Hayman Capital 2626 Cole Avenue, Suite 200
Dallas, TX 75204
July 30th, 2007
Dear Investors,
Over the past few months, we have seen the exacerbation of the Subprime problem accelerate at a precipitous pace. Wait a minute…I thought the Subprime problem was neatly contained in a nice little box of risk that the Fed had put it in? After many meetings and conversations with the various leaders of brokerage firms and asset managers, I don’t think the Subprime problem is as contained as many would like for you to believe. To understand the massive ripple effects of the Subprime problem, you have to look deeply into who owns the eventual risk and furthermore, how it will affect their behavior going forward.
The Greatest “Bait and Switch” of ALL TIME
I recently spent some time with a senior executive in the structured product marketing group (Collateralized Debt Obligations, Collateralized Loan Obligations, Etc.) of one of the largest brokerage firms in the world. I was in Roses, Spain attending a wedding for a good friend of mine who thought it would be an appropriate time to put the two of us together (given our shared interests in the structured credit markets). This individual proceeded to tell me how and why the Subprime Mezzanine CDO business existed. Subprime Mezzanine CDOs are 10-20X levered vehicles that contain only the BBB and BBB- tranches of Subprime debt. He told me that the “real money” (US insurance companies, pension funds, etc) accounts had stopped purchasing mezzanine tranches of US Subprime debt in late 2003 and that they needed a mechanism that could enable them to “mark up” these loans, package them opaquely, and EXPORT THE NEWLY PACKAGED RISK TO UNWITTING BUYERS IN ASIA AND CENTRAL EUROPE!!!! He told me with a straight face that these CDOs were the only way to get rid of the riskiest tranches of Subprime debt. Interestingly enough, these buyers (mainland Chinese Banks, the Chinese Government, Taiwanese banks, Korean banks, German banks, French banks, UK banks) possess the “excess” pools of liquidity around the globe. These pools are basically derived from two sources: 1) massive trade surpluses with the US in USD, 2) petrodollar recyclers. These two pools of excess capital are US dollar denominated and have had a virtually insatiable demand for US dollar denominated debt…until now. They have had orders on the various desks of Wall St. to buy any US debt rated “AAA” by the rating agencies in the US. How do BBB and BBB-tranches become AAA? Through the alchemy of Mezzanine-CDOs. With the help of the ratings agencies the Mezzanine CDO managers collect a series of BBB and BBB- tranches and repackage them with a cascading cash waterfall so that the top tiers are paid out first on all the tranches – thus allowing them to be rated AAA. Well, when you lever ONLY mezzanine tranches of Subprime RMBS 10-20X, POOF…you magically have 80% of the structure rated “AAA” by the ratings agencies, despite the underlying collateral being a collection of BBB and BBB- rated assets... This will go down as one of the biggest financial illusions the world has EVER seen. These institutions have these investments marked at PAR or 100 cents on the dollar for the most part. Now that the underlying collateral has begun to be downgraded, it is only a matter of time (weeks, days, or maybe just hours) before the ratings agencies (or what is left of them) downgrade the actual tranches of these various CDO structures. When they are downgraded, these foreign buyers will most likely have to sell them due to the fact that they are only permitted to own “super-senior” risk in the US. I predict that these tranches of mezzanine CDOs will fetch bids of around 10 cents on the dollar. The ensuing HORROR SHOW will be worth the price of admission and some popcorn. Consequently, when I hear people like Kudlow on CNBC tell their viewers that the Subprime problem is “contained”, I can hardly bear to watch.
The Moral Hazard of HOT Potatoes
The key reason the Subprime problem exists as it does today has to do with the wanton disassociation of risk inherent in the machine that churns out Subprime loans. Unlike the S&L crisis of the 1980s, the mortgage lenders of today aren’t taking their own balance sheet risk when underwriting loans. These brokers get paid for quantity REGARDLESS of quality. The balance sheet risk is transferred through three entities in less than 90 days from origination. The originator will originate ANYTHING he can sell to a whole loan buyer to pass the hot potato on. Whole loan buyers are simply the aggregators of loans at the Wall St. firms that aggregate, package, tranche, and sell as quickly as they possibly can to the clueless buyer. This transference of risk is the crux of the Subprime situation. Just think about it…if you were a 20-something making mortgage loans in California using someone else’s balance sheet and being paid per loan (with no lookback to performance of the loan), how many dubious loans would you underwrite?
Buyers are now BEWARE
During and after the rout these investors are about to shoulder, how excited do you think they are going to be to purchase the next “AAA” rated piece of structured finance paper?!!?!?!? These same investors and global pools of liquidity have been funding the Leveraged Buyout (LBO) boom by purchasing the debt that funds the Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) which in turn, buy 60%+ of the LBO debt used to finance these transactions. I also recently spent some time with one of the largest CLO issuers in the world. They had just returned from Japan where they were marketing a new CLO in order to be one of the buyers for new LBO debt. Needless to say, their marketing efforts fell on deaf ears. They were told by the Japanese investors that they have lost confidence in the ratings agencies (you think?) and that in an election year there is too much uncertainty. They basically said, “No more.” If there is not a CLO bid from Asian and Central European banks, where do you think the $290 billion in announced LBOs will go to sell their debt? I actually have no idea how to answer that question myself. We have seen the bank-loan index drop from 100.5 to 90.5 in 5 short weeks, and a widening in investment grade as well as non investment grade credit. In the immediate absence of liquidity, there will be many casualties of levered funds and firms. There will be a “re-pricing” of risk on a global scale that will mean more credit funds being carried out the door feet first.
Latest Casualties
Just today, the latest firm to suffer the wrath of too much leverage and mis-priced risk was Sowood Capital. What is truly remarkable about this particular situation is the fact that Jeff Larson, the former manager of the $30 billion Harvard Endowment, is the principal Manager at this firm. Sowood was renowned as being a “best-in-class” fund. If the former manager of the Harvard endowment managed to lose 57% of his fund (more than $1.7 billion in losses) in just 30 days, how are the “other” credit funds out there doing? How are they calculating Value-at-Risk? This afternoon, brokerage firms were sending collateral calls to other funds positioned similarly to Sowood. They joined the ranks of the two Bear Stearns funds managed by Cioffi, Australia’s Basis Capital, Absolute Capital, and Macquarie Fortress Funds as well investments by Korea’s Woori Bank, and London’s Caliber Fund by liquidating and eventually returning what is left to investors. Not to mention the downfall of the poster child of the levered “positive carry” industry, United Capital Market’s Horizon Fund – managed by John Devaney, owner of the aptly titled 142ft yacht, the Postive Carry (which is incidentally now for sale, all enquiries can be directed to http://www.iyc.com/featured_yachts.cfm?mn=1).
I have recently discovered the insightful writings of someone with whom I have not had the pleasure to speak or meet in person. Howard Marks is the Chairman of Oaktree Capital Management and he recently sent a letter to his clients entitled, “It’s All Good”. Mr. Marks had a most astute observation with regard to the recent investing environment:
“…investors’ recurring acceptance that it’s different this time – or that cycles are no more – is exemplary of a willing suspension of disbelief that springs from glee over how well things are going (on the part of people who’re in the market) or rationalization of the reasons to throw off caution and get on board (from those who have been watching from the sidelines as prices moved higher and others made money). In this way, the bullish swing of the investment cycle tends to cause skepticism and risk tolerance to evaporate. Faith, credence and open-mindedness all tend to move up – at just the time skepticism, discrimination and circumspection become the qualities that are most needed.”
Credit Markets and Where we are today in Subprime
Last week, I spent some time in the “Inland Empire” of California on a diligence trip to survey the actual damage. As many of you already know, 55% of all Subprime loans were made in California and Florida. The inland empire of California can be described as the central valley that extends from the southern part of the state all the way to the northern part of the state at least 1-hour inland from the coast. Let me start by saying it is MUCH WORSE than even I thought it could be. I met with various mortgage lenders, originators, economists, and capital markets professionals. The overriding theme that I got from them was that “Everyone committed fraud and everyone is responsible for the problem”. They told me that they believe that 90% of all Subprime loans that were made contained some kind of fraud. Either borrowers lied about their incomes or mortgage brokers fudged numbers on the applications to make them pass muster with the needed ratios in order to get loans approved. They also said that of the borrower frauds, 50% of applicants overstated their income by MORE THAN 50%!!! As Kindleberger put so well in his book, Manias, Panics, and Crashes:
The implosion of an asset price bubble always leads to the discovery of frauds and swindles. The supply of corruption increases in a pro-cyclical way much like the supply of credit. Soon after a recession appears likely the loans to firms that were fueling their growth with credit declines as the lenders become more cautious about the indebtedness of individual borrowers and their total credit exposure. In the absence of more credit, the fraud sprouts from the woodwork like mushrooms in a soggy forest.
In California today, home prices are down between 25%-40% in the central valley. From San Bernadino to Stockton, home prices are in free-fall and their physical condition is actually worse than their price decline. The borrowers are locked out of the financing market and there is no logical buyer for these homes outside of the original borrower. The foreclosure wave will hit these neighborhoods like the Asian Tsunami. If you plug in 15% depreciation in housing prices and 50% loss severities into our Subprime model, the capital structure is wiped out all the way to the “AA” tranches.
In the Subprime Credit Strategies Funds, we continue to hold our initial positions and have not taken any profits yet. In Hayman, we are short credit in the US (both Subprime RMBS and corporate credit) and long non-US equities and debt. We are short US consumer based equities, preferreds, and debt. I think the world is going to begin to decouple from the US and realize that currency appreciation coupled with the globe’s best growth is an attractive alternative to fraudulent ratings, US dollar depreciation, and financial inventions used to export risk.
Sincerely,
J. Kyle Bass
Managing Partner
9 August 2007
7 August 2007
FT Alphaville » Blog Archive » Lombard Street Research - potential for “major stress” in US banking
FT Alphaville » Blog Archive » Lombard Street Research - potential for “major stress” in US banking: "Banks are profit-maximising institutions that are the originators of liquidity through the expansion of their balance sheets. Two factors restrain their ability to expand: the need to hold some cash and the capital/asset constraint. A central bank influences the supply of money though its hold on the banks via the cash requirement, as at the end of the day only it can physically print money if there is a run on the banks. Central banks provide the banking system with liquidity at the rate of interest that they set. However, in normal circumstances the capital/asset constraint plays a more important role in banks’ decision to lend. Bear in mind that for banks, as profit-maximising institutions, lending at any rate is better than not lending at all if they have the capital. Of course they have to factor in risk."
3 August 2007
U.S. Housing Is Among `Biggest Bubbles,'
By Chen Shiyin and Pimm Fox
Jim Rogers, chairman of Beeland Interests Inc. Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. subprime-market rout that wiped out $2.1 trillion from global share values last week has ``got a long way to go,'' said Jim Rogers, a New York-based fund manager who predicted the start of the commodities rally in 1999.
This week's rebound in equity markets hasn't persuaded Rogers, 64, to pull out of bets that U.S. investment banks and homebuilders are heading for further declines.
``This was one of the biggest bubbles we've ever had in credit,'' Rogers, chairman of Beeland Interests Inc., said in an interview from Hong Kong. ``I have been and am still short the investment bankers in America. I'm also short homebuilders.''
The Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index plunged 5.3 percent last week, its worst weekly drop in five years, on concern defaults among subprime mortgages may be spilling over to other credit markets and hurting earnings and takeovers. Further losses may be in store even after the index, which tracks $32.6 trillion of stocks, advanced 0.7 percent this week.
``Given the stage of the credit cycle that we're in now, we would have to expect more negative news popping up,'' Beat Lenherr, who oversees $7 billion as chief investment officer for Asia at LGT Bank in Liechtenstein AG, said late yesterday in an interview in Singapore. ``The market sentiment is a bit nervous to the degree that every bad news is answered with selling.''
Worse to Come
The MSCI World Index today climbed 0.1 percent, its fourth gain this week, as investors speculated that better-than-forecast earnings will help offset the impact of mortgage losses.
Gains may be capped by further signs of turmoil among borrowers. Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co., the subprime mortgage company being acquired by Lone Star Funds, plunged 35 percent yesterday after saying it may go bankrupt.
American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. yesterday said it plans to halt operations, becoming the second-biggest residential lender to fail this year. The company's shares dropped 86 percent this week, cutting its value to $79 million, from $1.8 billion in December.
A measure of financial companies such as Countrywide Financial has dropped 3.7 percent so far this year, the only group to decline within the MSCI World Index.
``This is the only time in world history when people were able to buy houses with no money down and in fact, in some cases, the builders gave them money for a down payment,'' Rogers said. ``So this bubble is the worst we've had in housing and it's going to be the worst before its over cleaning it out.''
Buying China
China is a market that Rogers isn't selling even as share prices fall, he said. He's sold his other emerging market holdings as stock gains outstripped the prospect for earnings, Rogers added.
The CSI 300 Index last week jumped 8.4 percent. The index had gained 2.7 percent to a record as of 2 p.m. in Beijing, heading for its fourth weekly gain in a row. The benchmark has more than doubled this year and is the best performer among 89 stock indexes tracked by Bloomberg.
``China's the next great country in the world and we must learn about investing in China, because that's where fantastic fortunes are going to be made in the next century,'' Rogers said. ``I would be looking at China very carefully.''
Jim Rogers, chairman of Beeland Interests Inc. Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. subprime-market rout that wiped out $2.1 trillion from global share values last week has ``got a long way to go,'' said Jim Rogers, a New York-based fund manager who predicted the start of the commodities rally in 1999.
This week's rebound in equity markets hasn't persuaded Rogers, 64, to pull out of bets that U.S. investment banks and homebuilders are heading for further declines.
``This was one of the biggest bubbles we've ever had in credit,'' Rogers, chairman of Beeland Interests Inc., said in an interview from Hong Kong. ``I have been and am still short the investment bankers in America. I'm also short homebuilders.''
The Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index plunged 5.3 percent last week, its worst weekly drop in five years, on concern defaults among subprime mortgages may be spilling over to other credit markets and hurting earnings and takeovers. Further losses may be in store even after the index, which tracks $32.6 trillion of stocks, advanced 0.7 percent this week.
``Given the stage of the credit cycle that we're in now, we would have to expect more negative news popping up,'' Beat Lenherr, who oversees $7 billion as chief investment officer for Asia at LGT Bank in Liechtenstein AG, said late yesterday in an interview in Singapore. ``The market sentiment is a bit nervous to the degree that every bad news is answered with selling.''
Worse to Come
The MSCI World Index today climbed 0.1 percent, its fourth gain this week, as investors speculated that better-than-forecast earnings will help offset the impact of mortgage losses.
Gains may be capped by further signs of turmoil among borrowers. Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co., the subprime mortgage company being acquired by Lone Star Funds, plunged 35 percent yesterday after saying it may go bankrupt.
American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. yesterday said it plans to halt operations, becoming the second-biggest residential lender to fail this year. The company's shares dropped 86 percent this week, cutting its value to $79 million, from $1.8 billion in December.
A measure of financial companies such as Countrywide Financial has dropped 3.7 percent so far this year, the only group to decline within the MSCI World Index.
``This is the only time in world history when people were able to buy houses with no money down and in fact, in some cases, the builders gave them money for a down payment,'' Rogers said. ``So this bubble is the worst we've had in housing and it's going to be the worst before its over cleaning it out.''
Buying China
China is a market that Rogers isn't selling even as share prices fall, he said. He's sold his other emerging market holdings as stock gains outstripped the prospect for earnings, Rogers added.
The CSI 300 Index last week jumped 8.4 percent. The index had gained 2.7 percent to a record as of 2 p.m. in Beijing, heading for its fourth weekly gain in a row. The benchmark has more than doubled this year and is the best performer among 89 stock indexes tracked by Bloomberg.
``China's the next great country in the world and we must learn about investing in China, because that's where fantastic fortunes are going to be made in the next century,'' Rogers said. ``I would be looking at China very carefully.''
2 August 2007
Gartman's trading rules..
Once a year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Dennis Gartman publishes his 20 Rules of Trading.
I thought the best use of your time today would be to share some of his rules with you. In Gartman's own words...
1. Never, ever, ever add to a losing position: To do so will eventually and absolutely lead to ruin. Remember Long Term Capital Management and its legion of Nobel laureates who broke this rule repeatedly and went into forced liquidation. Learn this lesson... well and early!
2. Capital comes in two varieties: Mental capital, and that which is in your account: Of the two, mental capital is the more important. Holding losing positions costs measurable sums of actual capital, but it costs immeasurable sums of mental capital.
3. The objective is not to buy low and sell high, but to buy high and to sell higher: We can never know what price is "low." Nor can we know what price is "high." Always remember that Nortel fell from $85/share to $2 and seemed "cheap" all times along the way.
4. "Markets can remain illogical longer than you or I can remain solvent," is a brilliant statement from our good friend, Dr. A. Gary Shilling. Illogic often reigns and markets are inefficient despite what the academics try to tell us.
5. Sell that which shows the greatest weakness, and buy that which shows the greatest strength: Metaphorically, when bearish, throw rocks into the wettest paper sack, for they break most readily. In bull markets, ride the strongest winds.
6. Think like a fundamentalist; trade like a technician: It is imperative that we understand the fundamentals driving a trade, and that we understand the market's technicals also. When we do, then, and only then, should we trade.
7. Understanding psychology is usually more important than understanding economics: Markets are driven by human beings making human errors... and also making super-human insights.
8. Be patient with winning trades; be enormously impatient with losing trades: Remember, it is quite possible to make large sums trading/investing if we are "right" only 30% of the time, as long as our losses are small and our profits are large.
9. The Hard Trade is the Right Trade: If it is easy to sell, don't; and if it is easy to buy, don't. Do the trade that is hard to do and that which the crowd finds objectionable. Peter Steidelmeyer taught us this 25 years ago and it holds truer now than then.
10. There is never one cockroach: Bad news begets bad news, which begets even worse news.
I thought the best use of your time today would be to share some of his rules with you. In Gartman's own words...
1. Never, ever, ever add to a losing position: To do so will eventually and absolutely lead to ruin. Remember Long Term Capital Management and its legion of Nobel laureates who broke this rule repeatedly and went into forced liquidation. Learn this lesson... well and early!
2. Capital comes in two varieties: Mental capital, and that which is in your account: Of the two, mental capital is the more important. Holding losing positions costs measurable sums of actual capital, but it costs immeasurable sums of mental capital.
3. The objective is not to buy low and sell high, but to buy high and to sell higher: We can never know what price is "low." Nor can we know what price is "high." Always remember that Nortel fell from $85/share to $2 and seemed "cheap" all times along the way.
4. "Markets can remain illogical longer than you or I can remain solvent," is a brilliant statement from our good friend, Dr. A. Gary Shilling. Illogic often reigns and markets are inefficient despite what the academics try to tell us.
5. Sell that which shows the greatest weakness, and buy that which shows the greatest strength: Metaphorically, when bearish, throw rocks into the wettest paper sack, for they break most readily. In bull markets, ride the strongest winds.
6. Think like a fundamentalist; trade like a technician: It is imperative that we understand the fundamentals driving a trade, and that we understand the market's technicals also. When we do, then, and only then, should we trade.
7. Understanding psychology is usually more important than understanding economics: Markets are driven by human beings making human errors... and also making super-human insights.
8. Be patient with winning trades; be enormously impatient with losing trades: Remember, it is quite possible to make large sums trading/investing if we are "right" only 30% of the time, as long as our losses are small and our profits are large.
9. The Hard Trade is the Right Trade: If it is easy to sell, don't; and if it is easy to buy, don't. Do the trade that is hard to do and that which the crowd finds objectionable. Peter Steidelmeyer taught us this 25 years ago and it holds truer now than then.
10. There is never one cockroach: Bad news begets bad news, which begets even worse news.
1 August 2007
Macquarie warns Fortress fund faces 25 percent losses - International Herald Tribune
Macquarie warns Fortress fund faces 25 percent losses - International Herald Tribune: "SYDNEY, Australia: Investors in Macquarie Bank Ltd.'s high-yield fund Fortress Investments Ltd. face losses of up to 25 percent because of volatility in global credit markets.
The average price of assets in the fund's portfolios fell 4 percent in June and maybe another 20 to 25 percent in July, director of Macquarie Fortress Investments, Peter Lucas, said late Tuesday in a statement.
Fortress is the third fund manager in Australia to flag serious problems and the latest sign that the fallout from the U.S. subprime mortgage sector is spreading wider. Australia has the largest hedge fund industry in Asia, according to the government, and Australian hedge funds have been some of the first to say that the global widening in yield spreads has cut deep into their value.
Fund watchers say that as niche funds heavily exposed to U.S. credit markets assess their value at the end of July, more may report significant falls in value."
The average price of assets in the fund's portfolios fell 4 percent in June and maybe another 20 to 25 percent in July, director of Macquarie Fortress Investments, Peter Lucas, said late Tuesday in a statement.
Fortress is the third fund manager in Australia to flag serious problems and the latest sign that the fallout from the U.S. subprime mortgage sector is spreading wider. Australia has the largest hedge fund industry in Asia, according to the government, and Australian hedge funds have been some of the first to say that the global widening in yield spreads has cut deep into their value.
Fund watchers say that as niche funds heavily exposed to U.S. credit markets assess their value at the end of July, more may report significant falls in value."
Sorry we lost most of your money
July 30, 2007
To Our Investors in Sowood Alpha Fund LP and Sowood Alpha Fund Ltd.:
Sale of Assets
Today we made the painful and difficult decision to sell substantially all the funds’ portfolio to Citadel Investment Group. We took this step to protect your investment. Our actions over the weekend followed severe declines in the value of our credit positions and non-performance of offsetting hedges. Given what we were facing and our uncertain ability to meet margin calls, we sought other buyers for some or all of the positions. Citadel offered the only immediate and comprehensive solution. The transaction enabled us to avoid anticipated forced sales at extreme prices that would have been made in order to satisfy obligations under our counterparty agreements.
Performance Update
After the transaction with Citadel, the Net Asset Value (NAV) of Sowood Alpha Fund Ltd. and Sowood Alpha Fund LP will have declined approximately 57% and 53% month to date respectively, and approximately 56% and 51% calendar year to date respectively. As a result, our NAV as of July 30 is approximately $1.5 billion.
Current Plans
We will be advising you of plans to distribute assets as soon as we can, subject to reserves and holdbacks for completion of the audit, contingencies and potential liabilities. Proceeds will be distributed in accordance with the governing documents of the funds. We will seek to retain key staff to manage the distribution process going forward.
We understand this is a very difficult moment for you and are committed to keeping all lines of communications open. Since we are still working through positions and details of the transaction, it will take us a few days to organize everything in a manner that will satisfy your questions. That said, we are planning to hold one-on-one meetings starting next week with investors. In addition, we are planning a listen-only conference call later this week at which time I will discuss the actions we took over this past weekend and next steps.
Background
During the month of June, our portfolio experienced losses mostly as a result of sharply wider corporate credit spreads unaccompanied by any concomitant move in equities and exacerbated by a marked decline in liquidity. This occurred over a broad range of credit related instruments. In the first two weeks of July, spreads continued to widen, and we experienced a loss similar to June. The weakness in corporate credit – particularly focused on loans and loan credit default swaps – accelerated sharply during the week of July 23. Until the end of last week these developments, while reducing the value of our portfolio, were manageable. Our counterparties had not severely marked down the value of the collateral that the funds had posted nor changed our margin terms, and immediate liquidity needs could be met.
However, towards the end of last week, given the extreme market volatility, our counterparties began to severely mark down the value of the collateral that had been posted by the funds. In addition, liquidity became extremely limited for the credit portion of our portfolio making it difficult to exit positions. We, therefore, reached the conclusion over the weekend that, in the interest of preserving our investors’ capital, the appropriate course of action was to sell the funds’ portfolio. We believe that the arrangement with Citadel provided our best option under the circumstances, since we were unable to find other sources of liquidity.
Conclusion
We are very sorry this has happened. We have always attempted to do the very best for our investors. A loss of this magnitude in such a short period is as devastating to us as it is to you. We are committed to acting in the best interests of the funds’ investors and to keeping investors informed of decisions made in furtherance of this objective. We sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding during this challenging period.
Sincerely,
Jeff Larson
To Our Investors in Sowood Alpha Fund LP and Sowood Alpha Fund Ltd.:
Sale of Assets
Today we made the painful and difficult decision to sell substantially all the funds’ portfolio to Citadel Investment Group. We took this step to protect your investment. Our actions over the weekend followed severe declines in the value of our credit positions and non-performance of offsetting hedges. Given what we were facing and our uncertain ability to meet margin calls, we sought other buyers for some or all of the positions. Citadel offered the only immediate and comprehensive solution. The transaction enabled us to avoid anticipated forced sales at extreme prices that would have been made in order to satisfy obligations under our counterparty agreements.
Performance Update
After the transaction with Citadel, the Net Asset Value (NAV) of Sowood Alpha Fund Ltd. and Sowood Alpha Fund LP will have declined approximately 57% and 53% month to date respectively, and approximately 56% and 51% calendar year to date respectively. As a result, our NAV as of July 30 is approximately $1.5 billion.
Current Plans
We will be advising you of plans to distribute assets as soon as we can, subject to reserves and holdbacks for completion of the audit, contingencies and potential liabilities. Proceeds will be distributed in accordance with the governing documents of the funds. We will seek to retain key staff to manage the distribution process going forward.
We understand this is a very difficult moment for you and are committed to keeping all lines of communications open. Since we are still working through positions and details of the transaction, it will take us a few days to organize everything in a manner that will satisfy your questions. That said, we are planning to hold one-on-one meetings starting next week with investors. In addition, we are planning a listen-only conference call later this week at which time I will discuss the actions we took over this past weekend and next steps.
Background
During the month of June, our portfolio experienced losses mostly as a result of sharply wider corporate credit spreads unaccompanied by any concomitant move in equities and exacerbated by a marked decline in liquidity. This occurred over a broad range of credit related instruments. In the first two weeks of July, spreads continued to widen, and we experienced a loss similar to June. The weakness in corporate credit – particularly focused on loans and loan credit default swaps – accelerated sharply during the week of July 23. Until the end of last week these developments, while reducing the value of our portfolio, were manageable. Our counterparties had not severely marked down the value of the collateral that the funds had posted nor changed our margin terms, and immediate liquidity needs could be met.
However, towards the end of last week, given the extreme market volatility, our counterparties began to severely mark down the value of the collateral that had been posted by the funds. In addition, liquidity became extremely limited for the credit portion of our portfolio making it difficult to exit positions. We, therefore, reached the conclusion over the weekend that, in the interest of preserving our investors’ capital, the appropriate course of action was to sell the funds’ portfolio. We believe that the arrangement with Citadel provided our best option under the circumstances, since we were unable to find other sources of liquidity.
Conclusion
We are very sorry this has happened. We have always attempted to do the very best for our investors. A loss of this magnitude in such a short period is as devastating to us as it is to you. We are committed to acting in the best interests of the funds’ investors and to keeping investors informed of decisions made in furtherance of this objective. We sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding during this challenging period.
Sincerely,
Jeff Larson
Australia's Macquarie funds face losses
SYDNEY, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Australia's Macquarie Bank (MBL.AX: Quote, Profile, Research) has warned that retail investors face losses of up to 25 percent in two of its high-yielding investment funds as part of the fall-out from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis.
Macquarie said in a statement released to the Australian Stock Exchange that the Fortress funds -- which have no direct exposure to U.S. subprime mortgages -- could lose a quarter of their value.
Local media estimated the losses at more than A$300 million ($254 million).
The Australian newspaper said the funds, which are invested in senior secured loans, had combined assets of about A$220 million, but had borrowed borrowed six to seven times their value, magnifying potential losses.
Macquarie Fortress Investments director Peter Lucas also warned the funds faced possible margin calls from their lenders if they could not sell enough assets to reduce leverage, the newspaper said.
Macquarie said the funds' investment manager had no major concerns about the overall credit quality of the funds, but the portfolio had been affected by price volatility in U.S. markets in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
Macquarie said in a statement released to the Australian Stock Exchange that the Fortress funds -- which have no direct exposure to U.S. subprime mortgages -- could lose a quarter of their value.
Local media estimated the losses at more than A$300 million ($254 million).
The Australian newspaper said the funds, which are invested in senior secured loans, had combined assets of about A$220 million, but had borrowed borrowed six to seven times their value, magnifying potential losses.
Macquarie Fortress Investments director Peter Lucas also warned the funds faced possible margin calls from their lenders if they could not sell enough assets to reduce leverage, the newspaper said.
Macquarie said the funds' investment manager had no major concerns about the overall credit quality of the funds, but the portfolio had been affected by price volatility in U.S. markets in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
29 July 2007
Be wary of buy and Hold
Those receiving conventional buy-and-hold advice from their brokers and advisors should be leery. We referenced Barton Biggs', former Chief Global Strategist with Morgan Stanley, book Hedgehogging in our April 2006 issue, Losers: Why We Invest with Them.
"Secular cycles, both in markets and sectors of the market, make a big investment management firm a very conflicting enterprise to manage if you are a businessperson, because the rational things to do to maximize short-term profitability are exactly the wrong things from both an investment and a long-term profitability point of view. For example, during 2000, even as the bubble was bursting, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which has a business-dominated management, acted like businessmen: they heavily promoted the underwriting of technology and aggressive growth stock funds because those were the funds the salespeople could sell and that the public would buy. Management was not evil; they were doing what they thought was right. Large amounts of public money were being raised and very quickly lost. Short-term sales profits were collected at the expense of, not only the public, but the firm's long-term credibility and profitability."
Those who are looking for warnings from our "trusted" government officials should consider their track record. On July 12th of this year, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson declared, "This is far and away the strongest business economy that I have seen in my lifetime." Several days prior, on July 2nd, he stated, "In terms of housing, most of us believe that we are at or near the bottom."
If the truth is not already obvious to us, history can be instructive. With the help of Dr. Mark Thornton, of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, one needn't look far to find examples of misleading statements at major market and economic turning points. Paul Warburg, an early advocate of the Federal Reserve, was on the Federal Reserve Board when he made this statement in January of 1930.
"Happily, we have now turned our backs upon the events of this unfortunate event."
Even more incredulously, on November 22nd of 1929, William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor, stated:
"All the factors which make for a quick and speedy industrial and economic recovery are present and evident. The Federal Reserve System is operating, serving as a barrier against financial demoralization. Within a few months industrial conditions will become normal, confidence and stabilization in industry and finance will be restored."
As a final word of warning, we leave you with the words of Dr. Carroll Quigley, a noted historian, former professor of history at Georgetown University, and consultant to the U.S. Defense Department, the Smithsonian Institute, and NASA. His tome, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time was used as a resource in our December 2006 issue: Mind Games.
"All past history shows that espionage has been generally successful and intelligence has been generally a failure. By this I mean that no country had much success in keeping secrets, in the twentieth as in all earlier centuries,but neither has any other country had much success in evaluating or in interpreting the secrets it obtained. The so-called 'surprises' of history have emerged not because other countries did not have the information, but because they refused to believe it. The date of Hitler's attack on the West in May 1940 had been given to the Netherlands by the German Counterintelligence Office as soon as it was decided; the Western countries refused to believe it. The same was true of every one of Hitler's surprises. Stalin was given the date of the German attack on the Soviet Union by a number of informants, including the United States Department of State, but he refused to believe. Both the Germans and Russians had the date of D-Day, but ignored it. The United States had available all the Japanese coded messages, knew that war was about to begin, and that a Japanese fleet with at least four large carriers was loose (and lost) in the Pacific, yet Pearl Harbor was a total surprise."
While the evidence of trouble has just begun to surface in U.S. equity prices, the love affair with credit, as demonstrated by record profits in the banking and brokerage industries, has only made investors, especially large institutional investors, more attached to this bullish run than ever. But, with the continuing contraction in the housing sector, and its impact on borrowing, the early warning signals are blowing.
The following is an excerpt from the email we sent our subscribers last Thursday, July 19th, regarding our latest issue of The Investor's Mind:
"We are releasing this month's Investor's Mind early because a variety of technical indicators are pointing to an end to the bull market run that began in the fall of 2002. I thought it important to release this piece on three high-level financial meetings that have taken place over the last few months, which I believe make it clear that those at the top of the money game have known for some time that the end of this period will bring massive shifts to the global capital markets."
Doug Wakefield
"Secular cycles, both in markets and sectors of the market, make a big investment management firm a very conflicting enterprise to manage if you are a businessperson, because the rational things to do to maximize short-term profitability are exactly the wrong things from both an investment and a long-term profitability point of view. For example, during 2000, even as the bubble was bursting, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which has a business-dominated management, acted like businessmen: they heavily promoted the underwriting of technology and aggressive growth stock funds because those were the funds the salespeople could sell and that the public would buy. Management was not evil; they were doing what they thought was right. Large amounts of public money were being raised and very quickly lost. Short-term sales profits were collected at the expense of, not only the public, but the firm's long-term credibility and profitability."
Those who are looking for warnings from our "trusted" government officials should consider their track record. On July 12th of this year, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson declared, "This is far and away the strongest business economy that I have seen in my lifetime." Several days prior, on July 2nd, he stated, "In terms of housing, most of us believe that we are at or near the bottom."
If the truth is not already obvious to us, history can be instructive. With the help of Dr. Mark Thornton, of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, one needn't look far to find examples of misleading statements at major market and economic turning points. Paul Warburg, an early advocate of the Federal Reserve, was on the Federal Reserve Board when he made this statement in January of 1930.
"Happily, we have now turned our backs upon the events of this unfortunate event."
Even more incredulously, on November 22nd of 1929, William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor, stated:
"All the factors which make for a quick and speedy industrial and economic recovery are present and evident. The Federal Reserve System is operating, serving as a barrier against financial demoralization. Within a few months industrial conditions will become normal, confidence and stabilization in industry and finance will be restored."
As a final word of warning, we leave you with the words of Dr. Carroll Quigley, a noted historian, former professor of history at Georgetown University, and consultant to the U.S. Defense Department, the Smithsonian Institute, and NASA. His tome, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time was used as a resource in our December 2006 issue: Mind Games.
"All past history shows that espionage has been generally successful and intelligence has been generally a failure. By this I mean that no country had much success in keeping secrets, in the twentieth as in all earlier centuries,but neither has any other country had much success in evaluating or in interpreting the secrets it obtained. The so-called 'surprises' of history have emerged not because other countries did not have the information, but because they refused to believe it. The date of Hitler's attack on the West in May 1940 had been given to the Netherlands by the German Counterintelligence Office as soon as it was decided; the Western countries refused to believe it. The same was true of every one of Hitler's surprises. Stalin was given the date of the German attack on the Soviet Union by a number of informants, including the United States Department of State, but he refused to believe. Both the Germans and Russians had the date of D-Day, but ignored it. The United States had available all the Japanese coded messages, knew that war was about to begin, and that a Japanese fleet with at least four large carriers was loose (and lost) in the Pacific, yet Pearl Harbor was a total surprise."
While the evidence of trouble has just begun to surface in U.S. equity prices, the love affair with credit, as demonstrated by record profits in the banking and brokerage industries, has only made investors, especially large institutional investors, more attached to this bullish run than ever. But, with the continuing contraction in the housing sector, and its impact on borrowing, the early warning signals are blowing.
The following is an excerpt from the email we sent our subscribers last Thursday, July 19th, regarding our latest issue of The Investor's Mind:
"We are releasing this month's Investor's Mind early because a variety of technical indicators are pointing to an end to the bull market run that began in the fall of 2002. I thought it important to release this piece on three high-level financial meetings that have taken place over the last few months, which I believe make it clear that those at the top of the money game have known for some time that the end of this period will bring massive shifts to the global capital markets."
Doug Wakefield
Banks burnt by credit meltdown
Credit derivatives markets saw a strong bout of further heavy selling on Thursday in both Europe and the US, with the widely watched indices of riskier credits bearing the brunt of the pain.
Behind the headline numbers, banks and other financials have been among the worst affected as investors worry about their exposure to a range of problem areas from mortgage markets to the leveraged loans that fund private equity buy-out deals.
The iTraxx Crossover index, the key barometer of appetite for credit risk in Europe, saw the cost of protecting €10m ($13.7m) of mostly junk rated corporate debt jump above €400,000 per year on the five-year contract for the first time in almost two years.
The index at 400 basis points is more than twice the level at the start of June. Its US cousin also traded at record levels, hitting 326bp.
The perceived credit risk of owning the debt of US banks, which has soared in recent weeks, jumped to new highs yesterday as investors reacted to revelations that Wall Street had been left saddled with billions of dollars of unsold corporate debt.
Analysis by the Financial Times shows that investment banks in the US and Europe could have already been forced to retain more than $40bn worth of high-yield debt that they intended to sell in recent weeks.
Investor appetite for high-risk, high-yield debt has significantly diminished – illustrated this week by the failure to place about $20bn worth of loans for just two companies, Chrysler and Alliance Boots.
US banks especially had already seen both their stock prices and credit default swaps – which provide a kind of insurance against non-payment of debt – under heavy pressure owing to their exposure to US subprime mortgage crisis and to the hedge funds that were invested in related products.
“A lot of people are spooked that the [credit] lines extended to hedge funds have created massive counterparty risk,” said Christian Stracke, a senior analyst at CreditSights. “We can’t really have a great sense for what counterparty exposure is – and these players are beginning to drop off like flies under the weight of subprime.”
However, he added that the market was nervous more because of uncertainty than because banks were obviously in dire straits.
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs postponed on Wednesday the sale of $12bn of debt financing for Cerberus’s purchase of Chrysler. The US carmaker has agreed to hold $2bn, leaving the banks with a hefty $10bn on their books.
The two banks’ CDS hit their highest levels since 2003 yesterday. JPMorgan’s CDS was at 75bp, an increase of 25bp on the day, according to data from broker Phoenix Partners Group.
The bank is Wall Street’s biggest underwriter of leveraged loans, according to Bloomberg data, and its cost of protection in CDS markets has tripled in the past five weeks.
Meanwhile, Goldman’s CDS jumped as much as 18bp to 85bp.
However, one of the worst hit is Bear Stearns, the largest US underwriter of mortgage-backed bonds, which saw its CDS rise to 105bp from 83.50bp on Wednesday. This is five times the level seen at the beginning of this year, and the highest of any bank on the Street.
Most of these banks have also seen their stock prices stumble. Bear is down 23 per cent this year after falling another 3.7 per cent to $124.49 on Thursday. JPMorgan is down 8.5 per cent and Lehman 16 per cent.
The S&P investment bank index tumbled 3.7 per cent on Thursday and is down 9.1 per cent in 2007.
Another barometer of bank stress and a leading indicator for credit market weakness is the interest rate swaps market, which is now at the widest levels over US Treasury yields since February 2002.
Behind the headline numbers, banks and other financials have been among the worst affected as investors worry about their exposure to a range of problem areas from mortgage markets to the leveraged loans that fund private equity buy-out deals.
The iTraxx Crossover index, the key barometer of appetite for credit risk in Europe, saw the cost of protecting €10m ($13.7m) of mostly junk rated corporate debt jump above €400,000 per year on the five-year contract for the first time in almost two years.
The index at 400 basis points is more than twice the level at the start of June. Its US cousin also traded at record levels, hitting 326bp.
The perceived credit risk of owning the debt of US banks, which has soared in recent weeks, jumped to new highs yesterday as investors reacted to revelations that Wall Street had been left saddled with billions of dollars of unsold corporate debt.
Analysis by the Financial Times shows that investment banks in the US and Europe could have already been forced to retain more than $40bn worth of high-yield debt that they intended to sell in recent weeks.
Investor appetite for high-risk, high-yield debt has significantly diminished – illustrated this week by the failure to place about $20bn worth of loans for just two companies, Chrysler and Alliance Boots.
US banks especially had already seen both their stock prices and credit default swaps – which provide a kind of insurance against non-payment of debt – under heavy pressure owing to their exposure to US subprime mortgage crisis and to the hedge funds that were invested in related products.
“A lot of people are spooked that the [credit] lines extended to hedge funds have created massive counterparty risk,” said Christian Stracke, a senior analyst at CreditSights. “We can’t really have a great sense for what counterparty exposure is – and these players are beginning to drop off like flies under the weight of subprime.”
However, he added that the market was nervous more because of uncertainty than because banks were obviously in dire straits.
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs postponed on Wednesday the sale of $12bn of debt financing for Cerberus’s purchase of Chrysler. The US carmaker has agreed to hold $2bn, leaving the banks with a hefty $10bn on their books.
The two banks’ CDS hit their highest levels since 2003 yesterday. JPMorgan’s CDS was at 75bp, an increase of 25bp on the day, according to data from broker Phoenix Partners Group.
The bank is Wall Street’s biggest underwriter of leveraged loans, according to Bloomberg data, and its cost of protection in CDS markets has tripled in the past five weeks.
Meanwhile, Goldman’s CDS jumped as much as 18bp to 85bp.
However, one of the worst hit is Bear Stearns, the largest US underwriter of mortgage-backed bonds, which saw its CDS rise to 105bp from 83.50bp on Wednesday. This is five times the level seen at the beginning of this year, and the highest of any bank on the Street.
Most of these banks have also seen their stock prices stumble. Bear is down 23 per cent this year after falling another 3.7 per cent to $124.49 on Thursday. JPMorgan is down 8.5 per cent and Lehman 16 per cent.
The S&P investment bank index tumbled 3.7 per cent on Thursday and is down 9.1 per cent in 2007.
Another barometer of bank stress and a leading indicator for credit market weakness is the interest rate swaps market, which is now at the widest levels over US Treasury yields since February 2002.
11 reasons to freak out
"Total world stock market capitalization was about $37 trillion in 1990; it grew to about $51.225 trillion in March 2007. According to Morgan Stanley, the total world nominal value of derivatives stood at around $5.7 trillion in 1990; it grew to $415 trillion at the end of 2006.
Doing the math, it means the $ value of derivatives are about 8 times larger than stocks now, whereas in 1990 stocks were 6.5 times larger than derivatives. Hmmm!
Implications/guesses/comments:
1) There are too many derivatives in the world
2) The parceling out of those derivatives into smaller bundles for all to play the game doesn't seem to be reducing risks as “experts” expected.
3) They have never faced a serious test in this cycle
4) They have become increasingly complicated to price
5) Ratings agencies (S&P and Moody's) preferred fees to due diligence
6) Private equity is more interlinked to derivatives than most realize
7) Stress testing a derivatives portfolio can be tricky if you don't know whether or not the
counterparty (maybe one of the 3,000 hedge funds) will be in business
8) One wonders why stock prices aren't a lot higher given that massive amount of leverage
i.e. liquidity manufactured across the globe
9) Tied to point #7: It sets the stage for a massive global deflation, though everyone seems
to think inflation is the problem. (If we accept that inflation is too much money chasing
too few goods, then why isn't it higher with so much money generated since 1990?
Maybe the massive deflationary pump of billions of new labor market entrants and
overcapacity is stronger than experts realize.) A debt default is deflationary. And it
leads to forced savings, which adds deflationary pressures in a world driven by “drunken
sailor spending.”
10) There could be much, much further to go “on the downside” as funds rush for the rapidly
narrowing exits.
11) We want to pull the cover over our heads and go back to bed when we contemplate the
potential for a real market cleansing. We use the words “real market cleansing” because
we think the relative stimulus from central banks through rate cutting, in a world where
$415 trillion in credit craters, ain't going to have much impact.
So, if your friend turns to you today, or anytime in the near future, and says this: “You know
something, there are going to be some real bargains in the market soon!”—we suggest its time
to find a new friend."
BLACK SWAN TRADING
From http://www.blackswantrading.com
Doing the math, it means the $ value of derivatives are about 8 times larger than stocks now, whereas in 1990 stocks were 6.5 times larger than derivatives. Hmmm!
Implications/guesses/comments:
1) There are too many derivatives in the world
2) The parceling out of those derivatives into smaller bundles for all to play the game doesn't seem to be reducing risks as “experts” expected.
3) They have never faced a serious test in this cycle
4) They have become increasingly complicated to price
5) Ratings agencies (S&P and Moody's) preferred fees to due diligence
6) Private equity is more interlinked to derivatives than most realize
7) Stress testing a derivatives portfolio can be tricky if you don't know whether or not the
counterparty (maybe one of the 3,000 hedge funds) will be in business
8) One wonders why stock prices aren't a lot higher given that massive amount of leverage
i.e. liquidity manufactured across the globe
9) Tied to point #7: It sets the stage for a massive global deflation, though everyone seems
to think inflation is the problem. (If we accept that inflation is too much money chasing
too few goods, then why isn't it higher with so much money generated since 1990?
Maybe the massive deflationary pump of billions of new labor market entrants and
overcapacity is stronger than experts realize.) A debt default is deflationary. And it
leads to forced savings, which adds deflationary pressures in a world driven by “drunken
sailor spending.”
10) There could be much, much further to go “on the downside” as funds rush for the rapidly
narrowing exits.
11) We want to pull the cover over our heads and go back to bed when we contemplate the
potential for a real market cleansing. We use the words “real market cleansing” because
we think the relative stimulus from central banks through rate cutting, in a world where
$415 trillion in credit craters, ain't going to have much impact.
So, if your friend turns to you today, or anytime in the near future, and says this: “You know
something, there are going to be some real bargains in the market soon!”—we suggest its time
to find a new friend."
BLACK SWAN TRADING
From http://www.blackswantrading.com
27 July 2007
Gold will soon sparkle again
Telegraph Blogs : Business : Ambrose Evans-Pritchard : July 2007: "A lot of readers have asked why I duck the issue of gold when talking about the dollar crisis and the M3 monetary blow-off.
So here we go:
I started buying gold mining shares in September 2001, missing the bottom by four months. I still hold some shares (mostly duds, since I am the village idiot when it comes to picking stocks). Gold’s 15 to 20 year upward cycle is alive and well.
For those who don’t follow bullion, gold hit $252 an ounce in the Spring of 2001 in a final capitulation sell-off when Gordon Brown began his Treasury sales. It rose to a peak of $730 in May 2006.
Gold has languished since, in part because of sales by the Spanish and Belgian central banks. I remain very wary in the short to medium-term.
What unnerves me is the way gold has tended to move in sympathy with global stock markets. Whenever risk appetite rises, it rises. When investors shun risk, it falls. In other words, it has become correlated with all the speculative trades - notably the yen and franc carry trades - responding to abundant global liquidity. This liquidity is now being drained as the BoJ, ECB, SNB, BoE, Riksbank, and Chinese Central Bank, etc, turn off the tap. So be careful.
While the pattern appears to have changed over the last couple of weeks, this is not long enough to establish a “paradigm change”, excuse the ghastly term. My concern is that gold will fall hard along with everything else (except the yen and the Swissie) in any market crash/correction.
At some point it will decouple, as it did during the 1987 crash when it fell hard, found a ledge, and then recovered hard, while the DOW kept falling. But, I would rather hold Swissies or Yen until gold finds that ledge in a downturn, resuming its old role as a safe store of value. This may happen quite quickly in a crisis. (Of course, I may also be left behind right now in an accelerating rally, but that is a risk I accept)
Ultimately, gold will surge, once it becomes clear that the euro lacks the staying power to serve as an alternative to the dollar. To restate a point I have made many times, the euro-zone is an ill-assorted mix of 13 unconverged national economies – with national treasuries, debt structures, taxes, pensions, and labour laws - that are not ready to share a currency, and are drifting further apart by the day.
(Lest anybody forgets, the motive behind monetary union was PURELY political. The economists at the European Commission warned that the project could not survive over time if it included a Latin Bloc of countries with an unreformed culture of high inflation, rising wage costs, and an export base exposed to Asian competition [unlike Germany’s, which is complimentary] – unless it were backed by a full superstate. They were ignored. Indeed, any future crisis was to be welcomed as the “beneficial crisis”, a chance to force through full political integration that would otherwise have not been possible, as Romano Prodi so candidly admitted when he was Commission chief).
At some point it will become clear to everybody that: the Club Med group cannot compete at an exchange rate of $1.40, $1.45, $1.50, or whatever it reaches; their credit booms are tipping over; they will soon need stimulus more than the US.
Goldman Sachs, by the way, is already 'shorting' Italian and French bonds, while going 'long' on German bunds to play the divergence (the opposite of the euro-zone 'convergence play' that made the banks rich in the 1990s).
We may have a situation where sharp dollar falls caused by impending rate cuts by the Fed sets off a systemic crisis for Euroland. If so, politics will quickly take over from economics and begin to dictate events in Europe. The ECB will have to stop raising rates (whatever Berlin wants), and the euro will become a structurally weak currency tilted to the need of the weakest players. If it doesn’t, the EU itself will blow up. So the ECB will have to change tack to support the union. And the European Court will interpret the treaties in such a way as to force the ECB to do so.
Gold will fly once investors can see that neither of the two reserve currency pillars (euro and dollar) is on a sound foundation, and once the pair are engaged in a beggar-thy-neighbour devaluation contest to stave off a slump (if necessary with the use of Ben Bernanke’s helicopters, meaning mass purchase of Treasuries, mortgage bonds, stocks, or assets of any kind to support the markets). This would amount to a partial breakdown of the monetary system. Gold will not stop at $800. It might well go beyond $2,000.
We are not there yet. Timing is not my fort̩, but 2008 looks ripe. Watch the Spanish housing market. Watch the French trade data. Watch Chinese inflation. And, of course, watch the US jobs market Рthe bogus prop to the alleged US recovery
So here we go:
I started buying gold mining shares in September 2001, missing the bottom by four months. I still hold some shares (mostly duds, since I am the village idiot when it comes to picking stocks). Gold’s 15 to 20 year upward cycle is alive and well.
For those who don’t follow bullion, gold hit $252 an ounce in the Spring of 2001 in a final capitulation sell-off when Gordon Brown began his Treasury sales. It rose to a peak of $730 in May 2006.
Gold has languished since, in part because of sales by the Spanish and Belgian central banks. I remain very wary in the short to medium-term.
What unnerves me is the way gold has tended to move in sympathy with global stock markets. Whenever risk appetite rises, it rises. When investors shun risk, it falls. In other words, it has become correlated with all the speculative trades - notably the yen and franc carry trades - responding to abundant global liquidity. This liquidity is now being drained as the BoJ, ECB, SNB, BoE, Riksbank, and Chinese Central Bank, etc, turn off the tap. So be careful.
While the pattern appears to have changed over the last couple of weeks, this is not long enough to establish a “paradigm change”, excuse the ghastly term. My concern is that gold will fall hard along with everything else (except the yen and the Swissie) in any market crash/correction.
At some point it will decouple, as it did during the 1987 crash when it fell hard, found a ledge, and then recovered hard, while the DOW kept falling. But, I would rather hold Swissies or Yen until gold finds that ledge in a downturn, resuming its old role as a safe store of value. This may happen quite quickly in a crisis. (Of course, I may also be left behind right now in an accelerating rally, but that is a risk I accept)
Ultimately, gold will surge, once it becomes clear that the euro lacks the staying power to serve as an alternative to the dollar. To restate a point I have made many times, the euro-zone is an ill-assorted mix of 13 unconverged national economies – with national treasuries, debt structures, taxes, pensions, and labour laws - that are not ready to share a currency, and are drifting further apart by the day.
(Lest anybody forgets, the motive behind monetary union was PURELY political. The economists at the European Commission warned that the project could not survive over time if it included a Latin Bloc of countries with an unreformed culture of high inflation, rising wage costs, and an export base exposed to Asian competition [unlike Germany’s, which is complimentary] – unless it were backed by a full superstate. They were ignored. Indeed, any future crisis was to be welcomed as the “beneficial crisis”, a chance to force through full political integration that would otherwise have not been possible, as Romano Prodi so candidly admitted when he was Commission chief).
At some point it will become clear to everybody that: the Club Med group cannot compete at an exchange rate of $1.40, $1.45, $1.50, or whatever it reaches; their credit booms are tipping over; they will soon need stimulus more than the US.
Goldman Sachs, by the way, is already 'shorting' Italian and French bonds, while going 'long' on German bunds to play the divergence (the opposite of the euro-zone 'convergence play' that made the banks rich in the 1990s).
We may have a situation where sharp dollar falls caused by impending rate cuts by the Fed sets off a systemic crisis for Euroland. If so, politics will quickly take over from economics and begin to dictate events in Europe. The ECB will have to stop raising rates (whatever Berlin wants), and the euro will become a structurally weak currency tilted to the need of the weakest players. If it doesn’t, the EU itself will blow up. So the ECB will have to change tack to support the union. And the European Court will interpret the treaties in such a way as to force the ECB to do so.
Gold will fly once investors can see that neither of the two reserve currency pillars (euro and dollar) is on a sound foundation, and once the pair are engaged in a beggar-thy-neighbour devaluation contest to stave off a slump (if necessary with the use of Ben Bernanke’s helicopters, meaning mass purchase of Treasuries, mortgage bonds, stocks, or assets of any kind to support the markets). This would amount to a partial breakdown of the monetary system. Gold will not stop at $800. It might well go beyond $2,000.
We are not there yet. Timing is not my fort̩, but 2008 looks ripe. Watch the Spanish housing market. Watch the French trade data. Watch Chinese inflation. And, of course, watch the US jobs market Рthe bogus prop to the alleged US recovery
26 July 2007
Absolute Capital Hedge Fund Suspends Withdrawals
By Laura Cochrane and Stuart Kelly
July 26 (Bloomberg) -- Absolute Capital Group Ltd., an Australian hedge fund that invests in collateralized debt obligations, suspended withdrawals from two of its funds after forecasting losses amid a rout in U.S. subprime mortgages.
The firm froze its Yield Strategies Fund and Yield Strategies Fund NZD, which together have about A$200 million ($177 million) under management, Chief Investment Officer Bill Entwistle said in an interview today. The Sydney-based company is 50 percent owned by ABN Amro Holding NV's Australian unit
Absolute Capital, which says it doesn't invest in the riskiest portion of CDOs, is suffering from the widening impact of delinquencies on U.S. home loans to people with poor credit. Basis Capital Fund Management Ltd., another Australian hedge fund battered in the North American market, has hired Blackstone Group LP to negotiate with bankers to help it limit losses.
``Because of the contagion from subprime, all of the credit sectors are re-pricing,'' Sydney-based Entwistle said. ``There are lots of sellers and no buyers, the market has to settle down before we can get some clarity.''
The Yield Strategies Fund returned 6.4 percent the past year while the Yield Strategies Fund NZD, which started in May, gained 0.2 percent to June 30.
Australia's hedge fund industry has been rocked by losses at Basis Capital, which has said the value of its Yield Alpha Fund may plunge more than 50 percent if its assets are sold at distressed prices. Sydney-based Mariner Bridge Investments Ltd. on July 20 wrote down the value of its U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities.
Biggest Investors
The nation's 20 million people are the world's biggest investors per capita and Australia has the fourth-largest managed funds industry. Unlike in the U.S., where only qualified investors can place money in hedge funds, Australia allows individuals to invest in the vehicles.
Australian hedge fund managers directly controlled A$41 billion in assets as of July last year, the most in Asia, according to AsiaHedge. Assets almost tripled in the two years to June 2006 as money from compulsory pension savings, tax breaks, a new state-owned investment fund and takeovers boosted fund inflows, according to government data.
Absolute Capital said it won't process any requests for withdrawals until Oct. 25, estimating it may take three months for enough buyers to return to the CDO market.
Repackaged Debt
CDOs pool assets ranging from investment-grade debt to high-yield loans, and repackage them into bonds. Different portions of a single CDO have their own rating, ranging from as high as AAA to nothing at all.
Entwistle said 50 percent of Absolute Capital's two funds is invested in the so-called ``mezzanine'' portions of CDOs, which are typically assigned the second-highest non-investment grade rating of BB by ratings companies.
Basis Capital's investments included the unrated portions of CDOs, the first in line for losses when borrowers fall behind on mortgage payments.
``There's probably more pain to come,'' said Michael Birch, who helps manage $133 million at Wallace Funds Management, a Sydney-based hedge fund. ``We need more clarity as to the scale of the writedowns at Basis and Absolute. It might take six months for the full impact to come out.''
The sting from U.S. subprime mortgage delinquencies that hit a decade-high this year is being felt across businesses, regions and asset classes.
Buyers Vanish
Almost 40 companies have reworked or abandoned debt offerings in the past three weeks as after struggling to find buyers. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said July 19 there will be ``significant financial losses'' from risky mortgages, pointing to estimates as high as $100 billion.
Bear Stearns Cos., the fifth-largest U.S. securities firm, on July 18 told investors in its two failed hedge funds they'll get little if any money back after ``unprecedented declines'' in the value of subprime mortgage securities.
Investors earlier this month were demanding an extra 10.5 percentage points in yield over benchmark rates to own some of the lower investment-grade rated parts of CDOs, up from about 3.1 percentage points in July 2006, according to data compiled by Morgan Stanley.
Sales of CDOs surged to $503 billion last year, compared with 2003. Investor appetite for the securities is now waning. Analysts at New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. said CDO sales in the U.S. this month reached just $9.1 billion at July 20, compared with $42 billion for all of June.
Ratings Criticized
Ratings companies have been criticized by investors for not acting quickly enough to the subprime mortgage crisis. Leah Rhodes, a Melbourne-based director of structured finance at Standard & Poor's, today said losses from U.S. subprime loans ``did exceed our expectation.''
A spokeswoman for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the corporate regulator, didn't immediately return telephone calls seeking comment on Absolute Capital.
Kim Ivey, chairman of the Australian Alternative Investment Management Association, which represents 80 of the nation's hedge fund managers, said there will be more hedge funds hurt by the subprime market.
``I expect that it will be contained to just a handful,'' he said. ``More of a concern is what will happen once the fallout moves from the subprime sector to more senior debt, when many more managers have exposure.''
July 26 (Bloomberg) -- Absolute Capital Group Ltd., an Australian hedge fund that invests in collateralized debt obligations, suspended withdrawals from two of its funds after forecasting losses amid a rout in U.S. subprime mortgages.
The firm froze its Yield Strategies Fund and Yield Strategies Fund NZD, which together have about A$200 million ($177 million) under management, Chief Investment Officer Bill Entwistle said in an interview today. The Sydney-based company is 50 percent owned by ABN Amro Holding NV's Australian unit
Absolute Capital, which says it doesn't invest in the riskiest portion of CDOs, is suffering from the widening impact of delinquencies on U.S. home loans to people with poor credit. Basis Capital Fund Management Ltd., another Australian hedge fund battered in the North American market, has hired Blackstone Group LP to negotiate with bankers to help it limit losses.
``Because of the contagion from subprime, all of the credit sectors are re-pricing,'' Sydney-based Entwistle said. ``There are lots of sellers and no buyers, the market has to settle down before we can get some clarity.''
The Yield Strategies Fund returned 6.4 percent the past year while the Yield Strategies Fund NZD, which started in May, gained 0.2 percent to June 30.
Australia's hedge fund industry has been rocked by losses at Basis Capital, which has said the value of its Yield Alpha Fund may plunge more than 50 percent if its assets are sold at distressed prices. Sydney-based Mariner Bridge Investments Ltd. on July 20 wrote down the value of its U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities.
Biggest Investors
The nation's 20 million people are the world's biggest investors per capita and Australia has the fourth-largest managed funds industry. Unlike in the U.S., where only qualified investors can place money in hedge funds, Australia allows individuals to invest in the vehicles.
Australian hedge fund managers directly controlled A$41 billion in assets as of July last year, the most in Asia, according to AsiaHedge. Assets almost tripled in the two years to June 2006 as money from compulsory pension savings, tax breaks, a new state-owned investment fund and takeovers boosted fund inflows, according to government data.
Absolute Capital said it won't process any requests for withdrawals until Oct. 25, estimating it may take three months for enough buyers to return to the CDO market.
Repackaged Debt
CDOs pool assets ranging from investment-grade debt to high-yield loans, and repackage them into bonds. Different portions of a single CDO have their own rating, ranging from as high as AAA to nothing at all.
Entwistle said 50 percent of Absolute Capital's two funds is invested in the so-called ``mezzanine'' portions of CDOs, which are typically assigned the second-highest non-investment grade rating of BB by ratings companies.
Basis Capital's investments included the unrated portions of CDOs, the first in line for losses when borrowers fall behind on mortgage payments.
``There's probably more pain to come,'' said Michael Birch, who helps manage $133 million at Wallace Funds Management, a Sydney-based hedge fund. ``We need more clarity as to the scale of the writedowns at Basis and Absolute. It might take six months for the full impact to come out.''
The sting from U.S. subprime mortgage delinquencies that hit a decade-high this year is being felt across businesses, regions and asset classes.
Buyers Vanish
Almost 40 companies have reworked or abandoned debt offerings in the past three weeks as after struggling to find buyers. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said July 19 there will be ``significant financial losses'' from risky mortgages, pointing to estimates as high as $100 billion.
Bear Stearns Cos., the fifth-largest U.S. securities firm, on July 18 told investors in its two failed hedge funds they'll get little if any money back after ``unprecedented declines'' in the value of subprime mortgage securities.
Investors earlier this month were demanding an extra 10.5 percentage points in yield over benchmark rates to own some of the lower investment-grade rated parts of CDOs, up from about 3.1 percentage points in July 2006, according to data compiled by Morgan Stanley.
Sales of CDOs surged to $503 billion last year, compared with 2003. Investor appetite for the securities is now waning. Analysts at New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. said CDO sales in the U.S. this month reached just $9.1 billion at July 20, compared with $42 billion for all of June.
Ratings Criticized
Ratings companies have been criticized by investors for not acting quickly enough to the subprime mortgage crisis. Leah Rhodes, a Melbourne-based director of structured finance at Standard & Poor's, today said losses from U.S. subprime loans ``did exceed our expectation.''
A spokeswoman for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the corporate regulator, didn't immediately return telephone calls seeking comment on Absolute Capital.
Kim Ivey, chairman of the Australian Alternative Investment Management Association, which represents 80 of the nation's hedge fund managers, said there will be more hedge funds hurt by the subprime market.
``I expect that it will be contained to just a handful,'' he said. ``More of a concern is what will happen once the fallout moves from the subprime sector to more senior debt, when many more managers have exposure.''
23 July 2007
Trouble in Hedgefundistan
Two columns of black smoke can be seen rising over Wall Street and disappearing into the ice-blue New York sky.
Terrorism?
Not quite. The plumes of smoke are all that's left of two major hedge funds which blew up just weeks ago leaving nothing behind but a few smoldering embers and a mound of black soot.
The compiled assets of the Bear Sterns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund—nearly $20 billion—have vanished into the miasma of cyber-space where they will soon be joined by $1.4 trillion of other, equally worthless, Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO).
If you look carefully, you can almost see the mangled and bloodied bodies of the CDOs, the CSDs, the RMBS and the other shaky debt-instruments being pulled from the wreckage and tossed unceremoniously on the bonfire.
Is this how it all ends? The first whiff of trouble in the housing market and then—in a flash--all the funds in “Hedgistan” begin teetering towards earth?
“No Value”-“No Bids”
According to Bloomberg News, Bear Sterns announced last week that there's “little value left” in one of its funds and “no value left” in the other.
Nothing, nada, zippo.
The news was like a bucket of cold water dumped on the stock market leaving slack-jawed traders shuddering in trepidation.
What does it all mean?
Does that mean that the entire hedge fund empire—which is built on a foundation of dodgy loans and quicksand---may be headed for the crapper?
No one really knows. But a pall has settled-in over downtown Manhattan where gloomy-looking men in pinstriped suits are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Y'see, the hedge fund industry is based on the bizarre notion that one does not have to produce anything of value to make boatloads of money. You don't even need assets any more---just a risky loan that can be transformed into an investment grade security through the magic of “securitization” a sprinkling of Wall Street snake oil.
Abrah Kadabra---presto-chango!
It's like taking shards of bottle-glass and selling it as the Hope Diamond. Who's gonna notice?
The only catch is that--now that these toxic CDOs are going to auction--there are no bids. That's a bad thing.
“No bids” means that $1.4 trillion of shaky investments have no discernable market-value. The CDOs were graded “mark to model” which translates into “mark to fantasy”. It means that the investment bankers and hedge fund managers got together over Martinis one night and pulled a number out of a hat.
Now no one wants to buy them. They're worthless.
The skydiving hedge funds just pulled the CDO rip-chord and nothing came out but confetti.
Aaaaaaaahhhh!
And that's just half the story. There's trillions of dollars in derivatives riding on these shaky CDOs. That's enough to bring down the whole market in a heap once interest rates rise or liquidity dries up. Now it's just a matter of “when” now, not “if”.
This illustrates an important point, though. It shows what it takes to be a good hedge fund manager:
Take a shabby sub-prime mortgage; chop it into “investment”, “mezzanine” and “equity” tranches. Bundle it with other equally suspect mortgage backed securities (MBS). Decide (arbitrarily) what the CDOs are worth Tell your banker. Leverage at a ratio of 10 o 1. Take 2% “off the top” plus salary for your efforts. Buy a summer home in the Hampton's and a Lexus for the wife. Wait for the crash. Then repeat.
Congratulations; you are now a successful hedge fund manager!
Oh yeah; and don't forget to prepare a few soothing words for the investors who just lost their entire life savings and will now be spending their evenings squatting beneath a nearby freeway off-ramp.
“We're so very sorry, Mrs. Jones. Can we get you some cardboard-bedding to keep off the rain?”
The problems that are appearing in the stock and bond markets all started at the Federal Reserve when Fed-Chief Alan Greenspan opened the sluice-gates in 2003 and lowered interest rates to 1%. (Way below the rate of inflation) Since then, trillions of dollars have flooded into the markets creating multiple equity bubbles in real estate, stocks and credit.
Serial bubble-maker Greenspan is to finance-capitalism what Wrigley is to chewing gum. The greatest flim-flam man of all time.
The Fed has tried to conceal the massive increase to the money supply, but the evidence is everywhere. (Many analysts now calculate that inflation is running at roughly 13%) Food and energy have skyrocketed. Housing prices have soared. Everything has gone up except the cheapo imports which the Fed uses to manipulate the inflation stats.
The gigantic housing bubble is mostly Greenspan's doing. After printing-up mountains of cash and creating artificial demand through low interest rates; he promoted his product-line with the typical huckster sales-pitch. “Maestro” advised us that the extension of credit to all-God's creatures, worthy or not, is a good thing.
Here's a clip of Alan praising subprime lending in a speech on April 8, 2005:
"With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. . . . As we reflect on the evolution of consumer credit in the United States, we must conclude that innovation and structural change in the financial services industry have been critical in providing expanded access to credit for the vast majority of consumers, including those of limited means. . . . This fact underscores the importance of our roles as policymakers, researchers, bankers and consumer advocates in fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers."
Yes, of course, with all these “advances in technology” and new-fangled “credit-scoring models” why would we need to verify a loan-applicant's income or require that he scrape together a measly $5,000 for a $450,000 mortgage?
That's all so 20th Century!
Now that foreclosures are mushrooming at an unprecedented pace, the Fed is trying to distance itself from the problem by blaming the banks for their shoddy underwriting practices. But the guilt lies with the Central Bank. Its all part of their whacko plan to crush the dollar and create a police state.
It may sound trite, but “inflation is theft”. Unfortunately, inflation is also part of the ruling class' strategy to rob the poor, fuel the stock market with cheap credit, and move jobs overseas. It is the autocrat's method of “social engineering”---shifting wealth from one class to another by simply printing more money and pumping it through the system via low interest rates. Remember, bankers know that people will ALWAYS borrow money if lending standards are relaxed and the money is cheap enough. At 1%, the Fed was basically losing money on every transaction, but persisted with their plan anyway.
Anyone who cares to go back and trace interest rates moves for the last 7 years will see that the Fed is really a political organization that decides monetary policy entirely on the basis an elite agenda that supports endless war, outsourcing of American jobs, and domestic repression.
Are you surprised?
Now, a bad situation is about to get a whole lot worse. Consumer credit rose last month by a whopping 12.9%---credit card debt by 9.8%! Since housing prices have flattened out, homeowners can no longer borrow on their dwindling equity (Mortgage Equity Withdrawal; MEWs) which is forcing the maxed-out American consumer to use plastic even though rates are averaging from 18% to 27% monthly.
Automobile repos have also hit historic highs. But the real damage is showing up in the subprime market where the percentage of defaults continues to rise unabated.
In itself, a correction in real estate is not enough to bring down the whole economy. Unfortunately, the contagion from the subprime meltdown has spread to the stock market, the insurance industry, banking and pensions. Not even Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson or Fed-master Ben Bernanke are claiming that the subprime problems are “contained” anymore. Just this week, the scholarly looking Bernanke said to Senators on the Hill that the housing market has “deteriorated significantly”.
It's about time. If anyone still has any doubts about the magnitude of fiasco, I recommend they look over these eye-popping charts which tell the whole story. The housing blowdown will spread the carnage from “sea to shining sea”. http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=12232#post12232
The faltering housing market has drawn attention to an even more colossal credit bubble that is limping towards earth as loan requirements tighten and liquidity dries up.
The prevailing fear on Wall Street is that we may be seeing the beginning of a global credit crunch.
The danger is not just the subprime loans or even the mortgage companies that made the loans, but the overall risk to the secondary market where these loans have been sold as CDOs to the tune of $1.8 trillion.
In this new deregulated environment, the banks don't have to rely on savings anymore to make the loans. They simply originate the loans, take their commission, and sell the debt as CDOs. They're even allowed to sell the risk of default through credit default swaps (CDS) which are a form of insurance that minimizes the banks exposure. These weird innovations have spawned riskier and riskier loans and increased the likelihood of damage to the broader market.
The Toxic Cycle of Debt?
Economics correspondent, Stephen Long, explains it like this:
“The problem that arises from the subprime mortgage collapse is that it creates a toxic cycle of debt. Banks originate loans or bundle up loans that mortgage companies have made and sell the risk on to the hedge funds. Then the hedge funds say, ‘Hey, we've got this product that has an investment grade rating so we'll borrow against it from the banks.' (oftentimes leveraged at a ratio of 10 to 1) Now the hedge funds are trying to buy the original loans to stop them from going into default.”(The hedge funds are forced to slow the rate of foreclosures so they won't go bankrupt.)
So, what happens when these shaky bonds (CDOs) are “down-graded”?
Will the hedge funds fall like dominos just like the subprime mortgage-lenders? Will we see liquidity evaporate in the broader market triggering a plunge in the stocks and a massive sell-off in the bond market?
CDOs were conjured up with the idea that vast amounts of money could be made on very meager assets through a complex expansion of leverage. They were promoted as “limiting risk” by spreading it to a greater number of investors and providing extra protection through derivatives. Mortgage Backed Securities were sliced and diced into “more risky” and “less risky” tranches depending on investor appetite. Only now—to everyone's surprise---“collateralized debt obligations with stellar Triple-A ratings have been getting hit by the subprime market's woes.” (Wall Street Journal, “Bernanke revises subprime outlook”) On top of that, the ABX derivative index “has started showing pronounced weakness at the top of its ratings structure.” (ibid WSJ, 7-19-07)
Get it? In other words, even the VERY BEST of these multi-trillion dollar investments are beginning to falter. The contagion is spreading through the entire market. The CDOs are worthless. No one wants them. In fact, the whole new regime of exotic debt-instruments which emerged from 2000-on, is barely hanging on by a thread. One minor downturn in the stock market and the hedge funds will go freefalling through open space.
A speech by Robert Rodriguez of First Pacific Advisors (CFA) gives us a good idea of the enormity of the money involved. In his “Absence of Fear” address in Chicago on June 28, 2007 he states:
“Since 2000 hedge funds have more than doubled in number, while their assets have tripled. They too are using elevated levels of leverage, as are PE (Private Equity) firms and investors in highly leveraged fixed income securities. These funds are heavy users of derivatives. The Global derivatives market grew nearly 40% in 2006--the fastest pace in the last nine years--to $415 trillion, per the Bank of International Settlements. The amount of contracts based on bonds more than doubled to $29 trillion. The actual money at risk through credit derivatives increased 93% to $470 billion, while that amount for the entire derivatives market was $9.7 trillion. The International Monetary Fund, in its April 2006 Global Financial Stability Report, estimated that credit-oriented hedge fund assets grew to more than $300 billion in 2005, a six-fold increase in five years. When levered at 5-6x, this represents $1.5 to $1.8 trillion deployed into the credit markets. Fitch, in their June 5, 2007 special report, “Hedge Funds: The Credit Market's New Paradigm,” says that despite the upward trend in maximum allowable leverage, “notably, no prime broker reported raising margin requirements in response to historically tight credit spreads and growing concerns about the general level of risk-complacency in the credit markets.”
If Rodriguez's “eye-popping” numbers are accurate and the market slumps a mere 5%, “the value of a hedge fund's assets could lead to a forced sale of as much as 25% of its assets”. If the market falls just 10%, the fund would get a 50% haircut!
Yikes! That just shows how over-exposed the industry really is.
As the requirements on mortgages gets tougher and the subprime market continues to languish; bankers will naturally become more hesitant to loan zillions of dollars to hedge funds and private equity firms. When credit gets tighter, the hedge funds will begin to nosedive which will send the stock market in a long-term swoon. That's what happens when a market is this over-leveraged. It's unavoidable.
The markets are now perfectly poised for a full-system breakdown. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair expects a CDO time bomb. She summed it up like this:
"Its going to get worse before it gets better. How much worse, I don't know."
Terrorism?
Not quite. The plumes of smoke are all that's left of two major hedge funds which blew up just weeks ago leaving nothing behind but a few smoldering embers and a mound of black soot.
The compiled assets of the Bear Sterns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund—nearly $20 billion—have vanished into the miasma of cyber-space where they will soon be joined by $1.4 trillion of other, equally worthless, Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO).
If you look carefully, you can almost see the mangled and bloodied bodies of the CDOs, the CSDs, the RMBS and the other shaky debt-instruments being pulled from the wreckage and tossed unceremoniously on the bonfire.
Is this how it all ends? The first whiff of trouble in the housing market and then—in a flash--all the funds in “Hedgistan” begin teetering towards earth?
“No Value”-“No Bids”
According to Bloomberg News, Bear Sterns announced last week that there's “little value left” in one of its funds and “no value left” in the other.
Nothing, nada, zippo.
The news was like a bucket of cold water dumped on the stock market leaving slack-jawed traders shuddering in trepidation.
What does it all mean?
Does that mean that the entire hedge fund empire—which is built on a foundation of dodgy loans and quicksand---may be headed for the crapper?
No one really knows. But a pall has settled-in over downtown Manhattan where gloomy-looking men in pinstriped suits are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Y'see, the hedge fund industry is based on the bizarre notion that one does not have to produce anything of value to make boatloads of money. You don't even need assets any more---just a risky loan that can be transformed into an investment grade security through the magic of “securitization” a sprinkling of Wall Street snake oil.
Abrah Kadabra---presto-chango!
It's like taking shards of bottle-glass and selling it as the Hope Diamond. Who's gonna notice?
The only catch is that--now that these toxic CDOs are going to auction--there are no bids. That's a bad thing.
“No bids” means that $1.4 trillion of shaky investments have no discernable market-value. The CDOs were graded “mark to model” which translates into “mark to fantasy”. It means that the investment bankers and hedge fund managers got together over Martinis one night and pulled a number out of a hat.
Now no one wants to buy them. They're worthless.
The skydiving hedge funds just pulled the CDO rip-chord and nothing came out but confetti.
Aaaaaaaahhhh!
And that's just half the story. There's trillions of dollars in derivatives riding on these shaky CDOs. That's enough to bring down the whole market in a heap once interest rates rise or liquidity dries up. Now it's just a matter of “when” now, not “if”.
This illustrates an important point, though. It shows what it takes to be a good hedge fund manager:
Take a shabby sub-prime mortgage; chop it into “investment”, “mezzanine” and “equity” tranches. Bundle it with other equally suspect mortgage backed securities (MBS). Decide (arbitrarily) what the CDOs are worth Tell your banker. Leverage at a ratio of 10 o 1. Take 2% “off the top” plus salary for your efforts. Buy a summer home in the Hampton's and a Lexus for the wife. Wait for the crash. Then repeat.
Congratulations; you are now a successful hedge fund manager!
Oh yeah; and don't forget to prepare a few soothing words for the investors who just lost their entire life savings and will now be spending their evenings squatting beneath a nearby freeway off-ramp.
“We're so very sorry, Mrs. Jones. Can we get you some cardboard-bedding to keep off the rain?”
The problems that are appearing in the stock and bond markets all started at the Federal Reserve when Fed-Chief Alan Greenspan opened the sluice-gates in 2003 and lowered interest rates to 1%. (Way below the rate of inflation) Since then, trillions of dollars have flooded into the markets creating multiple equity bubbles in real estate, stocks and credit.
Serial bubble-maker Greenspan is to finance-capitalism what Wrigley is to chewing gum. The greatest flim-flam man of all time.
The Fed has tried to conceal the massive increase to the money supply, but the evidence is everywhere. (Many analysts now calculate that inflation is running at roughly 13%) Food and energy have skyrocketed. Housing prices have soared. Everything has gone up except the cheapo imports which the Fed uses to manipulate the inflation stats.
The gigantic housing bubble is mostly Greenspan's doing. After printing-up mountains of cash and creating artificial demand through low interest rates; he promoted his product-line with the typical huckster sales-pitch. “Maestro” advised us that the extension of credit to all-God's creatures, worthy or not, is a good thing.
Here's a clip of Alan praising subprime lending in a speech on April 8, 2005:
"With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. . . . As we reflect on the evolution of consumer credit in the United States, we must conclude that innovation and structural change in the financial services industry have been critical in providing expanded access to credit for the vast majority of consumers, including those of limited means. . . . This fact underscores the importance of our roles as policymakers, researchers, bankers and consumer advocates in fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers."
Yes, of course, with all these “advances in technology” and new-fangled “credit-scoring models” why would we need to verify a loan-applicant's income or require that he scrape together a measly $5,000 for a $450,000 mortgage?
That's all so 20th Century!
Now that foreclosures are mushrooming at an unprecedented pace, the Fed is trying to distance itself from the problem by blaming the banks for their shoddy underwriting practices. But the guilt lies with the Central Bank. Its all part of their whacko plan to crush the dollar and create a police state.
It may sound trite, but “inflation is theft”. Unfortunately, inflation is also part of the ruling class' strategy to rob the poor, fuel the stock market with cheap credit, and move jobs overseas. It is the autocrat's method of “social engineering”---shifting wealth from one class to another by simply printing more money and pumping it through the system via low interest rates. Remember, bankers know that people will ALWAYS borrow money if lending standards are relaxed and the money is cheap enough. At 1%, the Fed was basically losing money on every transaction, but persisted with their plan anyway.
Anyone who cares to go back and trace interest rates moves for the last 7 years will see that the Fed is really a political organization that decides monetary policy entirely on the basis an elite agenda that supports endless war, outsourcing of American jobs, and domestic repression.
Are you surprised?
Now, a bad situation is about to get a whole lot worse. Consumer credit rose last month by a whopping 12.9%---credit card debt by 9.8%! Since housing prices have flattened out, homeowners can no longer borrow on their dwindling equity (Mortgage Equity Withdrawal; MEWs) which is forcing the maxed-out American consumer to use plastic even though rates are averaging from 18% to 27% monthly.
Automobile repos have also hit historic highs. But the real damage is showing up in the subprime market where the percentage of defaults continues to rise unabated.
In itself, a correction in real estate is not enough to bring down the whole economy. Unfortunately, the contagion from the subprime meltdown has spread to the stock market, the insurance industry, banking and pensions. Not even Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson or Fed-master Ben Bernanke are claiming that the subprime problems are “contained” anymore. Just this week, the scholarly looking Bernanke said to Senators on the Hill that the housing market has “deteriorated significantly”.
It's about time. If anyone still has any doubts about the magnitude of fiasco, I recommend they look over these eye-popping charts which tell the whole story. The housing blowdown will spread the carnage from “sea to shining sea”. http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=12232#post12232
The faltering housing market has drawn attention to an even more colossal credit bubble that is limping towards earth as loan requirements tighten and liquidity dries up.
The prevailing fear on Wall Street is that we may be seeing the beginning of a global credit crunch.
The danger is not just the subprime loans or even the mortgage companies that made the loans, but the overall risk to the secondary market where these loans have been sold as CDOs to the tune of $1.8 trillion.
In this new deregulated environment, the banks don't have to rely on savings anymore to make the loans. They simply originate the loans, take their commission, and sell the debt as CDOs. They're even allowed to sell the risk of default through credit default swaps (CDS) which are a form of insurance that minimizes the banks exposure. These weird innovations have spawned riskier and riskier loans and increased the likelihood of damage to the broader market.
The Toxic Cycle of Debt?
Economics correspondent, Stephen Long, explains it like this:
“The problem that arises from the subprime mortgage collapse is that it creates a toxic cycle of debt. Banks originate loans or bundle up loans that mortgage companies have made and sell the risk on to the hedge funds. Then the hedge funds say, ‘Hey, we've got this product that has an investment grade rating so we'll borrow against it from the banks.' (oftentimes leveraged at a ratio of 10 to 1) Now the hedge funds are trying to buy the original loans to stop them from going into default.”(The hedge funds are forced to slow the rate of foreclosures so they won't go bankrupt.)
So, what happens when these shaky bonds (CDOs) are “down-graded”?
Will the hedge funds fall like dominos just like the subprime mortgage-lenders? Will we see liquidity evaporate in the broader market triggering a plunge in the stocks and a massive sell-off in the bond market?
CDOs were conjured up with the idea that vast amounts of money could be made on very meager assets through a complex expansion of leverage. They were promoted as “limiting risk” by spreading it to a greater number of investors and providing extra protection through derivatives. Mortgage Backed Securities were sliced and diced into “more risky” and “less risky” tranches depending on investor appetite. Only now—to everyone's surprise---“collateralized debt obligations with stellar Triple-A ratings have been getting hit by the subprime market's woes.” (Wall Street Journal, “Bernanke revises subprime outlook”) On top of that, the ABX derivative index “has started showing pronounced weakness at the top of its ratings structure.” (ibid WSJ, 7-19-07)
Get it? In other words, even the VERY BEST of these multi-trillion dollar investments are beginning to falter. The contagion is spreading through the entire market. The CDOs are worthless. No one wants them. In fact, the whole new regime of exotic debt-instruments which emerged from 2000-on, is barely hanging on by a thread. One minor downturn in the stock market and the hedge funds will go freefalling through open space.
A speech by Robert Rodriguez of First Pacific Advisors (CFA) gives us a good idea of the enormity of the money involved. In his “Absence of Fear” address in Chicago on June 28, 2007 he states:
“Since 2000 hedge funds have more than doubled in number, while their assets have tripled. They too are using elevated levels of leverage, as are PE (Private Equity) firms and investors in highly leveraged fixed income securities. These funds are heavy users of derivatives. The Global derivatives market grew nearly 40% in 2006--the fastest pace in the last nine years--to $415 trillion, per the Bank of International Settlements. The amount of contracts based on bonds more than doubled to $29 trillion. The actual money at risk through credit derivatives increased 93% to $470 billion, while that amount for the entire derivatives market was $9.7 trillion. The International Monetary Fund, in its April 2006 Global Financial Stability Report, estimated that credit-oriented hedge fund assets grew to more than $300 billion in 2005, a six-fold increase in five years. When levered at 5-6x, this represents $1.5 to $1.8 trillion deployed into the credit markets. Fitch, in their June 5, 2007 special report, “Hedge Funds: The Credit Market's New Paradigm,” says that despite the upward trend in maximum allowable leverage, “notably, no prime broker reported raising margin requirements in response to historically tight credit spreads and growing concerns about the general level of risk-complacency in the credit markets.”
If Rodriguez's “eye-popping” numbers are accurate and the market slumps a mere 5%, “the value of a hedge fund's assets could lead to a forced sale of as much as 25% of its assets”. If the market falls just 10%, the fund would get a 50% haircut!
Yikes! That just shows how over-exposed the industry really is.
As the requirements on mortgages gets tougher and the subprime market continues to languish; bankers will naturally become more hesitant to loan zillions of dollars to hedge funds and private equity firms. When credit gets tighter, the hedge funds will begin to nosedive which will send the stock market in a long-term swoon. That's what happens when a market is this over-leveraged. It's unavoidable.
The markets are now perfectly poised for a full-system breakdown. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair expects a CDO time bomb. She summed it up like this:
"Its going to get worse before it gets better. How much worse, I don't know."
14 July 2007
Presentation to CFA association, New York
A recent example of the flawed nature of this market came to my attention when my associate, Julian Mann, showed me a very garden variety LIBOR sub-prime floating rate security. A major pricing service valued this bond at par, while on March 19, 2007, one of the major rating agencies rated this bond A3. To affirm the accuracy of this bond's pricing, we went to two brokerage firms that traffic in this type of security and requested what their bid might be, if we owned this security. One responded with a $7 bid. In other words, a 7% of par bid, a difference of 93% to the pricing service. The other firm declined to bid, but they did indicate that, if they were to, their bid would have probably been around this level. Julian has found several other similar examples, so this one does not represent the proverbial “needle in the haystack.”
We believe that many of these models are flawed and give a spurious representation of accuracy. Given the deterioration in underwriting standards, models predicated on prior experience have little value when compared to the data of the last two or three years. In essence, one is assuming a normal distribution curve of data for modeling purposes, while in reality you have data that comes from a highly skewed distribution. We are beginning to see the negative effects of flawed modeling by the growing number of downgrades in the sub-prime sector. This trend is also starting to develop in the Alt-A sector as well. We believe these trends will continue to unfold over the next two or three years and should lead to a retrenchment in the securitization/origination industry. If our assessment is reasonably correct, mortgage credit availability will likely contract and, therefore, exacerbate the housing contraction and its effects upon the general economy. We disagree with the opinion expressed by our esteemed Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, when he said in his speech of May 17, 2007 at Chicago's 43rd annual conference on Bank Structures and Competition, “We believe the effect of the troubles in the sub-prime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spillovers from the sub-prime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.” We will see if this optimistic assessment proves to be the correct one.
We are of the opinion that the distancing of the borrower from the lender has contributed to the development of lax underwriting standards. Each participant, in the securitization/origination process, takes their ounce of payment, but no one truly worries about the underlying credit quality since the loan will be sold. Furthermore, most participants are compensated on volume and not quality of loan originated. In our opinion, “a rolling loan gathers no loss.” Possibly, with so many sub-prime originators failing because of loan put-backs to them, some degree of underwriting discipline will return to the market; however, with so many types of loan originators operating outside of the regulatory system with minimal capital, it is far better to originate a loan, capture the fee, and then get out of Dodge, should the business go bad. One can always return another day.
Finally, the securitization market and the multiplicity of products that have been created have never been truly tested in a major credit contraction like that of 1990-94. This is because most of today's securitization products did not exist back then. Another risk is how have they been used in various types of leveraged investment strategies? Have the creators of these products structured their operations to be able to handle a contracting market? It remains to be seen how this all works together. One may gain some insight to the potential risk by reviewing the collapse of the manufactured-housing securitization market. After seven years, it is still a fraction of its former size with all the former major originators gone.
Another example of risk knowing no boundaries, on June 1, the Government of Pakistan issued a $750 million 6.875% of 6/1/2017 dollar denominated bond priced at par and rated B1/B+ at barely 200 basis points above the ten-year Treasury bond yield. The following week in the Los Angeles Times, the headline read, “Musharraf's grip falters in Pakistan.” The second headline, “Dismay over U.S. support of general.” I guess the market believes the extra 200 basis points of yield spread is sufficient compensation for risk. I think not.
This weakening in credit quality trend also applies to the corporate bond market. High-yield bond spreads are at record lows, with the CCC component of the Merrill Lynch high-yield index at 18%, more than double the proportion ten years ago. 7 High-yield spreads have declined from nearly 1100 basis points over the Treasury yield in 2002, to barely 240 basis points recently. We believe this narrowing of credit spread is being driven by the near-record low default rates. For this trend to continue, a near “perfect” credit environment must continue. We see virtually no margin of safety for this sector. This narrow credit spread environment is the key driver that is propelling Private Equity and their bids for companies. As Dan Fuss, manager of the top-performing $10.7 billion Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, recently said, “I haven't felt this nervous about a market ever.” 8
PRIVATE EQUITY
The Private Equity (PE) industry is flourishing. PE has seen its capital raising rise more than ten-fold between 1990 and 2000, only to witness a temporary pullback in 2002, and then more than double between 2000 and 2006. PE is no different than any other hot investment trend, in that its peak capital raising and capital deployment occurred in 2000, the stock market peak, only to see this process collapse in 2002, the stock market trough. Capital deployment fell from $270 billion in 2000 to $49 billion in 2002, per the Leuthold Group. I call this process “buy higher” and then “don't buy lower.” Now we've seen PE fundraising rise to new all-time highs and along with that, acquisitions as well. Leuthold estimates that in 2006 $469 billion in cash acquisitions were announced and/or completed. While this was occurring, valuations have skyrocketed, according to JP Morgan's data. 9 Between 2001 and 2006, the average EV/EBITDA multiple paid rose 41%, from 6.1x to 8.6x. Leverage increased 54%, with the Average Total Debt/EBITDA multiple rising from 4.6x to 7.1x.
We are of the opinion that PE is pushing the boundaries of prudence and that this trend is elevating valuations in the equity market. It would not surprise us that there will be many other Chrysler situations in three to five years. By that I mean, Daimler-Benz A.G. paid approximately $36 billion for the Chrysler Corporation in 1998, only to sell 80.1% of its ownership for $7.4 billion in 2006. Given that this is other people's money, why worry.
HEDGE FUNDS
Since 2000 hedge funds have more than doubled in number, while their assets have tripled. They too are using elevated levels of leverage, as are PE firms and investors in highly leveraged fixed income securities. These funds are heavy users of derivatives. The Global derivatives market grew nearly 40% in 2006--the fastest pace in the last nine years--to $415 trillion, per the Bank of International Settlements. The amount of contracts based on bonds more than doubled to $29 trillion. The actual money at risk through credit derivatives increased 93% to $470 billion, while that amount for the entire derivatives market was $9.7 trillion. 10The International Monetary Fund, in its April 2006 Global Financial Stability Report, estimated that credit-oriented hedge fund assets grew to more than $300 billion in 2005, a six-fold increase in five years. When levered at 5-6x, this represents $1.5 to $1.8 trillion deployed into the credit markets. Fitch, in their June 5, 2007 special report, “Hedge Funds: The Credit Market's New Paradigm,” says that despite the upward trend in maximum allowable leverage, “notably, no prime broker reported raising margin requirements in response to historically tight credit spreads and growing concerns about the general level of risk-complacency in the credit markets.” The report provides a forced unwind example where an initial 5% price decline in the value of a hedge fund's assets could lead to a forced sale of as much as 25% of its assets, assuming leverage of 4.0x (20% margin). They conclude that liquidity risk is among the more important issues facing credit investors. In an era of constrained returns and narrow yield spreads, increased leverage is the solution since volatility is low; therefore, a higher level of leverage may be utilized. We question this logic.
EQUITY MARKET
Enhanced risk taking is widespread here as well. Equity mutual funds are now at or near their all-time record low cash percentage holding of 3.6%. According to the Leuthold Group's data, investors are directing their cash flows to among the riskiest areas of the equity universe—foreign focus equity funds. $80 billion has flowed into these funds through May compared to $11.8 billion for large-cap domestic equity funds and a net outflow of $4.2 billion for small-cap equity funds. This is the second year in a row that the foreign sector has overwhelmed the flows into domestic equity funds. We are of the opinion that investors are chasing the enhanced returns in the foreign sector but do not realize the extent of the risks they may be taking. We see little value in the domestic equity market since we view valuations as being elevated because, in our opinion, consensus profit expectations are assuming unsustainably high operating margins. There appears to be minimal valuation differentiation across most market cap sectors. For example, my value screen just hit a new low in terms of the number of qualifiers. Prior to the recent equity market decline, only 33 companies, with market caps between $150 million and $3 billion, were identified out of nearly 10,000 in the Compustat universe. The previous low was 46 this past February, and before that, it was 47 for both January 2004 and March 1998. When the market cap upper limit was expanded to $150 billion, only ten additional companies qualified. In times past, I would generally get 250 to 400 companies in just the smaller market cap range alone.
We believe that many of these models are flawed and give a spurious representation of accuracy. Given the deterioration in underwriting standards, models predicated on prior experience have little value when compared to the data of the last two or three years. In essence, one is assuming a normal distribution curve of data for modeling purposes, while in reality you have data that comes from a highly skewed distribution. We are beginning to see the negative effects of flawed modeling by the growing number of downgrades in the sub-prime sector. This trend is also starting to develop in the Alt-A sector as well. We believe these trends will continue to unfold over the next two or three years and should lead to a retrenchment in the securitization/origination industry. If our assessment is reasonably correct, mortgage credit availability will likely contract and, therefore, exacerbate the housing contraction and its effects upon the general economy. We disagree with the opinion expressed by our esteemed Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, when he said in his speech of May 17, 2007 at Chicago's 43rd annual conference on Bank Structures and Competition, “We believe the effect of the troubles in the sub-prime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spillovers from the sub-prime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.” We will see if this optimistic assessment proves to be the correct one.
We are of the opinion that the distancing of the borrower from the lender has contributed to the development of lax underwriting standards. Each participant, in the securitization/origination process, takes their ounce of payment, but no one truly worries about the underlying credit quality since the loan will be sold. Furthermore, most participants are compensated on volume and not quality of loan originated. In our opinion, “a rolling loan gathers no loss.” Possibly, with so many sub-prime originators failing because of loan put-backs to them, some degree of underwriting discipline will return to the market; however, with so many types of loan originators operating outside of the regulatory system with minimal capital, it is far better to originate a loan, capture the fee, and then get out of Dodge, should the business go bad. One can always return another day.
Finally, the securitization market and the multiplicity of products that have been created have never been truly tested in a major credit contraction like that of 1990-94. This is because most of today's securitization products did not exist back then. Another risk is how have they been used in various types of leveraged investment strategies? Have the creators of these products structured their operations to be able to handle a contracting market? It remains to be seen how this all works together. One may gain some insight to the potential risk by reviewing the collapse of the manufactured-housing securitization market. After seven years, it is still a fraction of its former size with all the former major originators gone.
Another example of risk knowing no boundaries, on June 1, the Government of Pakistan issued a $750 million 6.875% of 6/1/2017 dollar denominated bond priced at par and rated B1/B+ at barely 200 basis points above the ten-year Treasury bond yield. The following week in the Los Angeles Times, the headline read, “Musharraf's grip falters in Pakistan.” The second headline, “Dismay over U.S. support of general.” I guess the market believes the extra 200 basis points of yield spread is sufficient compensation for risk. I think not.
This weakening in credit quality trend also applies to the corporate bond market. High-yield bond spreads are at record lows, with the CCC component of the Merrill Lynch high-yield index at 18%, more than double the proportion ten years ago. 7 High-yield spreads have declined from nearly 1100 basis points over the Treasury yield in 2002, to barely 240 basis points recently. We believe this narrowing of credit spread is being driven by the near-record low default rates. For this trend to continue, a near “perfect” credit environment must continue. We see virtually no margin of safety for this sector. This narrow credit spread environment is the key driver that is propelling Private Equity and their bids for companies. As Dan Fuss, manager of the top-performing $10.7 billion Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, recently said, “I haven't felt this nervous about a market ever.” 8
PRIVATE EQUITY
The Private Equity (PE) industry is flourishing. PE has seen its capital raising rise more than ten-fold between 1990 and 2000, only to witness a temporary pullback in 2002, and then more than double between 2000 and 2006. PE is no different than any other hot investment trend, in that its peak capital raising and capital deployment occurred in 2000, the stock market peak, only to see this process collapse in 2002, the stock market trough. Capital deployment fell from $270 billion in 2000 to $49 billion in 2002, per the Leuthold Group. I call this process “buy higher” and then “don't buy lower.” Now we've seen PE fundraising rise to new all-time highs and along with that, acquisitions as well. Leuthold estimates that in 2006 $469 billion in cash acquisitions were announced and/or completed. While this was occurring, valuations have skyrocketed, according to JP Morgan's data. 9 Between 2001 and 2006, the average EV/EBITDA multiple paid rose 41%, from 6.1x to 8.6x. Leverage increased 54%, with the Average Total Debt/EBITDA multiple rising from 4.6x to 7.1x.
We are of the opinion that PE is pushing the boundaries of prudence and that this trend is elevating valuations in the equity market. It would not surprise us that there will be many other Chrysler situations in three to five years. By that I mean, Daimler-Benz A.G. paid approximately $36 billion for the Chrysler Corporation in 1998, only to sell 80.1% of its ownership for $7.4 billion in 2006. Given that this is other people's money, why worry.
HEDGE FUNDS
Since 2000 hedge funds have more than doubled in number, while their assets have tripled. They too are using elevated levels of leverage, as are PE firms and investors in highly leveraged fixed income securities. These funds are heavy users of derivatives. The Global derivatives market grew nearly 40% in 2006--the fastest pace in the last nine years--to $415 trillion, per the Bank of International Settlements. The amount of contracts based on bonds more than doubled to $29 trillion. The actual money at risk through credit derivatives increased 93% to $470 billion, while that amount for the entire derivatives market was $9.7 trillion. 10The International Monetary Fund, in its April 2006 Global Financial Stability Report, estimated that credit-oriented hedge fund assets grew to more than $300 billion in 2005, a six-fold increase in five years. When levered at 5-6x, this represents $1.5 to $1.8 trillion deployed into the credit markets. Fitch, in their June 5, 2007 special report, “Hedge Funds: The Credit Market's New Paradigm,” says that despite the upward trend in maximum allowable leverage, “notably, no prime broker reported raising margin requirements in response to historically tight credit spreads and growing concerns about the general level of risk-complacency in the credit markets.” The report provides a forced unwind example where an initial 5% price decline in the value of a hedge fund's assets could lead to a forced sale of as much as 25% of its assets, assuming leverage of 4.0x (20% margin). They conclude that liquidity risk is among the more important issues facing credit investors. In an era of constrained returns and narrow yield spreads, increased leverage is the solution since volatility is low; therefore, a higher level of leverage may be utilized. We question this logic.
EQUITY MARKET
Enhanced risk taking is widespread here as well. Equity mutual funds are now at or near their all-time record low cash percentage holding of 3.6%. According to the Leuthold Group's data, investors are directing their cash flows to among the riskiest areas of the equity universe—foreign focus equity funds. $80 billion has flowed into these funds through May compared to $11.8 billion for large-cap domestic equity funds and a net outflow of $4.2 billion for small-cap equity funds. This is the second year in a row that the foreign sector has overwhelmed the flows into domestic equity funds. We are of the opinion that investors are chasing the enhanced returns in the foreign sector but do not realize the extent of the risks they may be taking. We see little value in the domestic equity market since we view valuations as being elevated because, in our opinion, consensus profit expectations are assuming unsustainably high operating margins. There appears to be minimal valuation differentiation across most market cap sectors. For example, my value screen just hit a new low in terms of the number of qualifiers. Prior to the recent equity market decline, only 33 companies, with market caps between $150 million and $3 billion, were identified out of nearly 10,000 in the Compustat universe. The previous low was 46 this past February, and before that, it was 47 for both January 2004 and March 1998. When the market cap upper limit was expanded to $150 billion, only ten additional companies qualified. In times past, I would generally get 250 to 400 companies in just the smaller market cap range alone.
Wall Street Chasing Performance through Chemistry
“It’s like they’re chasing a dream. Even when they make tremendous profits, they’re still worried,” he said.
Alden Cass, a clinical psychologist who counsels Wall Streeters with drug addictions, said drug abuse and high anxiety are undercurrents to the current boom.
“When things are really good, they feel invulnerable,” Cass said. “That can lead to adultery, substance abuse, problems with the law.”
When it comes to profits, things are really good.
Six of the largest U.S. investment banks — Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, JPMorgan & Chase Co., Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns — combined for $17.6 billion in first-quarter profit this year. That’s after shelling out $28.8 billion for pay and benefits, financial statements show.
Those profit and pay figures are more than double those seen in the first quarter of 2000, the last days before the dot-com bubble burst. New York’s comptroller estimates Wall Street’s 2006 bonuses will generate $1.6 billion in state tax revenue.
Cocaine and hillbilly heroin
“To my knowledge, we have not seen an uptick in drug use,” Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Jean Marie McFadden said.
The other five firms declined comment or did not return telephone calls.
But Cass said opiate abuse among his clients is rising and they openly talk about being hooked on prescription drugs like OxyContin, known as hillbilly heroin.
“That’s what has changed from previous booms on Wall Street,” he said.
Cass and Stratyner said their clients sometimes conceal their habits by taking prescription drugs they get for back surgery or sports-related injuries. The Internet has also expanded the black market for drugs.
Wall Street professionals in their 20s use Ritalin and Adderall, prescription drugs used to treat attention-deficit disorder and hyperactivity, to enhance their performance as they grind out 100-hour weeks, Cass said.
Big bonuses and the need to blow off steam have helped invigorate demand for cocaine in Manhattan, according to two junior bankers who did not want to be named.
Juan Rodriguez, convicted of selling drugs to investment bankers and other professionals, said his clients never complained about the price of cocaine, even as it escalated.
“My customers were all business individuals,” Rodriguez said, citing Morgan Stanley bankers as among his clients.
Morgan Stanley said the company has a strong policy against substance abuse and uses random drug testing.
Passing the test
One hiring manager at a major New York bank said new staff must take a urine test, which is typical for the industry. But he said new hires can choose when to schedule the test during a 45-day period before their start date.
“Our drug test is not so much a test of whether you actually take drugs as it is an intelligence test to see if you can figure out how long it takes to get traces of the drug out of your system,” said the manager, who asked not to be named.
The hiring manager said his employer also had a policy of random drug tests for employees but that in several years he had never encountered anyone subjected to such a test.
Drugs are not the only reason for executive meltdowns.
Overwhelming pressure and anxiety to meet profit goals undid star trader David Becker as he rose the Citigroup ladder.
Don't miss this on MSNBC.com Health
Kings don't rule the castle — queens do
What cancer took from me - and what it gave
The Body Odd: Why are my hands all pruney?
Don't get the joke? Maybe you're too old
Stigma of being an overweight kid
Nine months after becoming global commodities chief, Becker found himself on the fast track to prison. The largest U.S. bank discovered in 2004 that Becker and others conspired to overstate profits by $20 million.
Becker, 41, pleaded guilty and is serving a 15-month sentence in federal prison. He declined to comment.
Before he committed his crime, he sought psychiatric help to deal with the pressure of balancing family and career, court papers show.
A metaphor for his life was a painting he owned depicting a man being pulled by all four limbs, Becker’s psychiatrist, Dr. Barbara Deutsch, wrote to the judge in the case.
“He felt enormous pressure to make the group’s budget at all costs,” Deutsch wrote. “He felt identified with this tortured man.”
Alden Cass, a clinical psychologist who counsels Wall Streeters with drug addictions, said drug abuse and high anxiety are undercurrents to the current boom.
“When things are really good, they feel invulnerable,” Cass said. “That can lead to adultery, substance abuse, problems with the law.”
When it comes to profits, things are really good.
Six of the largest U.S. investment banks — Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, JPMorgan & Chase Co., Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns — combined for $17.6 billion in first-quarter profit this year. That’s after shelling out $28.8 billion for pay and benefits, financial statements show.
Those profit and pay figures are more than double those seen in the first quarter of 2000, the last days before the dot-com bubble burst. New York’s comptroller estimates Wall Street’s 2006 bonuses will generate $1.6 billion in state tax revenue.
Cocaine and hillbilly heroin
“To my knowledge, we have not seen an uptick in drug use,” Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Jean Marie McFadden said.
The other five firms declined comment or did not return telephone calls.
But Cass said opiate abuse among his clients is rising and they openly talk about being hooked on prescription drugs like OxyContin, known as hillbilly heroin.
“That’s what has changed from previous booms on Wall Street,” he said.
Cass and Stratyner said their clients sometimes conceal their habits by taking prescription drugs they get for back surgery or sports-related injuries. The Internet has also expanded the black market for drugs.
Wall Street professionals in their 20s use Ritalin and Adderall, prescription drugs used to treat attention-deficit disorder and hyperactivity, to enhance their performance as they grind out 100-hour weeks, Cass said.
Big bonuses and the need to blow off steam have helped invigorate demand for cocaine in Manhattan, according to two junior bankers who did not want to be named.
Juan Rodriguez, convicted of selling drugs to investment bankers and other professionals, said his clients never complained about the price of cocaine, even as it escalated.
“My customers were all business individuals,” Rodriguez said, citing Morgan Stanley bankers as among his clients.
Morgan Stanley said the company has a strong policy against substance abuse and uses random drug testing.
Passing the test
One hiring manager at a major New York bank said new staff must take a urine test, which is typical for the industry. But he said new hires can choose when to schedule the test during a 45-day period before their start date.
“Our drug test is not so much a test of whether you actually take drugs as it is an intelligence test to see if you can figure out how long it takes to get traces of the drug out of your system,” said the manager, who asked not to be named.
The hiring manager said his employer also had a policy of random drug tests for employees but that in several years he had never encountered anyone subjected to such a test.
Drugs are not the only reason for executive meltdowns.
Overwhelming pressure and anxiety to meet profit goals undid star trader David Becker as he rose the Citigroup ladder.
Don't miss this on MSNBC.com Health
Kings don't rule the castle — queens do
What cancer took from me - and what it gave
The Body Odd: Why are my hands all pruney?
Don't get the joke? Maybe you're too old
Stigma of being an overweight kid
Nine months after becoming global commodities chief, Becker found himself on the fast track to prison. The largest U.S. bank discovered in 2004 that Becker and others conspired to overstate profits by $20 million.
Becker, 41, pleaded guilty and is serving a 15-month sentence in federal prison. He declined to comment.
Before he committed his crime, he sought psychiatric help to deal with the pressure of balancing family and career, court papers show.
A metaphor for his life was a painting he owned depicting a man being pulled by all four limbs, Becker’s psychiatrist, Dr. Barbara Deutsch, wrote to the judge in the case.
“He felt enormous pressure to make the group’s budget at all costs,” Deutsch wrote. “He felt identified with this tortured man.”
13 July 2007
Australian hedge fund warns about withdrawals
The resets are just starting and detailed information about Basis Capital's positions would be interesting to look at. Basis report that they avoided 2006 vintage loans but it's likely that 2005 isn't far behind. Anyway this report in from the Financial Times.
FT.com / Capital markets - Australian hedge fund warns about withdrawals: "An Australian hedge fund manager with $1bn in structured credits and junk-rated loans warned investors yesterday it could restrict withdrawals to ensure its survival as it reported losses of 14 per cent in one fund in June.
Basis Capital, based in Sydney, said in a letter to investors it had been hit by “indiscriminate” repricing of “otherwise fundamentally sound collateral” amid the crisis in US home loans to less creditworthy investors. It said it had deliberately avoided the worst-hit 2006 subprime loans.
The warning that redemptions can be restricted comes as a series of hedge funds in the US and UK have run into trouble from the collapse in price of illiquid, or hard-to-trade, securities linked to subprime loans.
Restrictions on redemptions are closely monitored by hedge fund investors as an indication of trouble."
FT.com / Capital markets - Australian hedge fund warns about withdrawals: "An Australian hedge fund manager with $1bn in structured credits and junk-rated loans warned investors yesterday it could restrict withdrawals to ensure its survival as it reported losses of 14 per cent in one fund in June.
Basis Capital, based in Sydney, said in a letter to investors it had been hit by “indiscriminate” repricing of “otherwise fundamentally sound collateral” amid the crisis in US home loans to less creditworthy investors. It said it had deliberately avoided the worst-hit 2006 subprime loans.
The warning that redemptions can be restricted comes as a series of hedge funds in the US and UK have run into trouble from the collapse in price of illiquid, or hard-to-trade, securities linked to subprime loans.
Restrictions on redemptions are closely monitored by hedge fund investors as an indication of trouble."
Swinging the Market - Calvin Bear
NEW 7/12/2007 4:08:50 PM
Two politically independent factors affect what happens in the share market – one is the real market price of money, and the other is the range of competitive options available for the equity dollar, in other words, comparative risk values.
Three politically dependent factors affect what happens in the market – whether or not the investment bankers who have supported their political candidates feel they have control of these politicians, whether they are individually extracting an evenhanded distribution of favours and money between their ranks from their political ‘slaves,' whether they have sufficient control over the minds and actions of the voting public.
There is only a very small handful of investment banks that exert that much control over the White House. But they control by far the largest dollar push in the equities markets virtually worldwide.
Whereas the judiciary is not politically independent in the USA, it is very very much independent in Israel – and consequently, there is a dynamic that is not much referred to even among those Jewish Banking Conspiracy ‘nutjobs' which often produces disturbances and wide differences of opinion among the operators in the bullfight ring who normally ‘should' be going along a consistent and collusive pathway; except that they don't regularly. This condition innately part of the Israel Lobby, allows for sudden dark volatility in almost every function of policy coming out of the White House, and equivalently it is the root cause of unheralded volatility within the share market collusive banking cartels who operate at the top of capital flow decisions in New York.
Although it is true that there has been for a long time a total lack of discipline surrounding the extending of money from the US Treasury to a small handful of investment banks and their associated interests – this cannot completely overcome the forces of money worldwide that really are the drivers of the interest rate; notwithstanding that it is also due to the trade currency status of the US Dollar and its link to the policy decisions of Japanese banks and the Japan Government, that the Treasury can get away with its bizarre belief in the printing press over the minting press.
Although I find it extremely odd for me to be making references to Lyndon Larouche, nevertheless he is an exact example of a brand name thinker whose printed body of recent work draws from so much excellent historical background, yet still manages to say that dead people are behind the active decisions of today's money and capital managers: it is perfectly true that there was a London City merchant base of corruption and greed that developed into a collusive trans-Atlantic elite two or three hundred years – but these people suffered just as much decimation through all the major wars since Napoleon and there is no evidence they still exist today.
In the same way, it is perfectly possible that Henry Kissinger was part of a globally powerful elite that includes Rumsfeld and Cheney – an elite that directed the current wars in the Middle East – it is not at all certain these people fully control all the complexities of US political reality and there is far more evidence that Congress is swinging brutally strongly AWAY from this clique and its interests.
The investment banks that are not aligned with the Kissinger ideologues currently running the White House, could already be operating on a long term plan to undo the present Republican ruling faction, and these banks will far prefer to create a BIG BUBBLE that can be pinned on the current Bush administrations negligence. Consequently you are more likely to see the share market withdrawals closer to the elections and not quite yet, so that the ‘problems' are fresh in the minds of voters and hot in the media AT THE TIME OF VOTING, and not sooner.
Kissinger is an old man, and Cheney is past his best aggressive years. Olmert is a political dead man walking. These people are dancing their swan songs, not their Bolero Fire Dances!
I mean career fund managers out of the establishment business schools can jump on all the bandwagons they want to but the fact will remain that they have no real access to private equity or hedge fund knowledge no matter how many new IPOs they set up.
ALL debt is supposed to have collateral supporting its downside risks – why should the phrase ‘collateralised debt obligation' suddenly imply an intrinsically self-immolating investment structure?
There is private equity that can NEVER be looked into by the SEC no matter it tries to do – there are secrets of financing and funding that simply are not in the public arena of knowledge. And there are hedge operations that can build or destroy any currency and these have nothing whatsoever to do with the types of leverage and derivative positions and the CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS (which are totally different to CDOs in essence).
The sub-prime lenders are called sub-prime because everyone always knew they could not meet their repayment schedules – why is it surprising to the professional investor that these will default? It might be surprising that the packaged funds that sell such sub-prime bundles to pension funds collapse with such regularity – but not to me. The fact is, the pension fund contributers are not collapsing; THEY are still making payments to someone, anyone, and probably just the next risky fund that replaced the collapsed one!
The only time there will be a market crisis is when the pension holders start making large scale capital calls… But this might conceivably be actuarily defeated as a ‘problem' if a lot of pensioners simply die. Which they inevitably will at some point.
No. The equity market will not fall just because idiot hedge fund managers or CDOs fail the investor. The equity market will only start to become a slide downwards when the quiet private equity investment bankers sell their equity positions in large scale in order to take up a position in a more competitive investing position. And this will require interest rates closer to 7 per cent than to 5.
Calvin J. Bear
Two politically independent factors affect what happens in the share market – one is the real market price of money, and the other is the range of competitive options available for the equity dollar, in other words, comparative risk values.
Three politically dependent factors affect what happens in the market – whether or not the investment bankers who have supported their political candidates feel they have control of these politicians, whether they are individually extracting an evenhanded distribution of favours and money between their ranks from their political ‘slaves,' whether they have sufficient control over the minds and actions of the voting public.
There is only a very small handful of investment banks that exert that much control over the White House. But they control by far the largest dollar push in the equities markets virtually worldwide.
Whereas the judiciary is not politically independent in the USA, it is very very much independent in Israel – and consequently, there is a dynamic that is not much referred to even among those Jewish Banking Conspiracy ‘nutjobs' which often produces disturbances and wide differences of opinion among the operators in the bullfight ring who normally ‘should' be going along a consistent and collusive pathway; except that they don't regularly. This condition innately part of the Israel Lobby, allows for sudden dark volatility in almost every function of policy coming out of the White House, and equivalently it is the root cause of unheralded volatility within the share market collusive banking cartels who operate at the top of capital flow decisions in New York.
Although it is true that there has been for a long time a total lack of discipline surrounding the extending of money from the US Treasury to a small handful of investment banks and their associated interests – this cannot completely overcome the forces of money worldwide that really are the drivers of the interest rate; notwithstanding that it is also due to the trade currency status of the US Dollar and its link to the policy decisions of Japanese banks and the Japan Government, that the Treasury can get away with its bizarre belief in the printing press over the minting press.
Although I find it extremely odd for me to be making references to Lyndon Larouche, nevertheless he is an exact example of a brand name thinker whose printed body of recent work draws from so much excellent historical background, yet still manages to say that dead people are behind the active decisions of today's money and capital managers: it is perfectly true that there was a London City merchant base of corruption and greed that developed into a collusive trans-Atlantic elite two or three hundred years – but these people suffered just as much decimation through all the major wars since Napoleon and there is no evidence they still exist today.
In the same way, it is perfectly possible that Henry Kissinger was part of a globally powerful elite that includes Rumsfeld and Cheney – an elite that directed the current wars in the Middle East – it is not at all certain these people fully control all the complexities of US political reality and there is far more evidence that Congress is swinging brutally strongly AWAY from this clique and its interests.
The investment banks that are not aligned with the Kissinger ideologues currently running the White House, could already be operating on a long term plan to undo the present Republican ruling faction, and these banks will far prefer to create a BIG BUBBLE that can be pinned on the current Bush administrations negligence. Consequently you are more likely to see the share market withdrawals closer to the elections and not quite yet, so that the ‘problems' are fresh in the minds of voters and hot in the media AT THE TIME OF VOTING, and not sooner.
Kissinger is an old man, and Cheney is past his best aggressive years. Olmert is a political dead man walking. These people are dancing their swan songs, not their Bolero Fire Dances!
I mean career fund managers out of the establishment business schools can jump on all the bandwagons they want to but the fact will remain that they have no real access to private equity or hedge fund knowledge no matter how many new IPOs they set up.
ALL debt is supposed to have collateral supporting its downside risks – why should the phrase ‘collateralised debt obligation' suddenly imply an intrinsically self-immolating investment structure?
There is private equity that can NEVER be looked into by the SEC no matter it tries to do – there are secrets of financing and funding that simply are not in the public arena of knowledge. And there are hedge operations that can build or destroy any currency and these have nothing whatsoever to do with the types of leverage and derivative positions and the CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS (which are totally different to CDOs in essence).
The sub-prime lenders are called sub-prime because everyone always knew they could not meet their repayment schedules – why is it surprising to the professional investor that these will default? It might be surprising that the packaged funds that sell such sub-prime bundles to pension funds collapse with such regularity – but not to me. The fact is, the pension fund contributers are not collapsing; THEY are still making payments to someone, anyone, and probably just the next risky fund that replaced the collapsed one!
The only time there will be a market crisis is when the pension holders start making large scale capital calls… But this might conceivably be actuarily defeated as a ‘problem' if a lot of pensioners simply die. Which they inevitably will at some point.
No. The equity market will not fall just because idiot hedge fund managers or CDOs fail the investor. The equity market will only start to become a slide downwards when the quiet private equity investment bankers sell their equity positions in large scale in order to take up a position in a more competitive investing position. And this will require interest rates closer to 7 per cent than to 5.
Calvin J. Bear
12 July 2007
Does neo-classical Economics make sense?
July 11, 2007
In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions
By PATRICIA COHEN
NY Times
For many economists, questioning free-market orthodoxy is akin to expressing a belief in intelligent design at a Darwin convention: Those who doubt the naturally beneficial workings of the market are considered either deluded or crazy.
But in recent months, economists have engaged in an impassioned debate over the way their specialty is taught in universities around the country, and practiced in Washington, questioning the profession's most cherished ideas about not interfering in the economy.
“There is much too much ideology,” said Alan S. Blinder, a professor at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Economics, he added, is “often a triumph of theory over fact.” Mr. Blinder helped kindle the discussion by publicly warning in speeches and articles this year that as many as 30 million to 40 million Americans could lose their jobs to lower-paid workers abroad. Just by raising doubts about the unmitigated benefits of free trade, he made headlines and had colleagues rubbing their eyes in astonishment.
“What I've learned is anyone who says anything even obliquely that sounds hostile to free trade is treated as an apostate,” Mr. Blinder said.
And free trade is not the only sacred subject, Mr. Blinder and other like-minded economists say. Most efforts to intervene in the markets — like setting a minimum wage, instituting industrial policy or regulating prices — are viewed askance by mainstream economists, as are analyses that do not rely on mathematical modeling.
That attitude, the critics argue, has seriously harmed the discipline, suppressing original, creative thinking and distorting policy debates. “You lose your ticket as a certified economist if you don't say any kind of price regulation is bad and free trade is good,” said David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done groundbreaking research on the effect of the minimum wage.
Most economists are still devoted to what is known as the neoclassical model. Philip J. Reny, chairman of the economics department at the University of Chicago — the temple of free-market economics — said the theory and methods were “taught to avoid personal biases and conclusions that aren't found in the data.” Like any science, he said, the field changes course slowly: “It requires evidence, and if evidence is there, it will accumulate and positions will move.” He added, “I personally have a lot of faith in the discipline.”
But as issues like income inequality, free trade and protectionism have become part of the presidential candidates' stump speeches, more thinkers have joined the debate. In addition to Mr. Blinder, other eminent economists like Lawrence H. Summers and the Nobel Prize-winner George A. Akerlof have pointed out what they see as the failings of laissez-faire economics.
“Economists can't pretend that the consensus for free markets and free trade that existed 30 years ago is still here,” said Robert B. Reich, a public policy professor at Berkeley who served in President Bill Clinton's cabinet.
Part of the reason is the growing income inequality and dislocation that global markets and a revolution in communications have helped create. Economists who question the free-market theories “want to speak to the reality of our time,” Mr. Reich said.
Meanwhile, critics have also pointed out the limits of standard cost-benefit accounting to measure items like the cost of inequality or damage to the ecosystem.
The degree to which economists wander from the mainstream varies widely.
Dani Rodrik, an economist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, for instance, said, “I fall into the methods of the mainstream, but not the faith,” which he defines as the belief that more markets and free trade are always good and government regulation is always bad. Thinkers like these may come up with controversial ideas but are hardly marginalized. Other economists, however, go much further, and try to chip away at the field's underlying theoretical foundations. So while Mr. Blinder, Mr. Card and Mr. Rodrik might be considered mere heretics, this second group has earned the label “heterodox.”
Although the meaning of the term is slippery, Frederic S. Lee, an economist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who edits the Heterodox Economics Newsletter, says it refers to those who reject the neoclassical model, which Milton Friedman helped create, and which Ronald Reagan championed when he took over the White House.
Mr. Reny and others point out that the increasing popularity in the mainstream of behavioral economics, which looks at people's complex psychological reactions to events, has offered a fuller picture of how consumers operate in the marketplace. Still, Mr. Lee criticizes neoclassical economics for maintaining that the market, if left alone, would ultimately find a happy balance. He also takes the discipline to task for relying on abstract theories and mathematical modeling instead of observation and sociological analysis.
In Mr. Lee's view, for example, oil companies — not the natural workings of the market — determine gas prices, and the federal deficit is a meaningless term because the federal government prints money in the first place.
According to his estimates, 5 to 10 percent of America's 15,000 economists are heterodox, which includes an array of professors on the right and the left (post-Keynesians, Marxists, feminists and social economists).
Heterodox economists complain that they are almost completely shut out by their more influential neoclassical colleagues who dominate most American university departments and prestigious peer-reviewed journals that are essential to gaining tenure. There are a few university departments where these iconoclasts are welcome, like Amherst in Massachusetts, the New School in New York and Professor Lee's home, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, but these are exceptions.
The experience of Mr. Card's graduate students suggests how the process can work. Mr. Card is by no means on the fringe, but he said his research on the minimum wage in New Jersey “caused a huge amount of trouble.” He and Alan B. Krueger, an economist at Princeton, found that contrary to what free-market theory predicts, employment actually rose after an increase in the minimum wage.
When Mr. Card's graduate students went on job interviews, he said other economists would ask questions like “What's wrong with your adviser? Has he started drinking?”
This is why Mr. Blinder said he advises graduate students “not to do what I do” when it comes to challenging the standard model.
Criticizing the approach that currently dominates the field, Mr. Blinder said economists must look more closely at the real world instead of modeling it in the lab. “Economics is insufficiently scientific,” he said. “Mathematics may be useful, but mathematics is not scientific. It doesn't generate refutable hypotheses.” In a recent issue of The Nation, Christopher Hayes spurred an energetic debate on the Web by suggesting that some precepts of heterodoxy were being incorporated into the mainstream — even if many heterodox economists were not.
Max B. Sawicky at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a nonprofit research organization that is a bulwark of heterodoxy, wrote in a discussion on tpmcafe.com that, “The duty of orthodoxy is clear: deny departmental positions and resources to inferior research programs and purify the top journals of incorrect thinking, all understood as maintaining high standards.”
This is the point where Mr. Rodrik, who has written extensively on the downside of globalization, departs from both Mr. Sawicky and Mr. Blinder. Although he acknowledged that inflexible rules about how one makes an argument and what counts as evidence can create blind spots, but insisted that once those rules were accepted, there was tremendous openness inside the academy.
The problem is outside, where economists are expected to “regurgitate ideas” about the glories of the free market. Most mainstream economists think that voicing any skepticism or doubt provides “ammunition to the barbarians,” he said, and allows narrow-minded people to “hijack any argument to suit their purpose.”
Mr. Rodrik said he used to worry about this until he realized that “on any issue, there are barbarians on both sides,” so there was no point in shading an argument to “suit one set of barbarians over the other.”
“And I've slept a lot better since.”
In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions
By PATRICIA COHEN
NY Times
For many economists, questioning free-market orthodoxy is akin to expressing a belief in intelligent design at a Darwin convention: Those who doubt the naturally beneficial workings of the market are considered either deluded or crazy.
But in recent months, economists have engaged in an impassioned debate over the way their specialty is taught in universities around the country, and practiced in Washington, questioning the profession's most cherished ideas about not interfering in the economy.
“There is much too much ideology,” said Alan S. Blinder, a professor at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Economics, he added, is “often a triumph of theory over fact.” Mr. Blinder helped kindle the discussion by publicly warning in speeches and articles this year that as many as 30 million to 40 million Americans could lose their jobs to lower-paid workers abroad. Just by raising doubts about the unmitigated benefits of free trade, he made headlines and had colleagues rubbing their eyes in astonishment.
“What I've learned is anyone who says anything even obliquely that sounds hostile to free trade is treated as an apostate,” Mr. Blinder said.
And free trade is not the only sacred subject, Mr. Blinder and other like-minded economists say. Most efforts to intervene in the markets — like setting a minimum wage, instituting industrial policy or regulating prices — are viewed askance by mainstream economists, as are analyses that do not rely on mathematical modeling.
That attitude, the critics argue, has seriously harmed the discipline, suppressing original, creative thinking and distorting policy debates. “You lose your ticket as a certified economist if you don't say any kind of price regulation is bad and free trade is good,” said David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done groundbreaking research on the effect of the minimum wage.
Most economists are still devoted to what is known as the neoclassical model. Philip J. Reny, chairman of the economics department at the University of Chicago — the temple of free-market economics — said the theory and methods were “taught to avoid personal biases and conclusions that aren't found in the data.” Like any science, he said, the field changes course slowly: “It requires evidence, and if evidence is there, it will accumulate and positions will move.” He added, “I personally have a lot of faith in the discipline.”
But as issues like income inequality, free trade and protectionism have become part of the presidential candidates' stump speeches, more thinkers have joined the debate. In addition to Mr. Blinder, other eminent economists like Lawrence H. Summers and the Nobel Prize-winner George A. Akerlof have pointed out what they see as the failings of laissez-faire economics.
“Economists can't pretend that the consensus for free markets and free trade that existed 30 years ago is still here,” said Robert B. Reich, a public policy professor at Berkeley who served in President Bill Clinton's cabinet.
Part of the reason is the growing income inequality and dislocation that global markets and a revolution in communications have helped create. Economists who question the free-market theories “want to speak to the reality of our time,” Mr. Reich said.
Meanwhile, critics have also pointed out the limits of standard cost-benefit accounting to measure items like the cost of inequality or damage to the ecosystem.
The degree to which economists wander from the mainstream varies widely.
Dani Rodrik, an economist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, for instance, said, “I fall into the methods of the mainstream, but not the faith,” which he defines as the belief that more markets and free trade are always good and government regulation is always bad. Thinkers like these may come up with controversial ideas but are hardly marginalized. Other economists, however, go much further, and try to chip away at the field's underlying theoretical foundations. So while Mr. Blinder, Mr. Card and Mr. Rodrik might be considered mere heretics, this second group has earned the label “heterodox.”
Although the meaning of the term is slippery, Frederic S. Lee, an economist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who edits the Heterodox Economics Newsletter, says it refers to those who reject the neoclassical model, which Milton Friedman helped create, and which Ronald Reagan championed when he took over the White House.
Mr. Reny and others point out that the increasing popularity in the mainstream of behavioral economics, which looks at people's complex psychological reactions to events, has offered a fuller picture of how consumers operate in the marketplace. Still, Mr. Lee criticizes neoclassical economics for maintaining that the market, if left alone, would ultimately find a happy balance. He also takes the discipline to task for relying on abstract theories and mathematical modeling instead of observation and sociological analysis.
In Mr. Lee's view, for example, oil companies — not the natural workings of the market — determine gas prices, and the federal deficit is a meaningless term because the federal government prints money in the first place.
According to his estimates, 5 to 10 percent of America's 15,000 economists are heterodox, which includes an array of professors on the right and the left (post-Keynesians, Marxists, feminists and social economists).
Heterodox economists complain that they are almost completely shut out by their more influential neoclassical colleagues who dominate most American university departments and prestigious peer-reviewed journals that are essential to gaining tenure. There are a few university departments where these iconoclasts are welcome, like Amherst in Massachusetts, the New School in New York and Professor Lee's home, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, but these are exceptions.
The experience of Mr. Card's graduate students suggests how the process can work. Mr. Card is by no means on the fringe, but he said his research on the minimum wage in New Jersey “caused a huge amount of trouble.” He and Alan B. Krueger, an economist at Princeton, found that contrary to what free-market theory predicts, employment actually rose after an increase in the minimum wage.
When Mr. Card's graduate students went on job interviews, he said other economists would ask questions like “What's wrong with your adviser? Has he started drinking?”
This is why Mr. Blinder said he advises graduate students “not to do what I do” when it comes to challenging the standard model.
Criticizing the approach that currently dominates the field, Mr. Blinder said economists must look more closely at the real world instead of modeling it in the lab. “Economics is insufficiently scientific,” he said. “Mathematics may be useful, but mathematics is not scientific. It doesn't generate refutable hypotheses.” In a recent issue of The Nation, Christopher Hayes spurred an energetic debate on the Web by suggesting that some precepts of heterodoxy were being incorporated into the mainstream — even if many heterodox economists were not.
Max B. Sawicky at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a nonprofit research organization that is a bulwark of heterodoxy, wrote in a discussion on tpmcafe.com that, “The duty of orthodoxy is clear: deny departmental positions and resources to inferior research programs and purify the top journals of incorrect thinking, all understood as maintaining high standards.”
This is the point where Mr. Rodrik, who has written extensively on the downside of globalization, departs from both Mr. Sawicky and Mr. Blinder. Although he acknowledged that inflexible rules about how one makes an argument and what counts as evidence can create blind spots, but insisted that once those rules were accepted, there was tremendous openness inside the academy.
The problem is outside, where economists are expected to “regurgitate ideas” about the glories of the free market. Most mainstream economists think that voicing any skepticism or doubt provides “ammunition to the barbarians,” he said, and allows narrow-minded people to “hijack any argument to suit their purpose.”
Mr. Rodrik said he used to worry about this until he realized that “on any issue, there are barbarians on both sides,” so there was no point in shading an argument to “suit one set of barbarians over the other.”
“And I've slept a lot better since.”
The trader as Hero -- A must read
Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight … just one step at a time, meeting each new thing that comes up, seeing it not as dreadful as it appears and discovering we have the strength to stare it down — Eleanor Roosevelt
Seasons come and go, markets change and evolve, but human behavior, which is hardwired into the brain, has not really changed much over many generations. Each of us looks and acts differently, but these are outward manifestations which are subject to societal pressures and ever-changing cycles of fashion and trends. Inwardly, we are all classic, fragile and captivating human beings. We have wants, needs, hopes, dreams, fears, joys and tears. Even now, when we have come so far in time and space of evolution, we are still enchantingly and ever-fascinatingly human. It is simply wonderful!
Every one of you who is reading this wants to learn how to make money from the markets. Over the years, I have provided a number of guidelines and principles to put you on the path to trading mastery. While simple, they are certainly not easy. Take personal responsibility for your trades, cut your losses quickly, stay healthy in mind and body, always practice good risk management , plan your trade and trade your plan, master your emotions, strengthen your neuropsychological capital, learn patience, stay with what is working, and take profits on a regular and radical basis. That sounds all well and good, but the majority struggle daily to figure out how to do it. Most continue to search for this or that method or this or that indicator or newsletter which will give them the answer they seek.
I cannot emphasize too strongly that there is one immutable fact which underlies all successful trading: The answer is within you. It is not out “’there” somewhere. It is about your brain (your true trading system) and how, not what, you think. Traders, with few exceptions, are made, not born. Anyone, given the passion, determination and willingness to work hard, lose, fall down and keep getting up, can learn to trade successfully. I assure you, if I can do it, you can do it. Now I will tell you secret that only a few know: I have two Ph.D. degrees, one in Brain Anatomy, and one in Futures Market Losses. I had to get the latter in order to get a true grip on who I was as a person, and turn myself around completely onto a path of success and consistent profitability. It’s a long story, but it took five years and was the most gut-wrenching and painful period I can recall. Would I change one single minute of the excruciating process? Absolutely not! Not one second of it, because all of those seconds brought me to where I am today.
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!... Maya Angelou
The point is this… If I can do it, you can do it.
How? You must totally believe that you are called to trading, that it is the one thing about which you are completely passionate and that you are willing to forego many things in order to succeed. If you can take these steps, you will make it. It’s not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. But it can be done, and it is within the reach of every one of you who is reading this. You can do it, but you must be willing to sacrifice everything you are for everything you can and will become. You must be willing to change key elements about yourself, particularly the way you think and act in real time when bombarded with conflicting information in an environment where you have total freedom of choice and where the only thing you can control is yourself. Moreover, you must learn to make decisions involving varying degrees of risk in an atmosphere of real time and total unpredictability. You must learn to change the way you think and what you have been taught about right and wrong and good and bad. You must entrain the qualities of being counterintuitive and peripatetic. You must become a chameleon, and a great actor, an acrobat on the largest and most intimidating stage in the world. Most of all, you must be absolutely determined and passionate about it.
And then what? What do you have left in your life once you have made it? What happens when you finally do "get" it, and trading becomes relatively effortless and you are consistently making more than you are losing? What is up with the trader who is wildly successful, has all the” stuff” he or she needs, and yet keeps trading? Why is that? Is it greed, and the need to keep making more and more money in the face of abundance? Yes, in part it is. But there is much more and on an intensely deeper level.
Why do we trade? Why do successful and wealthy traders keep trading, some of them into their 80's or until death? Passion. Challenge. Continual striving to be better and better with each passing day. Mastery. Freedom. And what do most of these great traders have in common, besides the ability to amass (and keep) large amounts of money?
The answer may surprise you as much as it delights me. They have in common: an attitude of gratitude, humility, manifestation of kindness to themselves and others and an intense understanding of their personal neuropsychology and the mass neuropsychology of the markets. They have learned from the greatest and most brutally honest psychotherapist in the world: the financial markets. They have suffered, been beaten down, brutally battered, lost money, but kept the therapy going because they knew that somewhere inside of them was the person they wanted to be. After intense personal pain and internal searching, they found out who they really are and embraced it without fear. They went to the darkest recesses of their souls and emerged as their own hero. Now, they bring flowers to themselves instead of waiting for someone to send them flowers.
Their wants have been met, so they work on their needs. For them, trading becomes an activity which nourishes and uplifts the spirit. They approach the markets with humility and passion, yet can be fierce ambushing wolverines while in the trading moment. They can be sharks, waiting to feed on the poor little fishes. Yet, they are chameleons. For the master, trading is a game to be played to the ultimate scope of his or her ability. He/she never forgets the ones that got away, the Ph.D. in losses, the missed opportunities, the times when he/she was the little fish. A master remembers these bitter, gut-wrenching times and has them etched in the hippocampal memory so as to never forget.
Masters have rich and full lives outside of trading, especially those who took the time to keep family and friends in some degree of intactness. They cherish relationships and put people before money. People first, money second and "stuff" third. They value and reward those who have supported and loved them. They cherish and love themselves. They are kind to themselves and others and recognize that kindness is the greatest gift we give to each other. Even the most successful traders and investors with the highest degree of longevity approach the markets with humility. They are non-confrontational and go flexibly with the flow. They are in sheer joy with the moment. It is the perfect moment, and they are always in it. They are in gratitude for the privilege of partaking of the gifts which they receive from the market. For them, trading is a spiritual activity!
My greatest hope for each of you is that you never forget this. In the end, it is always about gratitude, humility, kindness and love. Love what you do, and those who nurture and sustain you. Focus on yourself, who you are, and what you want and need and then practice and keep practicing. Do what you truly love, and the money will always follow. In the process, you will begin to see that you are evolving and growing your capital: financial capital, mental capital, emotional capital, and — as the topic of this essay — spiritual capital.
Thank you for the opportunity to share with you my experience, strength and hope. I wish each of you everything and more that you wish for yourself.
When you feel like all is gone, look inside you and be strong. And you'll finally see the truth, that a hero lies in you… from” Hero”, Mariah Carey
© 2007 Janice Dorn, MD, PhD
Seasons come and go, markets change and evolve, but human behavior, which is hardwired into the brain, has not really changed much over many generations. Each of us looks and acts differently, but these are outward manifestations which are subject to societal pressures and ever-changing cycles of fashion and trends. Inwardly, we are all classic, fragile and captivating human beings. We have wants, needs, hopes, dreams, fears, joys and tears. Even now, when we have come so far in time and space of evolution, we are still enchantingly and ever-fascinatingly human. It is simply wonderful!
Every one of you who is reading this wants to learn how to make money from the markets. Over the years, I have provided a number of guidelines and principles to put you on the path to trading mastery. While simple, they are certainly not easy. Take personal responsibility for your trades, cut your losses quickly, stay healthy in mind and body, always practice good risk management , plan your trade and trade your plan, master your emotions, strengthen your neuropsychological capital, learn patience, stay with what is working, and take profits on a regular and radical basis. That sounds all well and good, but the majority struggle daily to figure out how to do it. Most continue to search for this or that method or this or that indicator or newsletter which will give them the answer they seek.
I cannot emphasize too strongly that there is one immutable fact which underlies all successful trading: The answer is within you. It is not out “’there” somewhere. It is about your brain (your true trading system) and how, not what, you think. Traders, with few exceptions, are made, not born. Anyone, given the passion, determination and willingness to work hard, lose, fall down and keep getting up, can learn to trade successfully. I assure you, if I can do it, you can do it. Now I will tell you secret that only a few know: I have two Ph.D. degrees, one in Brain Anatomy, and one in Futures Market Losses. I had to get the latter in order to get a true grip on who I was as a person, and turn myself around completely onto a path of success and consistent profitability. It’s a long story, but it took five years and was the most gut-wrenching and painful period I can recall. Would I change one single minute of the excruciating process? Absolutely not! Not one second of it, because all of those seconds brought me to where I am today.
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!... Maya Angelou
The point is this… If I can do it, you can do it.
How? You must totally believe that you are called to trading, that it is the one thing about which you are completely passionate and that you are willing to forego many things in order to succeed. If you can take these steps, you will make it. It’s not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. But it can be done, and it is within the reach of every one of you who is reading this. You can do it, but you must be willing to sacrifice everything you are for everything you can and will become. You must be willing to change key elements about yourself, particularly the way you think and act in real time when bombarded with conflicting information in an environment where you have total freedom of choice and where the only thing you can control is yourself. Moreover, you must learn to make decisions involving varying degrees of risk in an atmosphere of real time and total unpredictability. You must learn to change the way you think and what you have been taught about right and wrong and good and bad. You must entrain the qualities of being counterintuitive and peripatetic. You must become a chameleon, and a great actor, an acrobat on the largest and most intimidating stage in the world. Most of all, you must be absolutely determined and passionate about it.
And then what? What do you have left in your life once you have made it? What happens when you finally do "get" it, and trading becomes relatively effortless and you are consistently making more than you are losing? What is up with the trader who is wildly successful, has all the” stuff” he or she needs, and yet keeps trading? Why is that? Is it greed, and the need to keep making more and more money in the face of abundance? Yes, in part it is. But there is much more and on an intensely deeper level.
Why do we trade? Why do successful and wealthy traders keep trading, some of them into their 80's or until death? Passion. Challenge. Continual striving to be better and better with each passing day. Mastery. Freedom. And what do most of these great traders have in common, besides the ability to amass (and keep) large amounts of money?
The answer may surprise you as much as it delights me. They have in common: an attitude of gratitude, humility, manifestation of kindness to themselves and others and an intense understanding of their personal neuropsychology and the mass neuropsychology of the markets. They have learned from the greatest and most brutally honest psychotherapist in the world: the financial markets. They have suffered, been beaten down, brutally battered, lost money, but kept the therapy going because they knew that somewhere inside of them was the person they wanted to be. After intense personal pain and internal searching, they found out who they really are and embraced it without fear. They went to the darkest recesses of their souls and emerged as their own hero. Now, they bring flowers to themselves instead of waiting for someone to send them flowers.
Their wants have been met, so they work on their needs. For them, trading becomes an activity which nourishes and uplifts the spirit. They approach the markets with humility and passion, yet can be fierce ambushing wolverines while in the trading moment. They can be sharks, waiting to feed on the poor little fishes. Yet, they are chameleons. For the master, trading is a game to be played to the ultimate scope of his or her ability. He/she never forgets the ones that got away, the Ph.D. in losses, the missed opportunities, the times when he/she was the little fish. A master remembers these bitter, gut-wrenching times and has them etched in the hippocampal memory so as to never forget.
Masters have rich and full lives outside of trading, especially those who took the time to keep family and friends in some degree of intactness. They cherish relationships and put people before money. People first, money second and "stuff" third. They value and reward those who have supported and loved them. They cherish and love themselves. They are kind to themselves and others and recognize that kindness is the greatest gift we give to each other. Even the most successful traders and investors with the highest degree of longevity approach the markets with humility. They are non-confrontational and go flexibly with the flow. They are in sheer joy with the moment. It is the perfect moment, and they are always in it. They are in gratitude for the privilege of partaking of the gifts which they receive from the market. For them, trading is a spiritual activity!
My greatest hope for each of you is that you never forget this. In the end, it is always about gratitude, humility, kindness and love. Love what you do, and those who nurture and sustain you. Focus on yourself, who you are, and what you want and need and then practice and keep practicing. Do what you truly love, and the money will always follow. In the process, you will begin to see that you are evolving and growing your capital: financial capital, mental capital, emotional capital, and — as the topic of this essay — spiritual capital.
Thank you for the opportunity to share with you my experience, strength and hope. I wish each of you everything and more that you wish for yourself.
When you feel like all is gone, look inside you and be strong. And you'll finally see the truth, that a hero lies in you… from” Hero”, Mariah Carey
© 2007 Janice Dorn, MD, PhD
11 July 2007
The Crack up boom!
Safe Haven | TedBits: "he Crack Up Boom series is exploring the unfolding 'Indirect Exchange' (as detailed by Ludvig Von Mises), that dollar holders will be using to exit their holdings now and eventually is will be followed by all holders of fiat currency holdings no matter which country is perpetrating the 'crime' of confiscation of wealth through the printing and credit creation process that all such monetary schemes evolve into. The 'Crack Up Boom' will drive an inflationary global expansion to inconceivable heights over the coming years. Asset prices will skyrocket as people do what they always do when threatened they will modify their behavior and do the things necessary for 'SELF PRESERVATION' of their families, countries, economies and their wealth. Let's take a look at Von Mises's description of the CRACK UP BOOM once again:
This first stage of the inflationary process may last for many years. While it lasts, the prices of many goods and services are not yet adjusted to the altered money relation. There are still people in the country who have not yet become aware of the fact that they are confronted with a price revolution which will finally result in a considerable rise of all prices, although the extent of this rise will not be the same in the various commodities and services. These people still believe that prices one day will drop. Waiting for this day, they restrict the"
This first stage of the inflationary process may last for many years. While it lasts, the prices of many goods and services are not yet adjusted to the altered money relation. There are still people in the country who have not yet become aware of the fact that they are confronted with a price revolution which will finally result in a considerable rise of all prices, although the extent of this rise will not be the same in the various commodities and services. These people still believe that prices one day will drop. Waiting for this day, they restrict the"
Bloomberg.com: Worldwide
Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "A total of 11 percent of the loan collateral for all subprime mortgage bonds had payments at least 90 days late, were in foreclosure or had the underlying property seized, according to a June 1 report by Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group Inc., a securities firm in Arlington, Virginia. In May 2005, that amount was 5.4 percent.
Investors depend on guesswork by Wall Street traders for valuing their bonds because there is no centralized trading system or exchange for subprime mortgage securities. Credit rating companies supported high prices because they failed to downgrade the debt as delinquencies accelerated.
Headed Lower
While there's no consensus on prices, traders agree that the bonds are headed lower. Some of the securities have already declined by more than 50 cents on the dollar in the past few months, according to data compiled by Merrill Lynch & Co.
One subprime mortgage bond, Structured Asset Investment Loan trust 2006-3 M7, is valued at about 91 cents on the dollar to yield 9.5 percent, according to the securities unit of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp. Merrill Lynch in New York puts the price of the same security at 67 cents to yield 18 percent."
Investors depend on guesswork by Wall Street traders for valuing their bonds because there is no centralized trading system or exchange for subprime mortgage securities. Credit rating companies supported high prices because they failed to downgrade the debt as delinquencies accelerated.
Headed Lower
While there's no consensus on prices, traders agree that the bonds are headed lower. Some of the securities have already declined by more than 50 cents on the dollar in the past few months, according to data compiled by Merrill Lynch & Co.
One subprime mortgage bond, Structured Asset Investment Loan trust 2006-3 M7, is valued at about 91 cents on the dollar to yield 9.5 percent, according to the securities unit of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp. Merrill Lynch in New York puts the price of the same security at 67 cents to yield 18 percent."
9 July 2007
The Crashing U.S. Economy Held Hostage
The Crashing U.S. Economy Held Hostage: "Remember when the U.S. was the world’s greatest industrial democracy? Barely thirty years ago the output of our producing economy and the skills of our workforce led the world.
What happened? It’s hard to believe that in the space of a generation our character and capabilities just collapsed as, for example, did our steel and automobile industries and our family farming. What then are the causes of the decline?
Here’s how I would put it today: our economy is on an artificial life-support system, a barely-breathing hostage in a lunatic asylum. That asylum is the U.S. and world financial systems which are on the verge of collapse.
The inmates are the world’s central bankers, along with most of the financial magnates big and small. The fact is that the economy of much of the world is in a decisive downward slide which the financiers cannot stop because the systems they operate are the primary cause. As often happens, the inmates rule the asylum.
The problems aren’t confined to the U.S. Unemployment worldwide is increasing, debt is rampant, infrastructures are crumbling, and commodity prices are rising.
What happened? It’s hard to believe that in the space of a generation our character and capabilities just collapsed as, for example, did our steel and automobile industries and our family farming. What then are the causes of the decline?
Here’s how I would put it today: our economy is on an artificial life-support system, a barely-breathing hostage in a lunatic asylum. That asylum is the U.S. and world financial systems which are on the verge of collapse.
The inmates are the world’s central bankers, along with most of the financial magnates big and small. The fact is that the economy of much of the world is in a decisive downward slide which the financiers cannot stop because the systems they operate are the primary cause. As often happens, the inmates rule the asylum.
The problems aren’t confined to the U.S. Unemployment worldwide is increasing, debt is rampant, infrastructures are crumbling, and commodity prices are rising.
7 July 2007
$ONE:AFBIX - SharpCharts 2 from StockCharts.com
$ONE:AFBIX - SharpCharts 2 from StockCharts.com: "I took the inverse of the AFBIX (which is a short ETF following credit spreads) and logged that with the $SPX in the background. Notice the nice corrolation up to April. After April, there is divergence meaning one has become detached from the other. Does it mean that credit spreads no longer matter? I don't think so. I think the market is trying to decide what's acceptable.
I've been in the financial market for a long time....this is erilly like the 1986/1987 timeframe."
I've been in the financial market for a long time....this is erilly like the 1986/1987 timeframe."
charles hugh smith-Weblog and wEssays
charles hugh smith-Weblog and wEssays: "Investors in the worse-hit of two stricken Bear Stearns hedge funds are offering to sell their holdings for as little as 11 cents on the dollar but still finding no buyers, according to unfilled trades on Hedgebay, a secondary market for funds.
Vulture funds and others have been quick to bid for holdings in the two funds, but the best bid for Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leveraged Fund, the more geared of the two, is just 5 cents on the dollar.
Private sales of stakes are the only way investors can exit the two Bear funds, after the bank suspended redemptions in May amid a wave of withdrawals.
'There are buyers but they can't agree on price,' said Jared Herman, co-founder of Bahamas-based Hedgebay.
The less-geared Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund, which the bank has rescued with a $1.6bn loan, is being offered at about 70 cents on the dollar. The fund is only attracting bidders at about 30 cents, according to people who use the system.
Market participants estimate the CDOs the Bear funds held would sell for at least 10 per cent less than the values calculated by lenders. 'Where things transact is still many points below where dealers have been marking them,' said one manager of CDOs and hedge funds. 'That is the big ugly se" Market participants estimate the CDOs the Bear funds held would sell for at least 10 per cent less than the values calculated by lenders. "Where things transact is still many points below where dealers have been marking them," said one manager of CDOs and hedge funds. "That is the big ugly secret of this market."
Does any of this strike you as just a tiny wee bit worse than the mainstream U.S. press suggests? A nickel on the dollar means a 95% loss; 30 cents on the dollar for the "high quality" tranches means 70% loss. How much money do you reckon will be lost as the hedge funds, banks and pension funds reporting huge losses turn into dozens, then hundreds or even thousands?
Vulture funds and others have been quick to bid for holdings in the two funds, but the best bid for Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leveraged Fund, the more geared of the two, is just 5 cents on the dollar.
Private sales of stakes are the only way investors can exit the two Bear funds, after the bank suspended redemptions in May amid a wave of withdrawals.
'There are buyers but they can't agree on price,' said Jared Herman, co-founder of Bahamas-based Hedgebay.
The less-geared Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund, which the bank has rescued with a $1.6bn loan, is being offered at about 70 cents on the dollar. The fund is only attracting bidders at about 30 cents, according to people who use the system.
Market participants estimate the CDOs the Bear funds held would sell for at least 10 per cent less than the values calculated by lenders. 'Where things transact is still many points below where dealers have been marking them,' said one manager of CDOs and hedge funds. 'That is the big ugly se" Market participants estimate the CDOs the Bear funds held would sell for at least 10 per cent less than the values calculated by lenders. "Where things transact is still many points below where dealers have been marking them," said one manager of CDOs and hedge funds. "That is the big ugly secret of this market."
Does any of this strike you as just a tiny wee bit worse than the mainstream U.S. press suggests? A nickel on the dollar means a 95% loss; 30 cents on the dollar for the "high quality" tranches means 70% loss. How much money do you reckon will be lost as the hedge funds, banks and pension funds reporting huge losses turn into dozens, then hundreds or even thousands?
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