20 January 2009

"This is the most facile portrait of what caused this crisis" ...and other thoughts on the inauguration of Barack Obama

Alan Greenspan is responsible for this crisis. He will be remembered for his tragic combination of ideological stubbornness and hubris. These were compounded by his age. Old age triggered a calcification in his thinking and myopia in his vision which rendered him out of touch and imperceptive to paradigmatic shifts in the world economy. In short, he was a victim of his own success and ego.

While the Federal Reserve's Fed Funds Target Rate played a large role in fomenting this crisis, it is not the whole story. The impact of China's rise, as transmitted through both the Wal-Mart effect on inflation and by China's massive interventions in the currency market, kept interest rate on long term U.S. government debt supernaturally low. This caused the stewards of our economy to fall asleep at their posts and the citizens of our country to become complacent.

Money was made too easy. She slept around, inflating the egos of people and the asset prices of things. Inevitably, we all got the clap.

Equally important is the human story. We, as humans, have a instinctive desire to avoid pain which has been encrypted and inculcated in us over the immense epoch of our genetic history. Often we construe falsehood with pain, when really we should embrace the opposite.

We see ourselves as rational creatures, and avoiding pain appears eminently rational. But this is fallacious. Avoiding pain is actually an emotional decision. Enduring pain in the pursuit of truth and some teleological utopos is truly rational. The ability to endure pain is characteristic of that higher order of thinking which separates us from all other creatures who possess no filter on their actions. Creatures who move before thought stalls in their brain with impulse as quick as synaptic transmission.

We, as a culture, failed in our fiduciary responsibility to ourselves. We allowed ourselves to be deluded. We delayed the tough decisions. We lived like children.

Alan Greenspan failed in his fiduciary responsibility to our nation. He let his desire to be liked, cherished and remembered overwhelm his thinking. This was not a conscious, pseudo-rational decision... its was an emotional one. But nothing is more insidious than the desire for popularity, as it corrupts truth, and posits the ends for the means.

The economy hasn't gotten laid in a long while, and he is frustrated. He lost his game when he slept with some hussy and got the clap. It is time for him to take his medicine.

Ambergris

A financial adviser has a fiduciary responsibility to an individual.

But I feel that an economist, as I conceive of it, is a fiduciary to a community and to the future. He is an artist, who like a musician, is a friendly experiencer in an art that is invisible... conceiving in a reality that is at once terrifying, glorious and profound.

I feel that of all of the art forms... music, architecture and economics are the most abstruse and profound because to practice them involves perceiving, visualizing and inventing structures out of the invisible. time

I see my role as a protector of all of those in my circle, be it my parents, all my friends, or generation mgmt. This is more or less what I've been trying to accomplish here, though gnosis can't be transmitted piecemeal as it is in this media.

It is because of this that I often feel a tremendous burden and responsibility. It often causes deafening pressure and stress and frequently is the source of my (sometimes) erratic behavior. I did not start by seeking this role, but in a sense, I suppose, I have been performing as such my whole life in my desire for community and utopia. As I am the only one so qualified in my extended circle of friends, I feel that it is exigent and indeed requisite.

There are many of my friends who I know feel this existential pressure to express "it" in their art. This art is a reflection of the greater vision of our community and the pressure stems from this tremendous responsibility, nay fiduciary duty, to portray (what I, for lack of a better term, call) generation mgmt in the greatest light.

I wish you all the best, and if I ever appear to be too crazy, please know that I only have the best intentions...

I know that someday, we will all find our ambergris.

-Matty Talty

Czech Modern

With all the hype and speculation surrounding Obama's impending bailout, I'd like to share some words of wisdom my 68 year-old Czech driver shared with me the other evening, “I’ve never seen an-y-thing more per.man.ent than a temp-ory govrn-ment pro-gram.”

18 January 2009

Fuck John Galt

Today, completely out of step with the times, the EU ruled that Microsoft could not longer bundle Internet Explorer with their Windows operating system without including their competitor's web browsers. It was deemed anti-competitive.

You know what is anti-competitive... an omnipotent, monopolistic government body.

Given that IE is total crap, many alternatives have sprouted up, and I do not know anyone reasonably intelligent who uses it. Its the equivalent of our moms and their AOL accounts... anachronistic and obsolescent.

So I say this to Microsoft. Rather than including several different browsers in Windows as the EU has forced you to do... include none at all. Then we will not be able even to use your stupid browser to upload a decent one, and we will be forced to drive to a store and pay for a "CD-ROM" containing a browser. Competition facilitates innovation, but the EU seems intent to live in the past and assume its citizens are all unthinking children.

Kinda a shitty metaphor for their monetary and fiscal policies, come to think of it...

16 January 2009

Perspective from Satyajit Das

1) Flat is the new up.
2) Debt is the new equity.
3) Dividends are the only return.
4) If you’re looking for the bottom of the market there’s a special offer - buy one you get the next one free.

His full article is very interesting:
http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/satyajitdas/index.cfm/2009/1/16/2008--Look-back-in-Horror

His book, "Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives" is a quite informative and a shockingly hilarious read.

I'd add one correllary to #4.
"Early is the new wrong." -Peter Clarke, CEO, Man Group

Fuck...

a. either the dow is going to go to 3500 or
b. the requisite government bailout is going to make inflation and taxes feel like it did.

14 January 2009

???

I'm not sure what the implications of this are, but it certainly looks dramatic. Treasuries are US Government Debt. Agencies refers to the debt of Freddie and Fannie.

13 January 2009

Tobin's q

"Tobin's q" is a ratio between:

The Market Value of a Company determined by the price of its Stocks and Bonds
and
The present Cost to replace this company's Assets (such as its factories, etc.)

If we calculate this value for the entire stock market (excluding Financial Companies) over the last 110 years, it looks like this:
















When the ratio is below zero, it would cost more to create a company anew than to buy an existing company on the stock market. In Bull markets, Tobin's q is above zero, due to the "greater fool" principle. In Bear markets, Tobin's q is below zero, do to the "holy shit!" principle.

12 January 2009

This is the most facile portrait of what's going on these days in the Economy

30 year Fannie Mae mortgage (blue) vs. 30 year Jumbo mortgage (green)

From Greenspan Put 2003 to present...


Close up, from Housing Market Peak 2006 to present...



The Collapse of the Private Equity Ponzi Scheme (Aug 2007)

The Self-Immolation of Bear Stearns (Mar 2008)

The
Nationalization of Fanny Mae (July/Aug 2008),

The Destruction/Retreat of the I-Banks (Sept/Oct 2008),


The Beginning of Quantative Easing
(Nov/December 2008)



_________________________________________________________________

Economic Indicators against a backdrop of Mortgage Rates

Prime Rate...















5 year portrait of unemployment...

















Inflation (Producer's Price Index)
















5 year portrait of paper wealth...



09 January 2009

To FT Alphaville being the only news source worth its salt, assuming we're talking 15th century salt in the Sahara

I came across this old article today. It was published (though I hadn't heard of Alphaville at the time) on June 14th, 2007. This was about a week after I quit investment banking and took a job as a carpenter at the Met Opera because I was scared shitless about the future. It was also about the same time as when some idiot Private Equity guys, "Sageview," bought Guitar Center for (I'm not kidding you) $59.99... which just shows they can be suduced by a 99 cent sticker price as much as their average customer.

(I find this Guitar Center leveraged buyout especially precious because it epitomizes the era of cheap credit. This was some deal! Guitar Center, a business whose entire business model is predicated on making 0% interest loans to the least credit worthy segment of the population, "musicians," was bought by Sageview, which payed almost entirely with money they borrowed cheaply themselves!!! Amazing!)

It was also about this time, that my dad, my sister's boyfriend (ex-Goldman Sachs, then Private Equity) and I took a car ride together. We began discussing when we thought the crash would come. "Shit," my dad said, "I just barely broke even to where I was 7 years ago." David, my sister's boyfriend, stated "My colleagues think within 6 months," in his typical diplomatic fashion. "I'm going to apply to business school." I was more equivicable. "As soon as the first big private equity buyout falls through. I don't know. Soon."

Sure enough, six weeks later, financing for the biggest LBO in history, the buyout of Chrysler, fell through. And the turmoil began. "I feel queasy," I wrote to my friend Elizabeth, the morning I read the news. ("This sucker could go down" is what I ment to say)

Anyway, back to the point. On June 14th, 2007 FT Alphaville published this story: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/06/14/5207/you-know-theres-a-bubble-when/
the conclusions of which I will repeat now. (You can read the details yourself.)

You know there's a bubble when:

1) It’s not just Hedge-Fund Guy and his trophy wife demanding splendid isolation from cattle-class rubberneckers eyeing their chocolate-dipped strawberries. Revolution Air, a charter company, will fly more than 20 U.S. kids to summer camp this month, at about $8,000 a hop, the New York Post reported last week.”

2) “You have to get the price right, or it will come back into the market,'’ Hirst told Bloomberg News reporter Linda Sandler. “A lot of people buy things and flip them.'’ You know there’s a bubble when artists are trying to set their prices so high that there won’t be a secondary market for their work.”

3) The zeitgeist-defining product among the free-range bananas, organic spring water and corn-fed soup is a 60-year-old Vecchia Dispensa balsamic vinegar, costing almost $200 for a triangular 100 milliliter bottle stoppered with red wax seals. You know there’s a bubble when an overgrown US chain store can sell antique vinegar to Britons at 32 times the price of Nicolas Feuillatte champagne.” [I swear by their 25 year old vinegar, by the way. Why not? Its the same price as a good crappy bottle of wine and can be used with 50 times as many meals -Matty]

4) It was a rather special chair. Emperor Kangxi graced the gilt-incised brown lacquer throne when he ruled China between 1662 and 1722. Still, Ho could have picked it up for just $43,700 when it sold in 1994 instead of HK$13 million. You know there’s a bubble when a gambling mogul drops a couple of million dollars so that his buttocks can polish the seat of royalty.”

5) “Flip a switch and this feature will maintain your drink’s temperature up to 140 degrees. It can also cool to a refreshingly chilly 35 degrees.'’ You know there’s a bubble when the latest innovation in automotive engineering is a gadget to keep your bucket of Starbucks’ Costa Rica Tarrazu hot enough to guarantee third- degree lap burns when you brake for that road-running child.” [Invented by Chrysler by the way]

6) This week, the philatelist auctioned the set in New York for $9.1 million. “It’s four times profit,'’ Bill Gross said of the price. “It’s better than the stock market.'’ You know there’s a bubble when tiny, lickable portraits of Queen Victoria are a better store of value than stocks or bonds.

7) “The word “bubble'’ has appeared in 94 Bloomberg News headlines this year, up from 40 in the year-earlier period and from 85 in all of 2005. You know there’s a bubble when there’s a bubble in usage of the word “bubble.'’

Happy New Year, everybody!

08 January 2009

Oh Time, will you ever cease to beguile me?

from ft alphaville:

UK interest rates cut to 315-year low

The Bank of England on Thursday urged the Treasury to hasten plans to ease the flow of credit to companies, as it cut official interest rates to a 315-year low of 1.5%. Warning of “an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn” in the global economy, the Bank said it needed to cut interest rates by a further 0.5 percentage points to prevent inflation falling too far for too long. But it stressed that further steps were needed to increase the flow of lending. The government is trying to gather international support for a package to restore funding for bank lending and ease pressures in capital markets.

This entry was posted by Gwen Robinson on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 5:52 and is filed under Capital markets. Tagged with .

From the Financial Times: The Year in Review, 2008

The year in review
By Lionel Barber

There was an ominous fragility about the world in 2008. In mid-September, the financial system came close to collapse. The failure of Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old Wall Street investment bank, triggered panic in markets. The authorities in New York, Washington, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo looked on helplessly. For a few nerve-wracking days and nights, the world appeared to be hurtling toward financial Armageddon.

The crisis was far from over when another assault on the senses took place, this time in Mumbai. Terrorists, laden with plastic explosives, grenades and assault rifles, killed at least 192 civilians across India’s financial capital and laid waste to the luxury Taj Mahal Palace hotel. By singling out symbols of Indian opulence and power, the perpetrators consciously aped the September 11 terrorists who targeted the Twin Towers in New York.

The Mumbai massacre and the global financial crisis offer a sobering reminder that the path of history is far from linear. No doubt some will be tempted to view the events as a form of divine retribution, a punishment for a generation of excess characterised by a growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us. The twin shocks certainly challenge assumptions which had appeared unassailable since the fall of the Berlin Wall: the innate superiority of the western model of market capitalism and the inevitable progress of globalisation, powered by the free movement of goods, labour, capital and services.


In 2008, as investors rode a switchback in the financial and commodity markets – oil ended the year at about $44 a barrel after reaching an all-time high of $147.27 in July – we witnessed the rise of an alternative model: illiberal capitalism. Authoritarian China has long pursued this path, where the state enjoys a commanding role in the economy. This year, Vladimir Putin’s Russia marched further in that direction, consolidating control over sectors deemed vital to national security, such as energy and commodities. French president Nicolas Sarkozy, irrepressible as ever, put his own Gallic gloss on events when he proclaimed: “Laissez-faire is finished, the all-powerful market that is always right, that’s finished … ”

In the new age of fragility, governments around the world reasserted their role. Sarkozy called for a French sovereign wealth fund to defend leading companies in strategic sectors of the economy. Peter Mandelson, ennobled and restored to the British cabinet after four years of exile in Brussels, called for a new industrial strategy to protect British companies threatened by recession. Asian and Middle East governments or state-sponsored agencies, worried about a sudden surge in food prices, bought up farmland in Africa.

Most striking of all, the US government – like the British government – found itself drawn into advocating a rescue package for the financial sector which had hitherto projected an air of invincibility. By year’s end, the US rescue was headed well above $1 trillion. “This sucker could go down,” warned George W. Bush. His was one of the more memorable utterances of the year – though some wondered whether Bush was referring to the US economy or his ill-starred presidency.

How could the world have arrived at such a humiliating impasse? And why, in the words of Queen Elizabeth II, did none of the experts see it coming? The answer lies in a toxic combination of failures in risk management and regulatory oversight, as well as skewed incentives, particularly in the area of credit derivatives – the sophisticated financial products which dispersed rather than concentrated risk in the system. These systemic failures were compounded by a more basic and familiar weakness: the infinite capacity of human beings living in periods of excess credit to delude themselves into believing that prices will invariably head upward. As one Wall Street chief executive confided to me: “This crisis was nothing more than a gigantic collective bet on the American consumer, sustained by a rising property market.”

In October, the world’s major central banks united in the first ever co-ordinated cut in benchmark interest rates. The cuts kept coming. By December, the US had reduced rates to 1 per cent and the Bank of England had dropped its key rate to 2 percent – the lowest since 1951.

The post-Bubble reckoning is – and will be – severe. Economists warned of a Depression as confidence evaporated in the banking system. The Great Credit Drought, caused by banks hoarding capital, threatened to trigger multiple corporate bankruptcies. The Big Three carmakers in Detroit were given months, if not weeks, to survive. Britain’s high street banks had a near-death experience.

Alistair Darling, chancellor of the exchequer, was excoriated in the summer for warning that the UK faced the most severe economic crisis since 1945. Weeks later, he looked (for once) like a prophet in his own lifetime.

By year’s end, the Brown boom was truly over, with government borrowing set to rise to more than 8 per cent of gross domestic product in 2009. But the Conservative opposition proved curiously ineffectual. The Tories’ considerable lead, at times extending to more than 20 points in the polls, evaporated as a free-spending Brown cast himself improbably as the saviour of Britain – and the world. Europeans, long used to being lectured about the virtues of liberal economics and the supremacy of the City of London, maintained a respectful silence. The notable exception was Angela Merkel, the feisty German chancellor, who preached fiscal probity with the fervour of a Lutheran pastor.

Continental leaders were unable to form a unified front when it came to the credit crunch – a second blow for Europhiles in 2008. The first came when the Irish rejected the Treaty of Lisbon, dashing the hopes of those who had thought the Celtic Tiger’s support for a constitution would bolster the European project.

Amid the pervading gloom, the election of Barack Obama to the White House stood out as a beacon of hope. The first-term senator from Illinois fought a brilliant campaign. He out-organised and outspent Hillary Clinton, the favourite for the Democratic nomination; then he swept aside Senator John McCain, the Vietnam war hero-cum-Washington maverick who fought a lacklustre campaign. McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as running-mate was typically off-key. Optometrists and much of the US media swooned over the moose-hunting governor of Alaska, but once her barnstorming speech at the Republican convention faded, she turned out to be a seven-day wonder.

Obama’s victory was a moment of great emotion in the US and around the world. Who can forget the shot of the Rev Jesse Jackson, tears rolling down his cheeks, as he waited in the early hours of the morning for the president-elect’s victory address in Grant Park, Chicago? Yet we should not forget McCain’s gracious concession speech, either. November 4 2008 saw American democracy at its best.

Obama’s win drew parallels with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932, but – barring a Depression – a more useful comparison may be with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Then, too, amid deeply troubled economic times, Americans were desperate for a change in leadership. The key will be whether Obama can manage a resurgent Democratic majority in Congress which will be tempted by protectionism and retribution against the once-dominant Republicans.

Inevitably, the Obama victory will be seen as a chance for the US to repair relations with the outside world. America’s image has suffered under the Bush presidency, but most of the damage was done in the first term, especially after the war of choice against Iraq. In the second term, the Bush administration curbed its unilateralist instincts.

In 2008, the stark message was that the threats to US (and western) interests have, if anything, become more pressing: Iran continues to pursue its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons; the Taliban insurgency continues to grow in strength in Afghanistan, drawing in an increasingly fragile Pakistan; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains as intractable as ever. Only Iraq offered a semblance of hope after the US and the Maliki government agreed a timetable for the withdrawal of combat troops by the end of 2011, a recognition that General David Petraeus’s “surge” against militants has been far more successful than the sceptics assumed.

Elsewhere, the US lost ground in the Caucasus when the Russian army invaded Georgia, a pro-western former Soviet republic pressing for membership of Nato. Critics predicted the foray was the opening gambit in a strategy by Vladimir Putin to regain control of former Soviet satellite states. Certainly, it tempered optimism that the “election” of Dmitry Medvedev, a nominally liberal bureaucrat, would signal a shift in Russian policy. The FT interviewed Medvedev in the Kremlin for two hours in late March, and found him a thoughtful advocate of the rule of law. But months later, he looked more and more like Putin’s puppet.

This was not a good year for freedom-lovers, with a few exceptions. July saw the spectacular release of Ingrid Betancourt, the Colombian-French anti-corruption activist held by Farc guerrillas for six-and-a-half years in the Colombian jungle; and two months later, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested and brought to the Hague to stand trial before the UN war crimes tribunal. The International Criminal Court was also active, with one prosecutor – for better or worse – recommending indicting Omar al-Bashir, president of Sudan, with genocide in Darfur.

But elsewhere, the picture was depressing. Robert Mugabe and his cronies clung to power in Zimbabwe, despite the ravages of hyperinflation. The Democratic Republic of Congo erupted into renewed violence, with casualties in the civil war evoking comparison with the levels reached in Rwanda in 1994. The Chinese cracked down on civil disobedience in Tibet. And pirates became ever bolder on the high seas off Somalia, even hijacking a Saudi supertanker.

If there was light, it came in the spectacular shape of the Beijing Olympics. The opening and closing ceremonies set new standards in pyrotechnics. But there were also memorable sporting performances, notably by the bionic swimmer Michael Phelps and the world’s most graceful athlete, the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who set world records in the 100m and 200m races and 4 x 100m relay. His trademark golden track shoes and his arched victory pose will linger in the popular imagination, a welcome counterweight to the cynicism which, thanks to the wonders of modern drug laboratories, has long poisoned athletics.

The other winner was Damien Hirst, the post-pop descendant of Andy Warhol, to quote FT critic Jackie Wullschlager. Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” exhibition contained more than 200 pieces and later fetched £111m in a Sotheby’s auction. The top lot was “The Golden Calf”, a 600kg bullock whose hooves and horns are cast in solid 18-carat gold. It sold for £10.3m, a record for the artist at auction.

The sums are breathtaking, but in retrospect they may be seen as the last gasp of an era of excess. Last month, it was reported that Hirst, who is worth more than £200m, had laid off 17 of the artists who help produce his work. One of the directors of his art production company said: “We have to be mindful of the current economic climate and how this might affect us in the future.”

The year 2009 will be altogether more testing for those at the top as well as the bottom of society.

Lionel Barber is editor of the FT.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

03 January 2009

Los Angeles is heavy. You can see to the ends of the earth and there's nowhere further to go.

New York is stressed out. People are angry. Two of my friends, both gentle and intelligent, and I all independently, got into altercations tonight. I demarcate myself, because I was the antagonist in my tussle.

I am a little stressed out with nostalgia for the future. That is the way to be, but I'm not quite right. I am melancholic for the future. and that is the worst way to be.

Melancholia implies a depression. Nostalgia implies a haze. but possibly a fiery haze.

I don't mean to be a beatnik, but Proper Valuation is mystical. It derives from, and makes sole reference to, The ratios and their harmonics.


..........