21 Dec 2017

The causes of the financial crisis have not been properly addressed. In particular, the perpetrators are widely and correctly seen as having got away with it. This, in my view, lies behind the populist behaviour that keeps giving us “anti-establishment” election results like Brexit, Trump and Corbyn. That’s the conclusion of this essay. Here are my arguments, looking at what happened in the US, the EU and the UK and the common failures of leadership in all three territories. WALL STREET AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS I think we all know that the financial crisis involved junk debts being packaged by rogues as AAA and sold to idiots. Faults on both sides, no doubt. US officials are relatively good at hammering those considered dispensable. (Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years at the age of 71. That showed him). But the biggest banks were considered “too big to fail”. They operated with an implicit guarantee that, no matter what, they would be bailed out by the state. This was extended to the claim that they were “too big to jail”. It has been said that it would be destabilizing to the financial system if the senior management of a major institution were taken on the “perp walk”, handcuffed in front of a global TV audience. At the same time, the alumni of US investment banks seem to penetrate government at the highest levels. The original bailout was presided over by the Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, once of Goldman Sachs. Also from a Goldman career is the current Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin (there are limits to President Trump’s populism). You can read plenty about Goldman Sachs here. US politicians who complain about the big banks tend to stand out because they are unusual. Bernie Saunders and Elizabeth Warren are portrayed as “progressive liberals” (that’s an insult in establishment parlance) and possibly anti-capitalist or un-American. It is estimated that the US banking lobby spends more than $100 million a year fighting attempts to regulate it.    In 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement claimed to represent “the 99%” against income inequality and corporate influence. President Obama said perceptively that: “I think it expresses the frustrations the American...

6 Jul 2016

On the face of it, the quarter was dominated by the UK Brexit referendum decision on 24 June though, in the main, trends were consistent throughout the quarter. The FTSE 100, which delivers its rare moments of outperformance in times of nervousness, had continued to do better than the FTSE 250 up to 23 June. After the referendum result this trend was dramatically extended, partly fuelled by the sharp fall of sterling against the US dollar. At the close of business on 30 June, the 100 was up by 4.9% in the quarter and the 250 was down by 4%, a huge difference in fortunes. (Despite this, over the last 5 years the 250 is +35% and the 100 just +8%). If this signalled nervousness about the future viability of the UK there was no sign of that in the performance of gilts. 10 year gilts yielded c.1.50% three months ago. Now they pay just 0.80%. What this seems to tell us that a prolonged depression is more likely than either a renewal of inflation (normally a probable result of currency devaluation) or a default by the UK government (even though we don’t really have a government at present). The message from elsewhere, especially the EU, is the same. 10 year bund yields were 0.14% three months ago. They are now, as predicted, negative (-0.17%). In Switzerland, even 30 year government bonds yield less than zero. This seems to be confusing aversion to risk with a disinclination to continue to remain alive. The future is unknown. Get over it. I sold some shares ahead of the referendum result on the mistaken view that we would probably vote to Remain. I think that the EU economy is burdened by many problems – unreformed labour markets, burdensome state pension liabilities, unfavourable demographics and ailing banks. European politicians have been allowing the ECB to carry the burden with its “whatever it takes” monetary policy. As I wrote before, “QE looks desperate and desperation does not promote confidence”. It is the banks that really concern me. The share prices of some of Europe’s best known banks are trading near or even below their financial crisis lows. Deutsche Bank...

30 May 2016

1)      SELECTIVE USE OF FACTS It is not news to say that people will select facts and opinions that appear to favour their side of an argument. There was a good example last week from the pro-Remain CBI which wants to demonstrate that the possibility of Brexit is already hurting investment. “Overall, surveys of investment intentions have shown a deterioration in investment plans, particularly in the services sector. Some of this is likely to be related to uncertainty ahead of the EU referendum. Although our April investment intentions data for the manufacturing industry actually strengthened, anecdote from the sector suggests some specific factors at play – in particular, replacement spending in the food & drink sector (following flood-related damage earlier in the year) and buildings investment by chemicals manufacturers looking to expand production on the back of solid export demand.” CBI Economic Forecast 16th May 2016 Did you get that? The latest data suggest that their view is wrong so they have concluded that the data are wrong. The CBI is supposedly a highly respectable organisation (so respectable that the EC contributes money to fund some of its publications) and can get away with substituting anecdote for data, or so it seems.    The Leave side is mostly less respectable and, partly by virtue of the necessity that it is promoting something of a leap in the dark, rarely seems to attempt to employ hard facts. But you can be sure that it is highly selective in what it says. You would imagine that the UK is full of people who are deeply worried about immigration. According to a survey that goes back to 1962, the peak year for UK citizens thinking that there are too many immigrants was 1970 when the level reached 89%. In 2014 it was 54%. Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech was made in 1968 and probably contributed to the high level of antipathy to immigration that the chart shows. During the speech, Powell quoted a white constituent (in Wolverhampton) as saying: “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” As it happened, the period...

15 Mar 2016

A STUPID ARGUMENT THAT YOU WILL CERTAINLY HEAR ENDLESSLY One of the most commonly and confidently asserted falsehoods is that markets hate uncertainty. Without uncertainty there would be nothing for markets to price. The pricing of assets is about probability. All questions of probability involve uncertainty. If you ever meet someone who believes in certainty sell them something because they will overpay. Politicians, particularly conservative or establishment ones, often try to scare voters with the unknown. In the current “Brexit” debate, the stayer camp is accused of conducting a Project Fear campaign. One of the central points of this argument is that foreign investors will be put off by the uncertainty that would result from Britain voting to leave the EU. This ignores the fact that almost everything in Britain already seems to be owned by foreigners. Politicians and other public commentators like to pretend that trophy assets are quintessentially British long after they have been sold off.  Witness the farcical outbreak of faux patriotism when a takeover of AstraZeneca by a U.S rival was suggested. The reason why there has been so much foreign investment in Britain is, ironically, politics. More specifically, it has been the lack of interference by politicians in ownership rights. British politicians do not, by and large, confiscate privately owned assets. The downside of this is that rather a large number of exotic individuals with wealth accumulated in dubious circumstances are attracted for this very reason. And there are more on the way, according to today’s news. “Ultra high-net-worth investors from Iran are poised to go on a buying spree of properties around the world – and London is likely to be the top location.”  City A.M. 15 March 2016 This is in many ways very annoying and even shameful unless you happen to be the legal vendor of an asset that has just been sold for a price beyond your greediest dreams. We can’t have it both ways, though it would be gratifying if there were some kind of effective test to verify that the funds used for the purchase had been lawfully acquired. This is supposed to be the function of money laundering laws but these appear...

25 Jan 2016

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) was a (now repealed) US official policy that insisted that gays serving in the military must take part in a cover-up. On the grounds that they kept their sexual preferences a secret they were excused from being openly bullied, discriminated against and dismissed. Something that everyone knew to be untrue (the idea that the US military was staffed entirely by patriotic heterosexuals) was sanctioned in a big game of “let’s pretend”. If everyone acted as if it were true it would be just as if it were actually true. But DADT turned out to be too convenient a device to be confined to such a narrow issue. It was perfect for the treatment of subprime mortgages! It was clear to many insiders that people who had no realistic chance of repaying were being granted loans to buy properties that had to rise in value to bail out the borrower, that these debts were being insured on terms that didn’t come close to reflecting their risk and that the loans were being repackaged and sold on, backed by credit agency ratings that were uninformed and irresponsible at best. Yet even when the crisis was unfolding at speed, banks and other financial institutions were saying publicly that everything with which they had been stuffed was AAA quality. Check out The Big Short for a great explanation of the story. The trouble with DADT is that it is like a Ponzi scheme. Once you have started to pretend, you have to keep going. The morons working at the soon-to-be rescued banks did not mean to buy toxic junk. But once the mistake was made the easier option was to keep playing along. Like a trader who hides loss-making positions in the bottom drawer (or a secret computer file), the final thing you can try to buy is time. You literally decide to wait for a miracle.    Something like this is going on with Quantitative Easing (QE = DADT). As I have pointed out elsewhere, the truth that QE was a device for inflating asset prices in order to save the banks from marking them to market was spun into an officially...

5 Jan 2015

In a confusing financial and political world in Q4, the UK stock market offered small but notable evidence of calm in as much as the FTSE 250 (+4.5%) easily outpeformed the FTSE 100 (-0.9%), reversing the trend seen in Q2 and Q3. Normally, larger shares perform better in nervous times as they are seen as safer havens. In the case of this quarter, the collapse of oil and oil sensistive shares (including other resource and energy related companies) may have delivered a particular blow to the FTSE but I am still inclined to take the 4% gain in the FTSE 250 at face value. For 2014 as a whole, the FTSE fell by 2.7% following a rise of 13.9% in 2013. Once again, major governmrnt bond yields provided a supportive background. German 10 year Bund yields fell in the quarter from 0.93% to 0.54%. A year ago they were 1.96%. 10 year Gilt yields have fallen from 2.88% to 1.72%. While these seems incredibly low to anyone who has followed gilts over the years, it could be seen as high when compared to the equivalents in Spain (1.62%) and Ireland (1.25%) and France (0.83%). Last quarter I wrote that “bond markets are shrieking the news that global growth has made a long-term shift to lower levels”. The fall of nearly 30% in the oil price in Q4 appears to confirm this view, though it can be argued that a cut of this scale in the price of such a key commodity will ultimately benefit the economies of all countries that do not depend on oil revenues.Initially, though, the effect is more likely to be felt by oil producers and will play out as generally negative in the short term. See my next blog post for more discussion on this. In the UK, the political future appears more important than usual. But it does not seem likely that a change of government would result in a great expansion of government spending. Nor does it seem probable that a referendum would result in a vote for the UK to leave the EU. Most of the political outcomes that frighten investors are highly unlikely and their probability...

29 Oct 2014

This is the transcript of a speech I made this week at the smartfuturelondon conference How to turn a good idea into an investment What makes a good idea?  If everyone agrees that change is inevitable and ‘it’s only a matter of time’, it always seems to take a very long time. Having heard yesterday’s presentation on smart energy – hands up if anyone thinks that’s a bad idea – I suspect that a common drag on the development of really good ideas is that everyone wants a piece. I was watching The Man With The Golden Gun on TV the other day. It was made in 1974 when the world was suffering the first OPEC oil shock. So in the tradition of the James Bond series to be topical, they shoved in a sub-plot in which the Golden Gun Guy steals the Solex Agitator, a device that turns the sun’s rays into energy.  What a great idea. Someone should try that. When mobile payments were agreed to be a good idea in 1997, there were more than 100 companies represented in the first mobile forum. That year, Coca Cola built a vending machine that accepted payment from a Nokia phone. Around 2005 I attended a presentation about mobile payment at which someone said that there was a Coca Cola vending machine in Helsinki. Everybody was trying to get a piece of mobile payments – and it was all taking a very long time. Sometimes, great ideas are just too early. Twenty years ago, Larry Ellison of Oracle thought that the PC was an absurd device, being limited by its own processing power and memory. “Put it on the internet” he said. So Oracle launched what we would now call the first netbook. Unfortunately, the internet was too slow at the time. The Oracle NC failed. But one of Ellison’s managers thought it was a great idea. He was Marc Benioff and he left to found Salesforce.com in 1999. It is now the reference business cloud computing company and has a market cap of $37 billion or 7x forecast revenues. The best and most valuable ideas seem to come from nowhere and often evolve...

22 Apr 2014

The FTSE 100 fell by 2.2% in the quarter. The FTSE 250 (that’s companies from 101 to 350) rose by 2.1%. I wrote in the Q4 report that it is generally the case that smaller companies’ share prices are relative beneficiaries of improving confidence. Large blue chips do better when investors are seeking protection. It is worth noting that in the first three weeks of April, FTSE 250 shares have become more jittery, falling by 2.2% compared to a modest 0.4% recovery in FTSE 100 stocks. It looks as if there has been plenty of profit taking in the best performing shares of the past year, many of which are those of FTSE 250 companies. These were relatively trivial ups and downs in UK equities. Of more consequence for relative valuations is the continued strength of major government bonds. Yields on US, German and UK 10 year bonds have continued to fall, despite much talk of stronger economic data and falling unemployment. More impressive still has been the rebirth of demand for the bonds of Greece (yield on 31 December 2013, 8.41%; today, 6.12%), Portugal (5.9%; 3.73%), Ireland (3.43%; 2.83%) and even France (2.46%; 1.99%). Cash continues to chase yield and is becoming less fussy. At a time when the price of assets regarded as safe continues to rise, it would seem irrational to turn negative on the shares of established and financially sound companies. On that basis, this year’s flat equity market is probably resting rather than expiring. Turning to shares that I have recommended, in December I highlighted four companies with long-term strategies. UBM, whose share price is nearly unchanged since then, has just acquired a new CEO. I must admit that I had missed the declared intention of the CEO David Levin to retire in 2014. He has now been replaced by Tim Cobbold, ex-CEO of De La Rue. There is no reason to think that this will change the company’s long-term strategy. UBM raised its dividend slightly in 2013 and, with its low capex requirements, is confident of maintaining its “progressive” dividend policy. But, there is inevitably a risk that a new CEO will surprise investors (new managers are usually...

28 Feb 2014

You might have heard that The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) delivered some disappointing results yesterday. Underlying operating profit fell by 15% to £2.5 billion and the shares fell by 8%. But you might be surprised that it made a profit at all, given that the reporting of the figures and the interviewing of the latest CEO were generally hostile. Well, here’s a point. The net result, discouragingly referred to as “attributable to ordinary shareholders” was rather a long way shy of the £2.5 billion underlying operating profit – it was in fact a loss of £9 billion. If you want to know how these figures are related, the earnings release has 225 pages to help you get up to speed. But before you do that, I would like to draw your attention to the report for 2008. Over a mere 99 pages, a modest underlying operating profit of £80 million somehow delivered a loss of £24 billion to those very ordinary shareholders. If you are wondering what damaged that hapless underlying profit so badly, it included: “Credit market write-downs and one-off items, purchased intangibles amortisation, write-down of goodwill and other intangible assets, integration costs, restructuring costs and share of shared assets”. Stuff, essentially. In case you think that the bank is putting a deceptive spin on its results, it explains itself as follows. “The financial information on pages 23 to 81, prepared using the Group’s accounting policies, shows the underlying performance of the Group on a managed basis which excludes certain one-off and other items. Information is provided in this form to give a better understanding of the results of the Group’s operations.” In other words, if you think that the bank made £2.5 billion rather than lost £9 billion, you will be understanding it better. You will be better informed than the FT (“Royal Bank of Scotland slides to £9bn loss for 2013”) and the BBC (“RBS shares fall after biggest loss since financial crisis”). The dictionary definition of “underlying” is interesting. 1. Lying under or beneath something: underlying strata. 2. Basic; fundamental. 3. Present but not obvious; implicit: an underlying meaning. 4. Taking precedence; prior: an underlying financial claim. I think...

5 Nov 2013

A few weeks ago, I listened to Carolyn McCall, CEO of Easyjet, choosing her Desert Island Discs on Radio 4. After her first 18 months in the job, the shares have taken off, soared and flown since the start of last year (+187% as I write). I found myself thinking that she had timed that career move perfectly – there has been a tremendous cyclical recovery in many airline stocks. Then I wondered if I was being a little harsh. We will never know, obviously, but would things have gone so well if Mr Buggins in a suit and tie had been appointed instead? Then a week ago a friend e-mailed me to ask what I think of Mitie shares and I replied: “I’m ok with Mitie. It’s run by women”. He thought I was being humorous and in a way he was right. It was a true but unserious answer. Yet it had emerged from my sub-conscious and caused me to wonder whether I might prefer companies with female executives. (Mitie is a stand-out as both the CEO and CFO are women). I have as many unsubstantiated and uninteresting views on the different qualities of the sexes as anyone but I do not make investments on the basis of generalisations like that. I want to see some statistics. So I went looking for some. First, some background about where we are, in the UK, on this topic. Girls are now outperforming boys academically and I read a comment piece the other day saying effectively that we should now be more worried about the fate of our young men. Be that as it may, it is widely recognised that the scarcity of women at board level is egregious. Many people would say that it is unfair and proof of discrimination. I would say that it is prima facie evidence of a damaging waste of talent that, as an investor, might well be costing me money. In February 2011, the government published a document entitled “Women on Boards”. Britain is the only country that could commission a report on “diversity” from a white chap known as Lord Davies of Abersoch CBE but this quote from...