deficit by a like amount. When the Fed buys $1 trillion worth of Treasuries and mortgages annually, as it is now doing, it effectively is financing 80% of the deficit for free.
 
The BOE and other central banks work in a similar fashion. British Chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to our Treasury Secretary) George Osborne wrote a letter to Mervyn King, Governor of the BOE (equivalent to our Fed Chairman) in November. “Transferring the net income from the APF [Asset Purchase Facility – Britain’s QE] will allow the Government to manage its cash more efficiently, and should lead to debt interest savings to central government in the short-term.” Savings indeed! The Exchequer issues gilts, the BOE’s QE program buys them and then remits the interest back to the Exchequer. As shown in Chart 1, the world’s six largest central banks have collectively issued six trillion dollars’ worth of checks since the beginning of 2009 in order to stem private sector delevering. Treasury credit is being backed with central bank credit with the interest then remitted to its issuer. Should interest rates rise and losses accrue to the Fed’s portfolio, they record it as an accounting liability owed to the Treasury, which need never be paid back. This is about as good as it can get folks. Money for nothing. Debt for free.

 

Investors and ordinary citizens might wonder then, why the fuss over the fiscal cliff and the increasing amount of debt/GDP that current deficits portend? Why the austerity push in the U.K., and why the possibly exaggerated concern by U.S. Republicans over spending and entitlements? If a country can issue debt, have its central bank buy it, and then return the interest, what’s to worry? Alfred E. Neuman for President (or House Speaker!).

Well ultimately government financing schemes such as today’s QE’s or England’s early 1700s South Sea Bubble end badly. At the time Sir Isaac Newton was asked about the apparent success of the government’s plan and he responded by saying that “I can calculate the movement of the stars but not the madness of men.” The madness he referred to was the rather blatant acceptance by government and its citizen investors, that they had discovered the key to perpetual prosperity: “essentially costless” debt financing. The plan’s originator, Scotsman John Law, could not have conceived of helicopters like Ben Bernanke did 300 years later, but the concept was the same: writing checks for free.

Yet the common sense of John Law – and likewise that of Ben Bernanke – must have known that only air comes for free and is “essentially costless.” The future price tag of printing six trillion dollars’ worth of checks comes in the form of inflation and devaluation of currencies either relative to each other, or to commodities in less limitless supply such as oil or gold. To date, central banks have been willing to accept that cost – nay – have even encouraged it. The Fed is now comfortable with 2.5% inflation for at least 1–2 years and the Bank of Japan seems willing to up their targeted objective to something above as opposed to below ground zero. But in the process, zero-bound yields and their QE check writing may have distorted market prices, and in the process the flow as well as the existing stock of credit. Capital vs. labor; bonds/stocks vs. cash; lenders vs. borrowers; surplus vs. deficit nations; rich vs. the poor: these are the secular anomalies and mismatches perpetuated by unlimited check writing that now threaten future stability.

Ben Bernanke has publically acknowledged these growing disparities. “We are quite aware,” he said in November 2011, “that very low interest rates, particularly for a protracted period, do have costs for a lot of people… I think the response is, though, that there is a greater good here, which is the health and recovery of the U.S. economy… I mean, ultimately, if you want to earn money on your investments, you have to invest in an economy which is growing.”

That growth now is to be measured each and every employment Friday via an unemployment rate thermostat set at 6.5%. We at PIMCO would not argue with that objective. Yet we would caution, as Bernanke himself has cautioned, that there are negative consequences and that when central banks enter the cave of quantitative easing and “essentially costless” electronic printing of money, there may be dragons.

Investment conclusions
Investors should be alert to the longterm inflationary thrust of such check writing. While they are not likely to breathe fire in 2013, the inflationary dragons lurk in the “out” years towards which long-term bond yields are measured. You should avoid them and confine your maturities and bond durations to short/intermediate targets supported by Fed policies. In addition, be aware of PIMCO’s continued concerns about the increasing ineffectiveness of quantitative easing with regards to the real economy. Zero-bound interest rates, QE maneuvering, and “essentially costless” check writing destroy financial business models and stunt investment decisions which offer increasingly lower ROIs and ROEs. Purchases of “paper” shares as opposed to investments in tangible productive investment assets become the likely preferred corporate choice. Those purchases may be initially supportive of stock prices but ultimately constraining of true wealth creation and real economic growth. At some future point, risk assets – stocks, corporate and high yield bonds – must recognize the difference. Bernanke’s dreams of economic revival, which would then lead to the day that investors can earn higher returns, may be an unattainable theoretical hope, in contrast to a future reality. Japan we are not, nor is Euroland or the U.K. – just yet. But “costless” check writing does indeed have a cost and checks cannot perpetually be written for free.

William H. Gross
Managing Director

 

10 BLEAK YEARS AHEAD

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Posted on 27th November 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

, , ,

When Hussman, Grantham, Gross, El-Erian, and Shiller all come to the same conclusion, you should take note. They manage hundreds of billions and they all conclude that real returns in the stock market will be less than 4% over the next ten years. The implications of this fact are far reaching and devastating. Pension funds are still assuming 8% returns over the long-term. When real returns on their stock and bond portfolios are 2% (bonds will provide a negative real return), the unfunded liabilities for state and local government pension plans will soar into the trillions. Taxpayers are on the hook for those unfunded liabilites. People who punched in an annual return on their retirement savings of 8% or 10% into those retirement calculators will find their 401k balances will be far below what they thought for retirement. Demographics, out of control government spending, never ending war, delusional consumers, overvalued stocks, 0% interest for savers, bankers controlling our economy and government, and corrupt bought off pandering politicians are a fatal mixture. This dire economic scenario also plays out nicely with the Fourth Turning Crisis we are confronted with. Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. 

Stocks dead, bonds deader till 2022: Pimco

Commentary: Gross, El-Erian warn of very slow growth ahead

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Big money managers are warning investors. They’re now citing the Bible: “Seven lean years.” No recovery till 2016. That was Jeremy Grantham back a few years ago. His GMO firm manages $104 billion.

Now Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, the co-CEOs at the $2 trillion Pimco money managers, are citing the same biblical warning to jar investors awake and prepare for the coming lean years of slow, low growth and austerity. Except in Pimco’s new warning, the future just got much, much darker for investors — no recovery until 2022.


Norbert Schiller/World Economic Forum

Pimco’s Mohamed A. El-Erian,

Earlier in the summer — back when most investors were totally distracted by campaign drama and betting heavily on a new president, anticipating a post-election bull market — many were expecting Corporate America would unleash trillions in hoarded reserves, stimulate a recovery and new bull. Back then, Reuters, Forbes, CNBC, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and rest of the obsessed media simply yawned at Gross and El-Erian’s warning that equities hit a “dead end in terms of significant appreciation.”

“Dead end?” No recovery till after the 2020 elections? Yes, one angry headline even said Gross was “faithless” with stocks. Why? Conventional wisdom tells us markets run in cycles. So investors believe it’s now time for a new bull. Gross and El-Erian disagree.

Warren Buffett and Jack Bogle first mentioned a “new normal” with slow, low growth back in 2002. It fell on deaf ears. Since the 2008 meltdown the same warnings are coming from gurus like Grantham, Gross, El-Erian and others. Ignore their warnings at your peril.

America’s economy, markets downshifting to long, low, slow-growth

Perhaps the single best description of America’s historic shift comes from Time magazine’s economics editor, Rana Foroohar, in “Why Stocks Are Dead (And Bonds Are Deader).” That column’s a must-read to help America’s 95 million investors understand the American economy and markets — from the Reagan/Bush generation … to the bank meltdown in 2008 … to the dark forecasts about the coming decade.

Here’s a summary of 10 points Foroohar picked up from meetings with El-Erian and Gross.

1. America fell in love with a Goldilocks economy

As early as 2005 Pimco warned that investors, voters and politicians had fallen in love with “a Goldilocks economy, the notion that markets were in a long period of growth and stability, neither too hot nor too cold.” El-Erian “never believed the bull” about wise “world’s central bankers and the seemingly endless growth of emerging markets.”

2. Economists predicting 3% to 4% growth are misleading America

Pimco was “quick to see, post-2008, the passing of an era,” says Foroohar. The unthinkable was happening: “The U.S. flirting with default, unlimited central-bank money dumps were suddenly happening.” Worse, today “while most experts (including those within the Obama administration) were plotting how to move from recession back to the trend growth rate of 3% or 4%,” Pimco concluded that a low 2% growth will probably be the New Normal “not for a couple of years but for decades.”

3. Warning: Too many investors, banks, politicians still in denial

Many investors are still disappointed with their nest eggs, in denial, ignoring Pimco’s message, trapped in wishful thinking, hoping for a return of the short-term bull-bear cycles common in recent decades, unwilling to face the harsh reality of the New Normal with slow growth everywhere: consumer spending, jobs, government revenues, corporate earnings, stocks, bonds, commodities, even America’s role in the world.

4. Investing is like surfing and the money wave may soon crash

Surfing is a popular Gross metaphor: Imagine waves of investor opinions moving stock prices. Whether surfing or investing, you “ride the wave,” sense the crest, always knowing that “ultimately a good surfer has to kick out.” Or get wiped out “when the wave crashes. And the money wave, says Gross, may be ready to crash.”

5. The stock market is a Ponzi scheme … get out now

In fact “Gross recently stunned the markets by calling equities a Ponzi scheme,” says Foroohar, “warning investors they will never see 6% real returns again and would be lucky to get 3%.” Worse, investors are going to pay a stiff price for the Fed’s cheap money today: Inflation, stagnating growth, skyrocketing costs of borrowing, real estate and stock prices, consumer spending … all dropping. Foroohar says two of “the world’s best surfers are saying, ‘Get out of the water.’” Now.

6. Bernanke’s cheap money is killing our long-term recovery

“Since the 1980s, central bankers worldwide have begun to use low interest rates and large cash infusions to ease, smooth and stretch those cycles.” Then, politicians made things worse, providing “voters with a cushy ride.” So the public added record “amounts of debt to buy stocks and houses, hoping their value would keep rising so we could buy more of everything else,” says Foroohar.

7. Bernanke can’t prop up our economic bubble much longer

Pimco warns that America’s been “riding the crest” of a money wave from three rounds of quantitative easing, “one reason the stock market took off earlier this year.” Gross and El-Erian took advantage of the Fed’s cheap money: Their “flagship Total Return Fund has outperformed its category for the past five years, returning 9.7% this year, nearly 3 percentage points better than the category.”

8. Politicians are clueless economists making our slow growth slower

Inept politicians are a big problem: Pimco adds “neither party really seems to understand that credit as a fuel for capitalism is basically exhausted.” Foroohar calls this a “chicken-and-egg cycle: the financial crisis demanded that the Fed pump even more money into the system to avoid a depression. But Washington, which should have then helped remedy the situation with growth-enhancing programs … has remained gridlocked.”

9. Congressional Budget Office warning: 2.4% GDP growth as far as 2022

Washington gridlock has shaped their biblical warning: It’s “a seven-years-feast-and-seven-years-famine-type situation,’ says Gross. ‘And we’ve been feasting for 20 or 30 years.’ The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which predicts 2.4% yearly growth as far ahead as 2022, seems to agree.” Growth under 3% “limits our national wealth and well-being in the long term,” El-Erian told Foroohar. “This is the first generation that’s seriously at risk of doing less well than their parents.”

10. Defensive investing: some tips for bad-news markets

How to invest in a recession that could become a depression? Gross and El-Erian passed on to Foroohar the best of strategies that have helped Pimco build its $2 trillion portfolio. First, remember: “Almost anything that we do in the future won’t be as high-returning as what you are used to,” says Gross. Double-digit returns are dead. Soon the Fed’s zero interest rates will be gone.

So where’s Pimco making bets? Next, remember, “the stock market as a whole may be a Ponzi scheme,” but “blue chips have become the new bonds. Plus multinationals Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and IBM can spread risk globally “while delivering a 3% inflation-beating dividend.” Also “well-capitalized, growing firms that are undervalued because they are in beleaguered markets,” like Spain’s Santander Bank are opportunities.

Avoid long bonds of nations with big political risks. But consider “higher-yielding debt of countries like Mexico and Brazil.” Gross and El-Erian favor “housing and anything housing-related,” like contractors and lumber companies. Their stock picks include: commodities, investment protected bond, high-grade munis and non-dollar denominated emerging countries. Their pans are banks and financial stocks, high-yield bonds and long bonds in big developed countries like the U.S., U.K. and Germany.

Finally, safety is key to Pimco’s strategies. Foroohar says, Pimco’s leaders will “continue to plot and plan and invest in the New Normal, watching the horizon for the crest of that money wave, hoping to keep riding it for a while longer … before it finally crashes to shore.”

 

TIME TO VOTE

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Posted on 1st November 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

Time To Vote, from PIMCO’s Bill Gross

So I pulled out my magic lamp that for some reason works only every October 22nd, and rubbed until the Genie appeared in his red and white checkered cloak with a 10-inch diameter Flavor Flav clock hanging ceremoniously around his neck. Being a rather forward, although not disrespectful Genie, he immediately said, “Mr. G, instead of the yield on the 10-year Treasury, perhaps this year you should wish to know who is going to win the Presidential election?” After some thought I replied, “Nah, I need some breaking news, Mr. Genie, something that will make a difference, something that will shock the world, like when does the iPhone 6 come out?” Obama/Romney, Romney/Obama – the most important election of our lifetime? Fact is they’re all the same – bought and paid for with the same money. Ours is a country of the SuperPAC, by the SuperPAC, and for the SuperPAC. The “people” are merely election-day pawns, pulling a Democratic or Republican lever that will deliver the same results every four years. “Change you can believe in?” I bought that one hook, line and sinker in 2008 during the last vestige of my disappearing middle age optimism. We got a more intelligent President, but we hardly got change. Healthcare dominated by corporate interests – what’s new? Financial regulation dominated by Wall Street – what’s new? Continuing pointless foreign wars – what’s new?I’ll tell you what isn’t new. Our two-party system continues to play ping pong with the American people, and the electorate is that white little ball going back and forth over the net. This side’s better – no, that one looks best. Elephants/Donkeys, Donkeys/Elephants. Perhaps the most farcical aspect of it all is that the choice between the two seems to occupy most of our time. Instead of digging in and digging out of this mess on a community level, we sit in front of our flat screens and watch endless debates about red and blue state theologies or listen to demagogues like Rush Limbaugh or his ex-cable counterpart Keith Olbermann. To express my discontent, Genie, along with my continuing patriotism, I’ve created a modern-day version of our Pledge of Allegiance. Place your hand over your clock and recite after me:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of
the fragmented state of America,
and to the plutocracy for which now it stands,
a red and blue nation,
under financial gods
indistinguishable,
with liberty and justice for the 1(%).
“Well,” said the Genie, with a little bit less respect in his voice, “you sound a little discouraged Mr. G – a tad cranky perhaps and showing all of your 68 years.” I suppose, I agreed. But during all those years, I’ve liked Ike and despised Bush Junior, been enraptured with Kennedy and enraged by Johnson, been put to sleep by both Ford and Carter and then invigorated by Reagan. And now – well, we’ve got the best government that money can buy, but I ain’t buying it. Now get back in your lamp and come up with something meaningful I can use this time come October 2013. And don’t fake me out with a picture of a skinnier but faster iPhone 6. I’m still trying to buy the “5” with the .01% interest on my money market account.Perhaps I should have asked Flavor Flav something more important. iPhones and next year’s 10-year Treasury yield aside, the biggest bet being wagered in financial markets these days is the bet on “financial repression,” “quantitative easing,” and the ultimate effect of both on the real economy. Of course even a genie couldn’t come up with a simple answer to that complex question. Sounds like something to be asked of a shrink from a couch, as opposed to a genie in a bottle. Whatever. But let me try and answer the repression and QE question with a little anecdote that I tell visiting clients.

About four years ago I opened up our family brokerage statement and searched with some effort to find the yield on our money market account. Interest rates, as I knew from my desk in Newport Beach, were plunging and I wondered just how much of a penalty we were being charged for the privilege of holding cash. My eyes finally fixed on the appropriate disclosure – hidden though it was – and it said “.01%.” Impossible! I thought. There must be a mistake here. Surely the decimal point was misplaced. Wasn’t “.01%” really 1% or even .1%, but definitely not “.01%.” That was close to nothing! Having counted cards at the blackjack table in my youth, I quickly calculated that over the next 12 months, our $10,000 balance would earn exactly $1.00. “Buy yourself a pair of shoes,” I said to Sue standing near my shoulder, “a pair of sandals at the weekend garage sale.” The remark was not well received. It seemed Sue was as sensitive about shoes as I was about interest rates. Note to self: Do not mention shoes with Sue except in the phrase “what a cute pair of shoes.”

Financial repression
Anyway, I quickly drifted back to my childhood days when I had a passbook at the local bank. Deposit rates were usually 4% or so back then, so I wondered how much money I would have needed then to produce the same $1.00 of interest I was receiving now. Twenty-five bucks! Whoa, $25 vs. $10,000! Seems like it was much better to be a saver back in 1958 and much better to be a spender in 2012. I could now take the $9,975 difference, spend it, and still have the same $1.00 of interest that I had back then! And that, Mr. Genie, with the Flavor Flav clock, is what is known as “financial repression.” By lowering interest rates to near zero through Fed Funds policy and quantitative easing, Ben Bernanke and his fellow central bankers are trying to force all of us to spend money.

Admittedly, the Fed’s theoretical foundation takes a different route to the same destination than does mine. Chairman Bernanke would say that by lowering yields, investors would logically sell their bonds to the Fed (QE I, II and III) and invest in something riskier and higher returning (high yield bonds, stocks and real estate). My $10,000 then, would do what capital has always done – gravitate to the highest reward/risk ratio available and in the process, stimulate investment and create jobs. The theoretical $9,975 that I might have chosen to “spend” in my first example would in the Chairman’s construct be eventually spent as well but in this case via investment and job creation, which in turn would lead to a virtuous cycle resembling the “old” as opposed to the “new” normal.

The difference between these two hypothetical models is critical. Is the money that is being made “available” through zero-based interest rates and quantitative easing being “spent” – or is it being “invested?” If it’s being spent, then at some point the game will come to an end – my $9,975 will have provided me and the economy some breathing room and some time to kick the future “big R” or “little d” down the road; but it will end. If it is being invested and invested productively, then we might eventually see the Old Normal on the horizon, reduce unemployment to less than 6% and return prosperity to the middle class.

Well, as President Obama might tell Governor Romney – “just do the math.” Or as Chris Berman might say on ESPN – “let’s go to the tape.” In the past three years of quantitative easing and financial repression, can we see a noticeable effect on investment as opposed to consumption? Is the Bernanke model working or is the $9,975 being spent on consumption? At first blush, an observer might vote for the Bernanke model. After all, the stock market has doubled in three-plus years, risk spreads are at historical lows, and housing prices are moving up – 10% higher in Southern California alone. Yet the real economy itself seems no different – still in New Normal gear. Surely by now, if the Bernanke model was as advertised, we would be seeing a pickup in investment as a percentage of GDP and a willingness to start saving “seed corn” as opposed to eating “caramel corn.” As Chart 1 points out – we are not. At the same time, we continue to consume at an “Old Normal” pace as shown in Chart 1 as well.

 
To confirm the point, let me introduce additional evidence for the prosecution, a chart that is periodically presented to our investment committee by PIMCO’s Saumil Parikh, who is turning out to be potentially a Pro Bowl replacement for recently retired All-Star Paul McCulley. It’s a little complicated sounding – “net national savings rate,” but it really speaks to the heart of the question. Net national savings is the amount of government, household and corporate savings that is left over after our existing investment stock is depreciated. Think of a building decaying and depreciating over 30 years so that you’d need to save each and every year to build and pay for a new one three decades down the road. If you don’t save, you can’t buy one: Net national savings.Well, Chart 2 confirms the evidence. Over the past three years, our net national savings rate has been negative, and lower than it has ever been in modern history. The last time this occurred was in the Great Depression.

 
 
Aside from a little squiggle back close to 0% over the last year or so, there is no evidence that investment is being incented by quantitative easing. All of the money being created and freed up is elevating asset prices, but those prices are not causing corporations to invest in future production. Admittedly, the chart shows this downward spiral has been underway for decades, but financial repression and quantitative easing were supposed to be the extraordinary monetary policies that kick-started the real economy in the other direction. They have not. We have been using the lower interest rates, the $9,975 of free money, to consume as opposed to invest.
To be fair, Ben Bernanke has been operating with one arm behind his back and has been calling for cooperative stimulation from the fiscal side of this government. He has received little response – not from Democrats, not from Republicans. They have all focused on re-electing themselves as opposed to constructively plotting a way forward. That is why Election Day seems like such a futile gesture to me. Red/Blue; Republican/Democrat. What kind of choice do we have when we pull the lever? If monetary policy has shown its impotent limits, can we now trust Washington to constructively reverse a downward slide in our net national savings rate? I suspect not. I doubt if either Obama, Romney, or many of their economic advisors even know what the definition is, let alone how to reverse it.
Investment strategy
Investors should recognize that asset and currency prices ultimately rest on the ability of a real economy to grow. If growth cannot be boosted by monetary policy, and fiscal policy is in the hands of a plutocracy more concerned about immediate profits as opposed to long-term vitality, then no Genie or Flavor Flav with a magic clock can make a difference. If, therefore, real economic growth is stunted in the United States and globally, then portfolio strategies should acknowledge bite-sized future returns and the growing risk that the negative consequences of misguided monetary and fiscal policy might lead to disruptive financial markets at some future point. The approaching fiscal cliff might be the first of a series of future disruptions. Although PIMCO expects a middle ground fiscal compromise from Washington, when that is combined with the fading influence of QE monetary policies, it leads only temporarily to 2% real growth in the U.S. at best – growth that is clearly not “Old Normal.” We are in a “New Normal” world where the negative effects of private sector deleveraging are only being weakly addressed by monetary and fiscal authorities. If so, then Treasury yields should stay low and my money market fund should continue to read “.01%.” The “cult” of equity – or better yet the cult of “total return” – for both bonds and stocks – is over, if that definition presumes a resumption of historical patterns anywhere close to double digits. The era of financial repression continues.
I must explain these things to my Genie, I fear. Despite his New Age appearance, his forecasts seem to be a bit old-fashioned and out-of-date.
William H. Gross
Managing Director
 
 
 
P.S. Flavor Flav just made an extraordinary appearance on October 31st. He told me to write that no matter who is elected, you can’t keep the U.S. down for long, and that while Sandy was a monster storm, America is a gigantic positive force whether Red or Blue.
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