Tag Archives: economy

Our Future

Posted on September 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

The fundamental problem facing the federal government (and for all the governments of Western Civilization), namely, that it has overextended its promises vastly beyond its ability to deliver on these promises.–Gary North

Ok, I have beaten this subject to death, but I will leave the subjects of debt, deficit and default–for now– with this important post for easy reference.

Hyperinflation Is Not Inevitable (Default Is)

Mises Daily: Monday, August 20, 2012 by Gary North

Hyperinflation is always a possibility for any national government or central bank. If a national government is running massive deficits, it can call on the central bank to buy treasury bills or treasury bonds with newly created money. This digital money is transferred to the treasury, which then spends the money into circulation.

There have been cases of hyperinflation in the past that have become legendary. The most famous of all of these hyperinflations is Germany from 1921 through 1923. Simultaneous with that hyperinflation was a hyperinflation in Austria. These were not the worst cases of hyperinflation in history, but they were the worst cases in industrial societies. The worst case was Hungary for two years immediately after World War II. The second-worst case took place a few years ago in Zimbabwe. Both were agricultural nations.

No other nations in western Europe have ever experienced anything like the hyperinflations of Germany and Austria in the early 1920s. Their currency systems were completely destroyed. Farmers were able to pay off debts that had been accumulated prior to World War I by selling one egg and handing the money over to the creditor. This of course destroyed the creditors. It is generally believed that the middle class in both Germany and Austria suffered enormous losses. They had been creditors.

There have been hyperinflations in Latin America after World War II. One of the worst was in Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. The statistics of catastrophic inflation are available here. This went on for two decades. I know of no other case of hyperinflation that lasted more than three years. This is why I regard Brazil’s inflation as the worst hyperinflation in modern history. The political authorities did nothing to stop it, and the central bank inflated. The devastation to the middle class was almost total. If people did not get their money into gold and silver and foreign currencies, they were wiped out. The country went to barter.

If this form of hyperinflation ever comes to the United States or any other Western industrial nation, it will lead to the complete destruction of long-term creditors. Anyone who bought long-term bonds of any kind, anyone who invested in mortgages of any kind, anyone who is the recipient of a government pension, or anybody who is dependent on Social Security and Medicare could not survive this kind of hyperinflation. It would always be paid off in money that is worth far less than when the debt was contracted. When we think of the delay in payments that already exists with respect to Medicare reimbursements to physicians, we get some idea of what it would do to the healthcare industry. The delay of 90 days would basically eliminate the debt.

Destroying Creditors

When we think of the traditional arguments in favor of hyperinflation from the government’s point of view, we think about the ability of the government to pay off creditors. As I will show, this argument no longer is valid.

It is valid for private corporations. Some large business that has issued a 30-year bond is in a position to pay off those bonds with money that is essentially worthless. The person who extended credit to the company did so when the currency had far higher purchasing power. Then comes hyperinflation. Most bonds allow the debtor to pay off early. This will destroy the creditors.

Wherever creditors exist, debtors are happy to repay their loans with money that has depreciated ever since the time that the loan was established. This is especially true if the loan had a fixed interest rate. If the rate of interest cannot be hiked by the lender, he is trapped in his debt. Long-term interest rates begin to skyrocket because of the effect of hyperinflation on consumer prices. New creditors demand a higher rate of interest in order to compensate them for the expected decline of purchasing power. But when hyperinflation speeds up the process of depreciation even faster, creditors who demanded higher interest rates find that the interest rate was not sufficient to compensate them for the decline of purchasing power. So, the next time around, creditors demand even higher rates of interest.

Every time the rate of long-term interest rises, the market value of the existing bonds declines. So, the creditor class, which had faithfully extended credit to businesses, finds that it gave up money that was of considerable value, and now gets back money that is essentially worthless. This destroys the creditor class, which then proves unable to supply new rounds of credit to borrowers.

In the case of central banks that adopt policies that produce hyperinflation, there is no doubt that creditors are ruined if the lenders have the right to pay off the loan with the newly issued currency. If there are no gold contracts or silver contracts governing the payment of the loans, the creditor is helpless in the face of lenders who use the depreciated money to get out of their obligations.

Short Bursts of Hyperinflation

The important fact in all of this, with the exception of Brazil, is this: this possibility of escaping the burden of debt is available only on a relatively short-term basis, and it is available only where the borrower has the right to repay the loan at any time in the national currency. Whenever these two provisions do not exist, hyperinflation only marginally benefits borrowers at the expense of creditors.

Consider the biggest debtor of all: the US government. It has borrowed money out of the Medicare trust fund and the Social Security trust fund from the beginning. The government has issued nonmarketable IOUs to both of the trust funds. These IOUs are good for decades. They are not short-term IOUs.

The government is in a position to repay only short-term bonds bought by the public. It is not allowed to repay holders of long-term bonds before the date that the bond terminates and the monies are to be repaid.

This places the US government at a significant disadvantage with respect to creditors. While it is possible for issuers of corporate bonds to repay the creditors at any time, this is not possible for the US government. Furthermore, the largest of its debts are related to two programs: Social Security and especially Medicare. These debts cannot be repaid with fiat money, because to do so would involve paying off long-term debts early. This is not possible for the federal government, unless the federal government changes the law. If it does this, it would be an admission of total defeat. It will be open default.

When the Social Security trust fund administrators or the Medicare trust fund administrators estimate the obligations of each program, they use the figure of 75 years. They talk about what is owed over the entire 75 years. This means that any period of hyperinflation that is less than 75 years will be insufficient to abolish the political debts of the US government. It cannot escape the obligation by paying retired citizens whatever they are owed over the entire time period. Hyperinflation will enable private corporations to escape their obligations to creditors, but it will not enable the federal government to escape. The government will be able to escape the burden in the years of the worst time of hyperinflation, but when the hyperinflation ends, and the central bank issues a new currency, this does not solve the problem facing the government.

The hyperinflation ends when the money is worthless. At that point, the government cannot buy goods and services. Neither can its dependents.

The government today faces a political problem. It is not simply that it has issued nonmarketable IOUs to the Social Security trust fund and the Medicare trust fund. It has made specific promises to the entire working population. These promises have the force of law. They also cannot be escaped by means of short-term monetary expansion. It is possible for the government for a brief period of time to get its hands on money that is depreciating, but there are cost-of-living escalators built into Social Security payments.

Furthermore, if the government uses the fiat money to pay healthcare providers, and the money does not cover the cost of providing healthcare, healthcare providers will go out of business. It does no good to go to hyperinflation in order to reduce the costs to the government of healthcare. If the government attempts this, it will find that healthcare providers go into another line of work.

All those forecasters who say that hyperinflation is inevitable in the United States never discuss this problem of the 75-year obligations. They never spell out in detail how hyperinflation will enable the US government to escape its obligations. These obligations stretch out over 75 years. No hyperinflation has ever lasted longer than 20 years, and most of them have not lasted longer than about 3 years. So, the policy of hyperinflation wipes out the middle class, and it wipes out most of the creditors who transferred money to corporations in exchange for long-term bonds. The corporations will simply pay off the bonds early with depreciated money, and will then be the possessors of whatever productive assets they bought with the borrowed money. So, when the government comes to potential creditors and asks for another round of debt, it will find the creditors are too wise to provide this credit.

The on-budget debt of the United States that is owed to the general public has an average maturity of approximately eight years. The Federal Reserve System is using “operation twist” to buy larger quantities of 30-year Treasury bonds. This lowers the rate on these bonds and also mortgages issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The private purchasers of these assets will find that, for any period of hyperinflation, the market value of these assets declines. The money, which is not much, that the government will pay to them as interest will not buy much of anything. The government cannot get rid of these debts by hyperinflation. It can pay interest on these debts cheaply only during the time of hyperinflation.

Kotlikoff’s Figures

This brings us back to the deficit in the most important category: off-budget debt. The general public is almost completely unaware of this debt. This debt comprises mainly the obligations of the government for Medicare, Social Security, and federal pensions. These debts extend out for 75 years, according to the calculations of the government. These are extremely long-term debts.

Professor Lawrence Kotlikoff of Boston University has been monitoring the growth of these debts for several years. He relies on the statistics published by the Congressional Budget Office. This is legally a nonpartisan organization that is set up to provide information on various aspects of the government’s budget.

Early in August 2012, Kotlikoff and financial writer Scott Burns published an article on the increase of the unfunded liabilities of the US government. According to the figures issued by the Congressional Budget Office, Kotlikoff concluded that there had been an increase in unfunded liabilities over the past 12 months of $11 trillion.

The total obligation of the federal government to voters that is not funded at the present time is now $222 trillion. This does not mean that, over the entire life of the program, the government will be short $220 trillion. It means that the present value of the unfunded liability is $220 trillion. This means that the government would have to set aside $220 trillion immediately, invest this money in nongovernment projects that will pay a positive rate of return, and will therefore fund the amortization of this debt. I have written about the estimate here.

The federal government at the present time is running annual on-budget deficits of about $1.2 trillion. It spends something in the range of $3.7 trillion. But it needs to have $222 trillion immediately to invest in private markets. It of course does not have this money. There is also the question of which markets could absorb a total of $222 trillion overnight and be able to gain a constant rate of return of, say, 5 percent per annum? It simply is not possible.

Kotlikoff’s figures indicate that the federal government at some point will have to default on large portions of the long-term debt. The numbers do not lie. Kotlikoff’s numbers are larger than most estimates, but other economists have estimated the total unfunded liability in the range of $90 trillion. This number is as unmanageable as $222 trillion.

The Congress of the United States could not come to an agreement in 2011 on how to solve an official deficit of $1.2 trillion per year. Congress kicked the can down the road until January 1, 2013. At that point, the government will have to slash spending, according to the agreement made in 2011. The Bush tax cuts of 2002 will expire unless Congress extends them.

It is obvious that Congress cannot come to an agreement to solve the problem of $1.2 trillion annual deficits. What Kotlikoff and Burns reveal is something far more extraordinary. They indicate that the actual increase of the federal deficit over the last 12 months is in the range of 10 times greater than the increase in the official government deficit. This means that the compounding process that is taking place in the area of unfunded liabilities dwarfs the compounding process that we see in the on-budget statistics.

If Kotlikoff’s figures are incorrect, then some government economist or other expert should publish a detailed study of the correct methodology to examine the figures issued by the Congressional Budget Office. If he has made a mistake, the public deserves to know what this mistake was, and what the correct answer is. I am aware of no such study as yet, but perhaps it will be issued soon. The question will then be this: to what extent did Kotlikoff exaggerate the figures? If it turns out that he is wrong by, say, $50 trillion, the critic will have a point, but the point will be essentially irrelevant to the future crisis of the US government.

Even if Kotlikoff is wrong by $100 trillion, it becomes clear that Congress is completely incapable of dealing politically with this problem. It could not possibly raise the funds to balance the budget if the budget really is increasing by, say, $5 trillion per year. The difference between $5 trillion and $11 trillion is huge, but irrelevant in relationship to the ability of the government to deal with it. The government does not have the money, nor does the free market provide sufficient investment opportunities to enable the US government and all of the other Western governments, including Japan, to solve the problem.

This is not simply an American problem. This is the problem of Western civilization. This is a problem created by every group of politicians in the world who have overpromised what each national government is going to be able to deliver in the future.

If Kotlikoff’s figures are wrong, there should be a hue and cry in Congress over the magnitude of his misrepresentation. There is no hue and cry. We hear the silence of the Congressional Budget Office and also the silence of Congress in general. This persuades me that Kotlikoff’s figures are sufficiently accurate, so that we can make judgments about what is likely to happen to the solvency of the US government and its ability to send out checks every month to its recipients.

Kotlikoff and Burns do not estimate the year in which the crisis will become obvious. I don’t blame them. We cannot be certain about this date, because we cannot be certain about Federal Reserve policy. We can be certain about this: there is no way to repay the obligations that the federal government has negotiated with the voters. It has pretended that it can continue to make its payments on time, but it has not shown how this is going to be possible over the long haul. Meanwhile, millions of baby boomers have started to retire.

The Federal Reserve System

The Federal Reserve cannot solve the problem of the 75-year debt which has unfunded liabilities in the present of $222 trillion. There is no way that the government of United States can solve this problem without simply going into default. So, it does not pay the Federal Reserve to adopt a policy of hyperinflation, which is necessary to destroy the debts of the various levels of civil government in the United States.

The Federal Reserve may go to mass inflation. By mass inflation, I have in mind rates of consumer price increases of 25 percent or thereabouts. We have never seen this in peacetime America, but it is possible. It will enable Congress to sell some of its rollover debt as this debt matures. The average maturity of the federal debt now is about eight years.

This does not solve the major problem, which is the unfunded liability of the federal government for long-term old-age retirement programs. The central bank could hyperinflate for a few years and enable Congress to kick the can down the road for another three or four years. But this does not solve the fundamental problem facing the federal government, namely, that it has overextended its promises vastly beyond its ability to deliver on these promises.

Economists at the Federal Reserve understand this as well as I do. I ask this: What possible incentive is there for the Federal Reserve System to hyperinflate the money to zero value, when the political obligations of the old-age retirement system will survive the time of hyperinflation? What is the advantage of the Federal Reserve to hyperinflate the money supply?

Maybe it would do this in order to intervene to save specific large New York banks, but their obligations are minimal compared to the total obligations of the US government.

I am convinced that, unless Congress nationalizes the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve will not adopt a policy of hyperinflation. That would be to the detriment of the banking system in general.

Conclusion

This is why I am not persuaded by those people who say that hyperinflation in the United States is inevitable. I don’t think it is. I think default is inevitable, but I don’t think it needs to be default by hyperinflation. That is because the government cannot get out of its obligations by fiat money. It cannot default by using hyperinflation, because hyperinflation will only last a few years, but the obligations last for the next 75 years.

In other words, the default will be much more open. The government is going to have to renege on promises made to the vast majority of people who are now dependent on the federal government for their retirement income, and it will also default on the workers who are still in the workforce, who are paying each payday into Social Security and Medicare.

Anyone who makes the case for inevitable hyperinflation needs to present evidence on how hyperinflation will enable the US government to escape the political obligations of the promises that it has made to retirees.

If Congress nationalizes the Fed, then we could get hyperinflation, just to meet present bills. But this will not solve the long-term problem: government unfunded liabilities. After the currency dies, the debt will still be there.

Blink! U.S. Debt Just Grew by $11 Trillion

By Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns – Aug 8, 2012

Republicans and Democrats spent last summer battling how best to save $2.1 trillion over the next decade. They are spending this summer battling how best to not save $2.1 trillion over the next decade.

In the course of that year, the U.S. government’s fiscal gap — the true measure of the nation’s indebtedness — rose by $11 trillion.

The fiscal gap is the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue. It captures all government liabilities, whether they are official obligations to service Treasury bonds or unofficial commitments, such as paying for food stamps or buying drones.

Some question whether “official” and “unofficial” spending commitments can be added together. But calling particular obligations “official” doesn’t make them economically more important. Indeed, the government would sooner renege on Chinese holding U.S. Treasuries than on Americans collecting Social Security, especially because the U.S. can print money and service its bonds with watered-down dollars.

For its part, economic theory sees through labels and views a country’s official debt for what it is — a linguistic construct devoid of real economic content. In contrast, the fiscal gap is theoretically well-defined and invariant to the choice of labels. Each labeling choice changes the mix of obligations between official and unofficial, but leaves the total unchanged.

Dangerous Growth

The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using the Congressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.

This fantastic and dangerous growth in the fiscal gap is not new. In 2003 and 2004, the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale extended the CBO’s short-term forecast and measured fiscal gaps of $60 trillion and $86 trillion, respectively. In 2007, the first year the CBO produced the Alternative Fiscal Scenario, the gap, by our reckoning, stood at $175 trillion. By 2009, when the CBO began reporting the AFS annually, the gap was $184 trillion. In 2010, it was $202 trillion, followed by $211 trillion in 2011 and $222 trillion in 2012.

Part of the fiscal gap’s growth reflects changes in policy, such as the Bush and Obama tax cuts, the introduction of Medicare Part D, and the expansion of defense spending. Part reflects “natural” growth of existing programs, including growth in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. And part reflects the demographic time bomb U.S. politicians are blithely ignoring.

When fully retired, 78 million baby boomers will collect, on average, more than 85 percent of per-capita gross domestic product ($40,000 in today’s dollars) in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Each passing year brings these outlays one year closer, which raises their present value.

Governments, like households, can’t indefinitely spend beyond their means. They have to satisfy what economists call their “intertemporal budget constraint.” The fiscal gap simply measures the extent to which this constraint is violated and tells us what is needed to balance the government’s intertemporal budget.

The answer for the U.S. isn’t pretty. Closing the gap using taxes requires an immediate and permanent 64 percent increase in all federal taxes. Alternatively, the U.S. needs to cut, immediately and permanently, all federal purchases and transfer payments, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, by 40 percent. Or it can mix these terrible fiscal medicines with honey, namely radical fiscal reforms that make the economy much fairer and far stronger. What the government can’t do is pay its bills by spending more and taxing less. America’s children, whose futures are being rapidly destroyed, are smart enough to tell us this.

(Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, andScott Burns, a syndicated columnist, are co-authors of “The Clash of Generations.” The opinions expressed are their own.)

To contact the writers of this article: Laurence Kotlikoff at kotlikoff@gmail.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net.

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Posted in Economics & Politics

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Videos of Ray Dalio (Global Economics) and Amit Wadhwaney (International Investing) Update on VALUE VAULT

Posted on September 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

Thanks to www.greenbackd.com/

International Value Investing (TAVF)

Read his transcript: Amit Wadhwaney TAVF Interview on International Value Investing

Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates on Global Economics

Ray Dalio on International Economics http://www.cfr.org/business-and-foreign-policy/conversation-ray-dalio-video/p28984

Thanks to a reader–Ray Dalio, founder and co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, L.P., discusses global economics.

This meeting is part of the Corporate Program’s CEO Speaker Series, which provides a forum for leading global CEOs to share their priorities and insights before a high-level audience of CFR members. The series aims to educate the CFR membership on the private sector’s important role in the policy debate by engaging the global business community’s top leadership.

Update on VALUE VAULT

Don’t panic if you are wondering what happened to the Value Vault. I moved the files. I will place the video files into separate folders and books into other folders. This should make for easier access and better organization. Though I go under the knife within two weeks, this will get done.  Thanks for your patience. An email will go out to all Value Vault key holders with updates.

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Posted in Housekeeping, Investing Gurus

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Free Course, Avoiding Scams and Book Donation: The Asian Financial Crisis (History)

Posted on August 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

Thanks to a generous, gracious reader who donated this book:

Financial-Crisis-From-Asian-to-Global-2009

For a short synopsis on the 1997 Crisis: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/1997_Asian_Financial_Crisis

An addition for those who wish to learn from past financial crisis. However, I am a bit skeptical that you–as a student of Rothbard, Mises, Hayek and De Soto–will learn much except how an insider (a central banker) viewed the crisis.  My job is not to censor but to share information that you can accept or reject.

Free Course on the U.S. Constitution

https://constitution.hillsdale.edu/201/Constitution-ENH002-101.

Excellent based on my taking the prior course on the Constitution. You can download the readings then view about 10 lectures each week.

Of Interest

Capital Account: news video/channel on Wall Street news. Learn about high frequency trading (“Mr. Market” on speed!), Wall Street personalities, etc. http://www.youtube.com/user/CapitalAccount

For example: Tips on avoiding financial fraud from a financial fraudster, Eddie Anton. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egfiqr8TcK8&list=UU8eFERtcxPZ-M3Cxkh7zhtQ&index=13&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL17E59801E417CC0E&feature=plcp

Someone begins their investing journey: http://learningvalueinvesting.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/clone/

Why did Lehman and Long-Term Capital Management blow up? (See article on Casino Banking) http://www.thefreemanonline.org/archive/issues/?issue=6&volume=62&Type=Issue

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Posted in Economics & Politics, Free Courses, Risk Management

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Kill the Rich, Confiscate All S&P 500 Profits, and Pay the Debt?

Posted on August 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

 

and

and

The National Debt and Federal Budget Deficit Deconstructed – Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins deconstructs our debt and deficit problem. How long could we fund our government if we took 100% of all income and assets of the rich and the S&P 500 companies? Two Years? Ten Years?  The answer would shock you–five months. But then what would we do the following year after all the wealth has been confiscated and sold? A fascinating 19 minute video with Tony Robbins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jboTeS9Okak

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Posted in Economics & Politics

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Obama, Regulations, and Small Business

Posted on July 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

HOT DOGS

Or in the case of 13-year old entrepreneur Nathan Duszynski in Holland, Michigan, who tried to start a business, and somebody else (government bureaucrats) made that not happen. Here’s what happened, or more accurately, what didn’t happen, according to the Holland Sentinel:

“Nathan Duszynski (pictured above), 13, decided he wanted a hotdog cart, so he could earn some money. But as he was setting up shop Tuesday in the parking lot of Reliable Sports at River Avenue and 11th Street — across the street from Holland City Hall — a city of Holland zoning official shut him down. Now, after spending more than $2,500 to start-up his business, Duszynski is throwing in the towel, his mom said.”

Think of All the Businesses That Did NOT Happen, Thanks to Government Bureaucrats and Regulations

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/
President Obama:

“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Pictures

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Posted in Economics & Politics, Humor & Entertainment

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Austrian Economist Savagely Devastates Paul Krugman in a Debate

Posted on July 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Thanks PB for the heads up.

If you had any waivers about Keynesian (establishment/conventional) economics vs. the Austrian perspective then view the video in the link below.

Professor Pedro Schwartz uses facts, theory and irrefutable cause and effect evidence to destroy Krugman’s advice to get out of crisis.  The introductions are in Spanish but the debate is in English.  I do believe Krugman is ignorant about time in the structure of production, thus he esposes an endless injection of stimulus to increase aggregate demand.

I remember driving through a subdivision in 2010 twnety-five miless outside of Las Vegas wondering who would build four hundred homes for nobody? Tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes…..Had a neutron bomb struck the development? Try stimulating that.

http://dailycapitalist.com/2012/07/09/krugman-destroyed-in-debate/

Krugman Destroyed In Debate By Jeff Harding, on July 9th, 2012

This comes from Luis Martin of TrugmanFactor, a blog located in Spain that translates and publishes Daily Capitalist articles. You can skip the intro in Spanish and get to Krugman’s lecture (0:09:19). But the real stuff starts at 0:35:25 where Professor Pedro Schwartz responds to Krugman’s comments in excellent English. Professor Schwartz is a distinguished and well known Austrian theory economist. And in Luis’s words, “completely destroys Krugman.” In fact Schwartz tweeted later that Krugman refused to shake his hand afterward. Enjoy.

Another Krugman Debate

Robert Murphy, an Austrian Economist, explains the Austrian Business Cycle to Krugman using a Sushi Capital Theory analogy: http://mises.org/daily/4993

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PS: a reader apologized for disagreeing with me. Don’t. I like disagreements or hearing another point of view or discovering that I am just plain wrong. As a fallible human, I hope to always be aware of my fallibility. We are all trying to learn.

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Valuation from a Strategic Perspective, Part 1: Shortcomings of the NPV Approach to Valuation

Posted on June 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

Review

For beginners and a review of Present Value—see these 10 minute videos: http://www.khanacademy.org/finance-economics/core-finance/v/introduction-to-present-value and  http://www.khanacademy.org/finance-economics/core-finance/v/present-value-2 and http://www.khanacademy.org/finance-economics/core-finance/v/present-value-3

and Discounted Present Value: http://www.khanacademy.org/finance-economics/core-finance/v/present-value-4–and-discounted-cash-flow

Prof. Damodaran’s Handout on NPV:DCF Basics by Damodaran

Prof. Greenwald Lecture Notes (See pages 10-13 on NPV Valuation):OVERVIEW Value_Investing_Slides

And The Dangers of Using DCF (Montier and Mauboussin)

CommonDCFErrors (Montier) and dangers-of-dcf (Mauboussin)

Part I: What are the three major shortcomings of using the Net Present Value Approach (“NPV”) to valuing companies?

The NPV approach has three fundamental shortcomings. First, it does not segregate reliable information from unreliable information when assessing the value of a project. A typical NPV model estimates net cash flows for several years into the future from the date at which the project is undertaken, incorporating the initial investment expenditures as negative cash flows. Five to ten years of cash flows are usually estimated explicitly. Cash flows beyond the last date are usually lumped together into something called a “terminal value.” A common method for calculating the terminal value is to derive the accounting earnings from the cash flows in the last explicitly estimated year and then to multiply those earning by a factor that represents an appropriate ratio of value to earnings (i.e., a P/E ratio). If the accounting earnings are estimated to be $12 million and the appropriate factor is a P/E ratio of 15 to 1, then the terminal value is $180 million.

How does one arrive at the appropriate factor, the proper price to earnings ratio? That depends on the characteristics of the business, whether a project or a company, a terminal date. It is usually selected by finding publicly traded companies whose current operating characteristics resemble those forecast for the enterprise in its terminal year, and then looking at how the securities markets value their earnings, meaning the P/E at which they trade. The important characteristics for selecting a similar company are growth rates, profitability, capital intensity, and riskiness.

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This wide range of plausible value has unfortunate implications for the use of NPV calculations in making investment decisions. Experience indicates that, except for the simplest projects focused on cost reduction, it is the terminal values that typically account for by far the greatest portion of any project’s net present value. With these terminal value calculations so imprecise, the reliability of the overall NPV calculation is seriously compromised, as are the investment decisions based on these estimates.

The problem is not the method of calculating terminal values. No better methods exist. The problem is intrinsic to the NPV approach. A NPV calculation takes reliable information, usually near-term cash flow estimates, and combines that with unreliable information, which is the estimated cash flows from a distant future that make up the terminal value. Then after applying discount rates, it simply adds all these cash flows together. It is an axiom of engineering that combining good information with bad information does not produce information of average quality. The result is bad information, because the errors from the bad information dominate the whole calculation. A fundamental problem with the NPV approach is that it does not effectively segregate good from bad information about value of the project.

A second practical shortcoming of the NPV approach to valuation is one to which we have already alluded. A valuation procedure is a method from moving from assumptions about the future to a calculated value of a project which unfolds over the course of that future. Ideally, it should be based on assumptions about the future that can reliable and sensibly be made today. Otherwise, the value calculation will be of little use.

For example, a sensible opinion can be formed about whether the automobile industry will still be economically viable twenty years from today. We can also form reasonable views of whether Fort or any company in the industry is likely. Twenty years in the future, to enjoy significant competitive advantages over the other automobile manufacturers (not likely). For a company such as Microsoft, which does enjoy significant competitive advantages today, we can think reasonable about the chances that these advantages will survive the next twenty years, whether they will increase, decrease, or continue as is.

But it is hard to forecast exactly how fast Ford’s sales will grow over the next two decades, what its profit margins will be, or how much will be requires to invest per dollars of revenue. Likewise, for a company like MSFT, projecting sales growth and profit margins is difficult for its current products and even more difficult for the new products that it will introduce over that time. Yet these are the assumptions that have to be made to arrive at a value based on NPV analysis. (See page 10 of Greenwald notes-link on blog post).

It is possible to make strategic assumptions about competitive advantages with more confidence, but these are not readily incorporated into an NPV calculation. Taken together, the NPV approach ‘s reliance on assumptions that are difficult to make and its omission of assumptions that can be made with more certainty are a second major shortcoming.

A third difficulty with the NPV approach is that it discards much information that is relevant to the calculation of the economic value of a company. There are two parts to value creation. The first is three sources that are devoted to the value creation process, the assets that the company employs. The second part is the distributable cash flows that are created by these invested resources. The NPV approach focused exclusively on the cash flows. In a competitive environment, the two will be closely related. The assets will earn ordinary –the cost of capital—returns. Therefore, knowing the resource levels will tell a good deal about likely future cash flows.

But if the resources are not effectively, then the value of the cash flows they generate will fall short of the dollars invested. There will always be other firms that can do better with similar resources, and competition from these firms will inevitably produce losses for the inefficient user. Even firms efficient in their use of resource may not create excess value in their cash flows,  so long as competition from equally environment, resource requirements carry important implications about likely future cash flows, and the NPV approach takes no advantage of this information.

All these criticisms of NPV would be immaterial if there were no alternative approach to valuation that met these objections. But in fact there is such an alternative. It does segregate reliable from unreliable information; it does incorporate strategic judgments about the current and future state competition in the industry; it does pay attention to a company’s resources. Because this approach had been developed and applied by investors in marketable securities, starting with Ben Graham and continuing through Warren Buffett and a host of others, we will describe this alternative methodology in the context of valuing a company as a whole in Part II.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND

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Free Lectures on Austrian Economics; Do Value Investors Add Value? Investing Wisdom for the Young

Posted on June 15, 2012 | Leave a comment
Austrian Economics

Mises Academy at www.mises.org (click on academy tab) is offering a free lecture on microeconomics. Register and attend the free lecture by Peter Klein. You will get a flavor for the courses. I have taken several and have enjoyed the interaction. Go here: http://academy.mises.org/courses/microeconomics/

The book for the course is an excellent primer on Austrian (real world) economic thinking. I suggest you read this book, Foundations of the Market Price System by Milton Shapiro before you tackle Man, Economy and State by Rothbard or Human Action by Mises.

http://library.mises.org/books/Milton%20M%20Shapiro/Foundations%20of%20the%20Market%20Price%20System.pdf

Lecture on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle by Dr. Roger Garrison : ttp://youtu.be/jFqtTj7TeO0

Visual Study of the Austrian Trade Cycle (“ABCT”). Read this before seeing the above lecture to gain more insights into booms and busts.Visual Explanation of the Austrian Trade Cycle By Garrison I would never invest in commodity cyclical businesses unless I understood ABCT.

The Case For Quantitative Value Investment

My favorite investing blog has a white paper on active vs. passive investing.

http://greenbackd.com/2012/06/13/simple-but-not-easy-the-case-for-quantitative-value-white-paper/

Investing Wisdom for the Ages

http://greenbackd.com/2012/06/11/how-to-best-prepare-for-a-lifetime-of-good-investing/

http://abnormalreturns.com/finance-blogger-wisdom-a-lifetime-of-good-investing/

The Secret to Losing Weight

American Prisoner Alan Gross after fours years in Castro’s Gulag

Casualties of War

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Affirming the Case for Quality (GMO White Paper); Share Repurchases

Posted on June 11, 2012 | 7 Comments

Quality Companies are often under appreciated by investors

I hope my wretched scribbling will help your investing journey. We want to learn from the lessons all around us. Study failure so as not to pay a high tuition for knowledge and study success so as to develop your own investment method.  Yes, it is fun to point out the disasters like Sunpeak Ventures (SNPK)—nothing but a “pump and dump”—yet focusing on great companies is more valuable, yet less popular than you might think. Your time is best spent understanding and investing in great companies—either hidden champions that are emerging or dominate hidden niches or great franchises with dominant moats.  This is why I try to write often about competitive advantage, franchises, and quality businesses.

Here is a GMO White Paper (June 2012) that affirms the case for quality. Companies with high and stable profits (KO, PEP, EXPD, M, and GOOG) tend to have lower bankruptcy risk, lower leverage and generally higher returns compared to risk of loss. Please read carefully: GMO_WP_-_2012_06_-_Profits_for_the_Long_Run_-_Affirming_Quality

Ben Graham argued that real risk was “the danger of a loss of quality and earning power through economic changes or deterioration in management.”

The returns earned by stock investors are entirely a function of the underlying corporate profits of the stocks held in a portfolio.  Note the focus that Buffett has placed on knowing where a business will be in five to ten years—a chewing gum company versus a high tech start-up). As he says, “We favor businesses and industries unlikely to experience major change…operations that….are virtually certain to possess enormous competitive strength ten or twenty years from now. A fast changing industry environment may offer the chance for huge wins, but it precludes the certainty we seek.”

Oligopolies tend not to revert—note the persistence of corporate profitability of companies that operate within corporate barriers.

Look at the stability of companies like Tootsie Roll and WD-40. Tootsie Roll (Tootsie Roll_VL) has slowly declining returns on capital but it is shrinking its capital structure. Note the low price variability. Everyone knows about WD-40 (WDFC) (lubricant oil) and Tootsie Roll (candy)—the products will not disappear in the customers’ minds nor become obsolete.

Note on page 4 of the GMO White Paper: While it has become conventional wisdom that the market misprices price-based risk factors like low beta outperforms high beta, we find that it also misprices fundamental risk. . Companies that report negative net income underperform the market by a whopping 8% per annum. The market overpays for risk at the corporate level in much the same way that it overvalues the risk of high beta stocks. Conversely investors had historically underpaid for the low risk attributes of high quality companies.  To us (GMO), investing in Quality companies simply exploits the long-term opportunity offered by the predictability of profits in conjunction with the market’s lack of interest in the anomaly. Their predictability higher profits are not quite high enough to command the attention of a market in thrall to the possibility of the next big jackpot. 

Lesson: focus on quality companies to find better returns for lower risk.

Radio Show on Quality Stocks

For beginners and (those who are willing to sit through or skip the commercials), there are discussions about high clean-surplus ROE companies here: http://www.buffettandbeyond.com/radio.html

More on corporate buybacks

Assessing Buybacks from all Angles_Mauboussin

Prize

Tomorow I will post the prize to all those who lent their wisdom to: http://wp.me/p1PgpH-Qw

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MF Global Accounting Lesson

Posted on June 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a great defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. –Sun Tsz 2,500 years ago

When you come to the market, bring your investment discipline; bring your analytical powers; bring humility.–the Two Cents Philosopher

June 7, 2012 at www.nytimes.com

Accounting Backfired at MF Global

This article illustrates the importance of converting accounting information into economic reality and the pitfalls for both management and investors when ignored. 

By FLOYD NORRIS

Back when I was studying accounting at Columbia University’s business school, the professor had a handy way to determine whether it made sense for a company to recognize revenue: Had it completed the hard task in its business?

GAAP — generally accepted accounting rules — were not so simple, he said, and sometimes let companies record revenue — and post profits — far too early. Companies that took advantage of such rules could well be reporting earnings they would never see.

The hard task varied from business to business, he said. For a farmer, the hard part was done when the crop was harvested. Even if it had not yet been sold, there was a ready market for corn or soybeans or whatever, and money had been earned. For a manufacturer of tourist tchotchkes, making them was the easy part. Persuading someone to buy them was the difficult part, and revenue recognition should be delayed.

Over the years, I’ve seen any number of accounting disasters, ranging from Enron to subprime mortgages, where that simple principle was ignored. Sometimes that accounting was within the limits of GAAP and sometimes it was not. In all cases, it produced profits that vanished before they were actually realized.

Now there is another example at MF Global, the brokerage firm that Jon Corzine ran into the ground.

The accounting maneuver allowed MF Global to buy bonds issued by European countries and book profits the same day. That is the rough equivalent of a farmer’s booking profits as soon as he plants the crop.

To be fair to MF Global, it did disclose what it was doing in a footnote to its financial statements. The accounting appears to have been proper under accounting rules that are now being reconsidered.

In a minute, I’ll explain exactly what the company did and how the accounting rules came to make it possible to report profits that were at best premature and at worst fictional.

But for now, consider the effect such rules had. MF Global, when Mr. Corzine took it over in 2010, was unprofitable. Here was a way to report instant profits and make the financials look better. There is no way to know whether the firm would have taken fewer risks without the foolish accounting, but perhaps it would have. In any case, regulators and investors might have seen a less rosy — and more realistic — picture in the months leading up to the firm’s failure last fall.

The transactions were laid out this week in reports from two trustees trying to unravel the MF Global mess and return as much money as possible to customers.

The fact that there are two trustees, one appointed by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which provides reimbursement for brokerage customers under some circumstances, and the other by the bankruptcy court judge, only begins to address the complexities of the mess made by Mr. Corzine. There are also “special administrators” in London, since many of the trades were carried out through a British subsidiary. The three sets of trustees and administrators have spent a lot of time fighting one another.

“Among the lines of business that Mr. Corzine built up to attempt to improve profitability at MF Global was the trading of a portfolio of European debt securities,” states the report by the SIPC trustee, James W. Giddens. “These trades provided paper profits booked at the time of the trades, but presented substantial liquidity risks including significant margin demands that put further stress on MF Global’s daily cash needs.”

How, you might wonder, could MF Global report profits immediately? Shouldn’t it wait for interest to be paid on the bonds, or at least for the market value of the bonds to rise?

To my old professor, the answer to that would have been yes. But that is not what the rules said.

To explain how that worked, we must venture into the world of repos. But don’t let your eyes glaze over. A repo in reality is usually just a loan. The lender gets an agreed rate of interest, and it gets possession of the collateral while the loan is outstanding. That way, if there is a default by the borrower, the lender can sell the collateral and not have to wait to be paid.

MF Global having bought a Spanish government bond, for example, would then repo it, meaning it would turn over the bond in return for a loan. MF Global would get the cash, but it retained all the rewards and risks of owning the actual security. If the bond defaulted, MF Global would suffer the loss.

Most repos are accounted for as loans. But sometimes they are accounted for as sales. One such case involves what are called “repos to maturity,” or R.T.M.’s, in which the repo does not expire until the security matures. MF Global called these transactions R.T.M.’s even though they expired two days before maturity. That was because a London clearinghouse, which was on the other side of the trades, was not willing to lend the money for that long. It wanted to be repaid before the bond reached maturity, so as to be protected from loss if the bond went into default at maturity.

Under the rule, MF Global could say it had sold the bond, not just lent it out. And with a sale, it could post a profit based on the fact that it borrowed more than it paid for the bond. Theoretically, it should have also taken a reserve for the fair value of the default risk it was taking. The details are not clear, but it appears that reserve was not very large, leaving MF Global with a profit to report.

Just now, that seems truly absurd. But the Financial Accounting Standards Board says that until MF Global failed, no one had complained about the rule. Since then, the chief accountant’s office at the Securities and Exchange Commission has voiced concern, and the board hopes to propose a new rule later this year.

I wondered how that rule came to exist. The answer, as in many cases of abused accounting rules, seems to be that FASB was trying to stop a different abuse.

That abuse came years ago, when United States Treasury securities were trading at large discounts to face value.

That was because interest rates had risen, not because anyone doubted the bonds would be repaid. Under the accounting rules, owners did not have to take losses on the bonds so long as they held onto them, no matter how low the market price was. But if they sold them, they had to take the loss.

Enter the clever strategy. The owners would do repos on the bonds, and treat them as loans. The repos would not expire until the bonds matured.

For all practical purposes the owner had sold the bonds at a loss, been paid for them and moved on to other investments, but no loss showed up on his financial statements.

The FASB ruled that a “repo to maturity” was really a sale. In the above case the owner of the bond would have to report a sale, not a borrowing, and report the loss.

The accounting board provided guidance indicating that if the repo ended very close to maturity, that amounted to the same thing. That made sense if you ignored default risks, and in those days repos were usually of very high-quality bonds with little or no chance of default.

That is the rule that MF Global was able to use, except that rather than avoiding a real loss, as in the previous case, this time it was reporting a profit that would arrive only if the countries were able to pay their debts.

As everyone knows now, people grew nervous about sovereign credit over the last couple of years. Regulators worried about the risky nature of the sovereign debt forced MF Global to maintain higher capital levels, which the report by the bankruptcy trustee indicates the firm tried to evade by shifting some of the positions to an unregulated subsidiary.

But the firm still needed more and more cash to meet margin calls as the market value of the bonds fell. In the end, it ran out of cash, and — intentionally or otherwise — seems to have misappropriated hundreds of millions of dollars from customer accounts.

It would be wrong to say bad accounting caused MF Global to fail. But it did both encourage and obscure risk-taking that ended in collapse and scandal.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

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