A good day at the US polls: Specter out, Rand Paul in.

Posted on May 19, 2010

Arlan Specter, a creature of the Senate for three decades, has lost his bid for Democratic nomination. It is exceedingly rare for a sitting congressman or senator to not even be nominated by his own party, but such is the anger towards incumbants. I’m glad to see this guy go, since he is a politician of the worst type, most remembered for leading the coverup of the John Kennedy murder and pushing the preposterous single bullet theory (wikipedia):

According to the single-bullet theory, a three-centimeter-long copper-jacketed lead-core 6.5-millimeter rifle bullet fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository passed through President Kennedy’s neck and Governor Connally’s chest and wrist and embedded itself in the Governor’s thigh. If so, this bullet traversed 15 layers of clothing, 7 layers of skin, and approximately 15 inches of tissue, struck a necktie knot, removed 4 inches of rib, and shattered a radius bone. The bullet was found on a gurney in the corridor at the Parkland Memorial Hospital, inDallas, after the assassination. The Warren Commission found that this gurney was the one that had borne Governor Connally. This bullet became a key Commission exhibit, identified as CE 399. Its copper jacket was completely intact. While the bullet’s nose appeared normal, the tail was compressed laterally on one side.

In its conclusion, the Warren Commission found “persuasive evidence from the experts” that a single bullet caused the President’s neck wound and all the wounds in Governor Connally.

Rand Paul, Ron Paul’s son, has won the Republican nomination for Jim Bunning’s Senate seat in Kentucky, defeating his cookie-cutter opponent in a landslide. Rand’s positions are mostly libertarian like his father’s, especially on regulation, taxation, banking and other domestic issues, but he has made some disconcertingly hawkish noises when it comes to foreign policy.

This could be an interesting election year. It would be great to see a lot more bums tossed out — not that it should make any significant difference to policy, since there are only a handful of people running for national office who would consistently take anti-state positions, but it’s just nice to see karma at work.

Civil Lawsuit, Allran vs. New York Fed, alleges cartel & Ponzi

Posted on May 13, 2010

Via Zerohedge, a suit has been filed in the US district court for western North Carolina by a group of citizens alleging that the Federal Reserve is an unconstitutional cartel and Ponzi scheme. Also named as defendants are several large banks and their CEOs, Geithner, Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Greenspan, John Snow, Shiela Bair and several other hacks and oligarchs.

The suit enumerates various “evils” committed over the last 97 years, but reaches way too far and dilutes the case by stringing together an overarching theory of a grand plot against the American way. Since it doesn’t stick to clear-cut issues of constitutionality such as the legal tender laws it is unlikely to get traction, but there can’t be a better place for it than in Western NC.

I take it as a sign of the times. It’s heartening to see people channel their anger about the economy into the study of banking history and take action that will at least open some more eyes.

Allran v NY Fed Reserve http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

Key 2007 email sums up the mortgage situation. It’s not from Goldman.

Posted on May 4, 2010

Forget the middlemen – the real criminals are those who betray their oaths of office.

Via the Motley Fool, here is an email from someone inside John Paulson’s hedge fund:

It is true that the market is not pricing the subprime RMBS [residential mortgage-backed securities] wipeout scenario. In my opinion this situation is due to the fact that rating agencies, CDO managers and underwriters have all the incentives to keep the game going, while ‘real money’ investors have neither the analytical tools nor the institutional framework to take action before the losses that one could anticipate based [on] the ‘news’ available everywhere are actually realized.

This guy was on the right track. Incentives are everything when you’re looking for explanations. The only things this guy left out were the role of government and the fact that managers did have the tools (google, for one) to figure out that there was a housing bubble.

Government provided low-interest credit through Fannie and Freddie, which passed off much of the risk here to the taxpayer through their implied (later realized) guarantee. There was also the tremendous moral hazard of “too-big-to-fail,” which was always just a cover story to justify whatever taxpayer theivery the banks wanted to undertake. FDIC is also another massive risk-transfer scheme that encourages reckless lending by both bankers and depositors.

Also key is the fact that the incompetent rating agencies, Moody’s, S&P and Fitch, only got that way after the government made them a cartel and removed market forces from their industry. If all rating agencies were paid by investors (rather than issuers) and had to compete on the basis of their performance, like Egan Jones, they would actually do some analysis.

Goldman is a scapegoat. In the final analysis, they may be untrustworthy (who didn’t know that anyway), but they are just middlemen, and they didn’t force anyone to buy their bonds. They didn’t create the demand for junk credit — interest rates and spreads were very low during the bubble years, and huge institutional buyers with very highly paid managers simply failed to do their job of understanding what they were buying. Without their demand for junk mortgages, there could be no giant bubble. In the case of public pension funds like Calpers, this demand was partly the result of unrealistic promises made to unions which required very high annualized rates of return.

For anyone who had read any economic history, the situation was plain as day (houses were selling for record multiples of incomes and rent, prices were way above trendline, credit was ridiculously easy, and speculation was rampant). If I saw it as a 20-something kid using google, how could the big shots miss it? The reasons are similar those in any mania, with heavy doses of moral hazard, group-think and extreme optimism. It’s all clear in retrospect, but back then only the weirdos, historians and Austrians were removed enough from the zeitgeist to see it.

If you want to single out firms and individuals for retribution, look at those who betrayed their oaths of public service during the bubble and the Heist of ’08: Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Chris Dodd, Barnie Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Cox, etc. Forget the middlemen – these are the real criminals, the people who lie into cameras for a living and deploy force against the citizenry (as a taxpayer you are forced under threat of imprisonment to absorb the losses on bad mortgages you neither bought nor created).

The bankers can buy this power, but only because it’s for sale. Bankers don’t even have to violate the law to lock savers into their paper money cartel and pass off risks to the taxpayer — their lackeys have fixed it all for them.

Analysts and institutions: stocks “extremely cheap” despite 1.7% yields after 80% rally. Hussman & Prechter: another crash likely.

Posted on April 26, 2010

Bloomberg today gives a tour of the bull camp, which believes in a V-shaped recovery and soon-to-be record S&P earnings:

Even after the biggest rally since the 1930s, U.S. stocks remain the cheapest in two decades as the economy improves…

…Income is beating analysts’ estimates by 22 percent in the first quarter, making investors even more bullish that the rally will continue after the index climbed 80 percent since March 2009. While bears say the economy’s recovery is too weak for earnings to keep up the momentum, Fisher Investments and BlackRock Inc. are snapping up companies whose results are most tied to economic expansion.

“The stock market is incredibly inexpensive,” said Kevin Rendino, who manages $11 billion in Plainsboro, New Jersey, for BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. “I don’t know how the bears can argue against how well corporations are doing.”

S&P 500 companies may earn $85.96 a share in the next year, according to data from equity analysts compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with the index’s record combined profits of $89.93 a share from the prior 12 months in September 2007, when the S&P 500 was 19 percent higher than today.

Those figures would be for operating earnings, not the bottom line. In recent years it has been increasingly common to simply call operating earnings “earnings” and to imply that multiples on this figure should be compared to historic multiples on the bottom line. Ken Fisher, readers may recall, was running obnoxious video web ads through 2007-2008 touting a continued rally just before stocks fell off a cliff. His equity management firm makes the most money if people are all-in, all the time, as it collects fees as a percent of assets.

Record Pace

The earnings upgrades come as income beats Wall Street estimates at the fastest rate ever for the third time in four quarters. More than 80 percent of the 173 companies in the S&P 500 that reported results have topped estimates, compared with 79.5 percent in the third quarter and 72.3 percent in the three- month period before that, Bloomberg data show.

It is impressive how companies have protected themselves since the downturn began, but the way they have done this is by simply cutting costs, hence the stubborn 9.5% (headline U-3) or 17% (U-6) unemployment rate.

David Rosenberg, as usual, is the cooler head in the room:

Alternate Valuation

David Rosenberg, chief economist of Gluskin Sheff & Associates Inc., says U.S. stocks are poised for losses because they’ve become too expensive. The S&P 500 is valued at 22.1 times annual earnings from the past 10 years, according to inflation-adjusted data since 1871 tracked by Yale University Professor Robert Shiller.

Economic growth will slow and stocks retreat as governments around the world reduce spending after supporting their economies through the worst recession since the 1930s, said Komal Sri-Kumar, who helps manage more than $100 billion as chief global strategist at TCW Group Inc. The U.S. budget shortfall may reach $1.6 trillion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to figures from the Washington-based Treasury Department.

“The correction is going to come,” Sri-Kumar said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York on April 21. “You now have a debt bubble growing in the sovereign side, and we’re slow to recognize how negative that could be.”

We are still in the thick of the largest credit bubble in history. Consumer and real estate debt has yet to be fully liquidated (and hasn’t even started in China), corporate indebtedness is the highest ever, and now government debt has reached the point of no return where default is inevitable.

Equity is the slice of the pie left over after all debts are serviced, so to say that it is cheap when it only yields 1.7% (in the case of S&P dividends) is insane. It is much safer to be a creditor of a business than an owner, so debt yields should be lower than equity yields. In today’s perverse investment climate, even 10-year treasuries of the US and Germany yield more than twice equities.

This extreme confidence in stocks and dismissal of risk considerations further indicates that this is a toppy environment, highly reminiscent of 2007.

John Hussman explores this theme a bit further in his latest market comment:

As of last week, our most comprehensive measure of market valuation reached a price-to-normalized earnings multiple of 19.1, exceeding the peaks of August 1987 (18.6) and December 1973 (18.3). Outside of the valuations achieved during the late 1990′s bubble and the approach to the 2007 market peak, the only other historical observation exceeding the current level of valuation was the extreme of 20.1 reached just prior to the 1929 crash. The corollary to this level of rich valuation is that our projection for 10-year total returns for the S&P 500 is now just 5.3% annually.

While a number of simple measures of valuation have also been useful over the years, even metrics such as price-to-peak earnings have been skewed by the unusual profit margins we observed at the 2007 peak, which were about 50% above the historical norm – reflecting the combination of booming and highly leveraged financial sector profits as well as wide margins in cyclical and commodity-oriented industries. Accordingly, using price-to-peak requires the additional assumption that the profit margins observed in 2007 will be sustained indefinitely. Our more comprehensive measures do not require such assumptions, and reflect both direct estimates of normalized earnings, and compound estimates derived from revenues, profit margins, book values, and return-on-equity.

That said, valuations have never been useful as an indicator of near-term market fluctuations – a shortcoming that has been amplified since the late 1990′s. The lesson that valuations are important to long-term investment outcomes is underscored by the fact that the S&P 500 has lagged Treasury bills over the past 13 years, including dividends. Yet the fact that these 13 years have included three successive approaches (2000, 2007, and today) to valuation peaks – at the very extremes of historical experience – is evidence that investors don’t appreciate the link between valuation and subsequent returns. So they will predictably experience steep losses and mediocre returns yet again. Ironically, before they do, it also means that investors who take valuations seriously (including us) can expect temporary periods of frustration.

I’ve long noted that the analysis of market action can help to overcome some of this frustration, as stocks have often provided good returns despite rich valuations so long as market internals were strong, and the environment was not yet characterized by a syndrome of overvalued, overbought, overbullish, and rising yield conditions. In hindsight, the stock market has followed this typical post-war pattern, and we clearly could have captured some portion of the market’s gains over the past year had I ignored the risk of a second wave of credit strains (which I remain concerned about, primarily over the coming months).

It is important to recognize, however, that even if we had approached the recent economic environment as a typical, run-of-the-mill postwar downturn, we would now be defensive again, as a result of the current overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising yields syndrome. I do recognize that my credibility in sounding a cautious note would presently be stronger if I had ignored further credit risks and captured some of the past year’s gains. But the awful outcome of this same set of conditions, which we also observed in 2007, should provide enough credibility.

Hussman proceeds to offer a detailed statistical analysis of how valuation and market action impact risks and returns. Curious parties are encouraged to read his essay in its entirety.

Here is how he rather bluntly sums up the current environment:

As of last week, the Market Climate in stocks remained characterized by an overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yields syndrome that has historically produced periods of marginal new highs, slight declines, and yet further marginal highs, followed somewhat unpredictably by nearly vertical drops. I’ve often accompanied the description of this syndrome with the word “excruciating,” because the apparent resiliency of the market and the celebration of each fresh high, can make it difficult to maintain a defensive stance. Interestingly, the analysts at Nautilus Capital recently noted that the most closely correlated periods in market history to this one were the advances of 1929 and 2007. While exact replication of those advances would allow for a couple more weeks of further strength, we’ve generally found it dangerous to expect history to do more than rhyme. These hostile syndromes have a tendency to erase weeks of upside progress in a few days.

I have to agree with this assessment as well as that of Robert Prechter that this spring offers perhaps the greatest short-selling opportunity in history.

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