26 Jan 2024

I forgot who it was who said that he wasn’t afraid of flying but of landing. The same philosophy may be applied to borrowing. Borrowing is rather like flying – rewarding, useful and even exhilarating. The scary part is landing the debt and returning it to its hangar. It is worth asking why the US seems uniquely able to borrow with impunity compared to other countries which feature at various stops on the slope downwards to habitual insolvency. I would argue that the three main impediments to foreign investment anywhere are distrust of a government, distrust of its currency and, recently, distrust of the reliability of energy supply. There is one policy that Presidents Trump and Biden appear to share – that if you want to sell in America you need to manufacture in America: and according to UN investment data, the rest of the world is happy to fall in line. Despite apparently going along with the COP religious movement, Biden’s government has been careful to continue America’s pursuit of cheap and independent energy and to be a willing exporter of LNG to the world. In 2022 the US became the leading exporter of LNG and, to the horror of the lobbying organisation Covering Climate Now, a “massive expansion” of export terminals is proposed. “Taken together, if all US projects in the permitting pipeline are approved, they could lead to 3.9 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, which is larger than the entire annual emissions of the European Union,” wrote a group of scientists in an open letter to Biden in December urging the president to halt the expansion. . Source: coveringclimatenow.org STOP PRESS : President Biden has just “paused” new export licences. Lobbying works, sometimes. Financing public spending by borrowing feels irresponsible. Politicians rarely dare to advocate it. Instead, they do it stealthily. In the US the Biden administration launched the comically named Inflation Reduction Act to lend a sense of responsible purpose to its continuing accumulation of a debt pile now standing at $34 trillion (it was $10 trillion in 2000). Before we believers in prudent finance throw up our hands in horror we must be quite clear about why...

9 Jul 2020

In isolation, Q2 was quite good for stock markets. But in the context of what happened in Q1, we are still in the mire with our Wellington boot just out of reach of our hovering, stockinged foot. The FTSE 100 rose by 9% but is still down 17% year on year. The FTSE 250 recovered by 14% in Q2 (having been down 31% in Q1) but is -12% year-on-year. As usual, the All-Share was between the two. It seems fair to say that we are no wiser about the probable economic outcome of the pandemic though we can see that there is a consensus that central banks can print any amount of money on the single condition that they don’t admit that that is what they are doing. In the US it is more explicit because it is more acceptable to say that anything large is too big to fail when it would involve the loss of large numbers of jobs. Even if you are not seeking re-election as President, it is hard to argue against that. The response to Covid-19 is becoming highly political in the UK, despite there being no general election scheduled until 2024. Mass unemployment cannot be deferred indefinitely, even by money printing. Everyone must know this but no one wants to say it – governing politicians are terrified of hard truths unless they can be floated under a halo of brave sacrifice and oppositions bide their time until they can feign shocked surprise at how badly things turned out.   So we are left with a pretend future funded with pretend money.  Pretend money is far from being just a UK phenomenon.  The euro was infamously pretend money before the financial crash. Greece, Italy etc thought that they could borrow extravagantly but cheaply because their euro liabilities were implicitly guaranteed by the ECB. Kyle Bass, who, in around 2008, took long positions in German Bunds matched against shorts of Greek government bonds, called it the greatest asymmetric trade of all time.  Eight years ago this week, Bunds yielded 1.5% and their Greek equivalents 26%. The spread between the two was 24.5% having been around 0.5% when Bass took his position....

12 Feb 2015

Quantitative easing is a process by which a central bank buys relatively safe assets (mostly government bonds) and thereby puts cash into the hands of the newly-ex owners of those assets. In the early years of the financial crisis, this was effectively a life-support system for financial institutions which, post-Lehman Brothers, looked like they might fall domino-style. As the central bank bids up asset prices it creates a rising tide that floats many boats. One side effect of this is that the wealthy become wealthier. QE is quite tricky to justify from this point of view. If it is necessary to prevent the collapse of the banking system it is a jagged pill that needs to be swallowed. As I have written before, this is broadly how the Bank of England justified QE in 2009. “Purchases of assets by the Bank of England could help to improve liquidity in credit markets that are currently not functioning normally.” But gradually, while the music remained the same the lyrics changed. Expressing an idea that was essentially imported from the US, the justification from the Bank in 2011 was quite different. “The purpose of the purchases was and is to inject money directly into the economy in order to boost nominal demand.” You see what they did there? Once again, it was party time in financial markets. Bonds and equities were rising nicely. Bonds were rising because the Bank was buying them and other people were buying them because the Bank was buying them and equities were rising because they looked cheap compared to bonds. And property in the areas where financial people live began to go up again, despite the fact that prices appeared to require mortgages that quite high incomes could not plausibly service and that damaged banks could not reasonably be expected to offer. My friends and I have done splendidly from this once we had “got it”. And although I don’t know any influential people, some of my friends do. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want but these influential people soon popped up all over the place saying how brave and wise central bankers were to extend QE. THE HIGH MORAL...