Tag Archives: Fiat Currencies

India’s Economic Suicide; Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research

very-bad-boy

Indian Prime Minister Nahendra Modi has declared 500 and 1,000 rupee notes illegal for exchange. Since these are worth a mere $7.26 and $14.53, he has de facto ended paper currency for use in all major transactions.

Half the population do not have bank accounts, and consumer trade has come to a screeching halt. That is because the highest permitted denomination fetches only about one US dollar, and exchanging the larger notes requires long waits and government identification, which a quarter of Indians do not possess.

Beyond the self-inflicted economic crisis, Jayant Bhandari says India is becoming a police state. She is on a fast track to banana-republic status, before fragmentation into smaller political units.

The gold market in India is in chaos, as people rid themselves of the domestic fiat currency: the price per ounce has skyrocketed to above $2,000, and tax authorities are blocking the retailers. This means the black market is set to boom, as smugglers adapt to the new opportunity, but import demand from India has dropped momentarily, since the formal markets are under the gun.

Hear the podcast: http://goldnewsletter.com/podcast/jayant-bhandari-indias-economic-suicide/

See articles: http://www.acting-man.com/?p=47966

Another dent in confidence of fiat currencies. What are YOUR thoughts. Lessons?  I will pay $1 million dollars to ANYONE who can tell me how central planning helps people increase wealth over time vs. free exchange.

The balance between quantitative and qualitative research

“There’s so much you can tell in a 10-minute tour of a plant.

I can tell you right away whether we’re making money, if we have quality or delivery issues (so customer issues) and if there’s a morale problem. It’s easy to tell.

But you can’t tell until you go there.”

– Linda Hasenfratz, CEO Linamar Corporation, in conversation with The Women of Burgundy, September 21, 2016

One of the familiar tensions underlying the quality-value investment discipline is the balance between quantitative and qualitative research. Many investors intuitively understand the importance of assessing the quantitative aspects of a business. We analyze the numbers to understand what level of return the business is generating for its shareholders, what level of debt sits on the balance sheet, and whether the cash flows into the business are stable and recurring, for example.

While a quantitative assessment is vital to an investment decision, it is not complete without a qualitative framework to guide its meaning. For instance, it is not just the level of debt on the balance sheet that matters, but whether those debt levels are appropriate for the business. It’s not just a historical record of stable cash flows that gives us confidence, but rather an understanding of the economic moat that protects those cash flows from future competition.

It is with this background that I find Linda Hasenfratz’s quote truly compelling. As CEO of Linamar, she is responsible for running a global manufacturing business that spans 13 countries around the world. She may be able to look at the financial metrics to assess how her business is doing, but for Hasenfratz it is clear that a true, holistic understanding of the business comes from walking the halls of manufacturing plants and speaking face-to-face with her management teams around the world.

Her words were a welcome reminder about the importance of being there, on the ground, to gain a complete qualitative understanding of the operations. As I listened, I felt as if a member of our Investment Team had been dropped into her seat. Take, for instance, the excerpt below from the June 2016 issue of The View from Burgundy, “Boots on the Ground,” which brings us along on a site tour of a Chinese flavour and fragrance company’s R&D facility:

“Normally lab environments are tightly controlled, but in this case, rooms labelled ‘temperature controlled’ had open windows, letting in both the hot summer air and a fair share of local insects. What’s more, the facility was curiously devoid of employees, and the few research staff we did encounter were surly and unapproachable. It seemed odd to us that a company could have its main R&D facility in such a state of inactivity and disrepair, while reporting seemingly world-leading profitability in a highly competitive research-driven industry.

Our negative impression from the site tour provided useful information that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to acquire had we not done the on-the-ground work. It prevented us from making an investment in what had appeared on paper to be an attractive business, provided one didn’t scrutinize its operations – an example of why relying on company-produced financial statements alone is not sufficient when conducting due diligence.”

In other words, the science of investing is never complete without the art.

PS:

India Confiscates Gold, Even Jewelry, in Raids on Hidden Money

Global financial repression picks up steam, led by India. After declaring large denomination notes illegal, India now targets gold.

It’s not just gold bars or bullion. The government has raided houses, no questions asked, confiscating jewelry.

For background to this article, please see my November 27 article Cash Chaos in India, 86% of Money in Circulation Withdrawn; Cash Still King in Japan.

Large denomination means 500-rupee ($7.30) and 1,000-rupee notes ($14.60), which account for more than 85 percent of the money supply. They are no longer legal tender, effective immediately.

As one might imagine, chaos ensued. And it continues.

India Confiscates Gold

india-gold

Picking up where we left off, please consider Message to Modi: Do No More Harm by Mihir Sharma.

The chaos accompanying “demonetization” hasn’t eased up noticeably. It seems likely the disruption to the economy, especially in cash-centric rural India, will hit growth sharply for at least a few quarters. It’s tough to say for how long and by how much; we are in uncharted territory here and guesses have varied widely. But many analysts agree with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who’s predicting the new policy will knock 2 percentage points off that world-beating GDP growth rate.

Demonetization was originally sold as a “surgical strike on black money”— the illicit piles of cash many rich Indians have accumulated out of sight of the taxman. It’s now clear the policy has been anything but surgical. Worse, uncomfortable questions are being asked about whether the complicated rules and exemptions that have accompanied demonetization have allowed black-money holders to launder most of their cash. Of late, Modi’s chosen to focus instead on demonetization as means of advancing a cashless economy.

Yet the idea of a war on unaccounted-for wealth remains central to demonetization’s popular appeal, which means Modi will have to find other ways to keep that narrative going. So the government has now begun to push income-tax officials to conduct raids on those who might be concealing assets in forms other than cash, such as gold.

There’s already enough fear of such raids becoming common again that the government felt the need to step in to quell some of the anxiety. That didn’t help much. The government “clarified,”  among other things, the rules governing when tax officials could seize gold: Nothing would happen “if the holding is limited to 500 grams per married woman, 250 grams per unmarried woman and 100 grams per male.” It also said that there would be no limits on jewelry “provided it is acquired… from inheritance.” Also, the “officer conducting [the] search has discretion to not seize [an] even higher quantity of gold jewelry.”

What this means, unfortunately, is that India’s income tax officers have just won the lottery. During a raid, they can, on the spot, decide whether or not to confiscate a family’s gold holdings. And remember, India has an enormous amount of gold — 20,000 metric tons, much of it inherited. (The rules governing simple searches are different, but few know that.) Rather than cleaning up tax administration, the government has handed tax officials more power than they’ve had for decades. The rich will pay what they need to escape harassment; the rest will suffer.

Rich Escape, Poor and Middle Class Suffer

The last line in the preceding article says all you need to know about what’s happening: “The rich will pay what they need to escape harassment; the rest will suffer.”

Evidence suggests the politically connected, and their friends, knew about the ban on cash and acted in advance. Everyone else is stuck.

India’s raid on gold reinforces its ban on cash. Short term aside, these kinds of actions will increase demand for gold.

What’s Next?

I keep wondering: what’s next? People pretend they know, I admit I do not. However, I am quite sure a currency crisis is coming. Where it strikes first is unknown, but the list of likely candidates increases every year.

My spotlight has been on Japan, China, and the EU. India caught me off guard, but it adheres to my general theory this pot will eventually boil over in a cascade from an unexpected place, outside the US.

US actions may cause a currency crisis, but I believe a crisis will hit elsewhere first. If I am correct, gold will be the safe haven, regardless of currency, but especially where the crisis hits.

Mike “Mish” Shedlock

 

Ben Graham’s Curse on Gold or the Counter-Argument to Buffett’s Attack on Gold

Our Goal as An Investor Is to Maintain THE Purchasing Power of our investments

Ben Graham’s Curse on Gold

By David Galland, Casey Research

It seems that the mainstream investment community only takes a break from ignoring gold to berate it: one of gold’s most outspoken critics, uber-investor Warren Buffett, did so recently in his latest shareholder letter. The indictments were familiar; gold is an inanimate object “incapable of producing anything,” so any investor holding it instead of stocks is acting out of irrational fear.

How can it be that Buffett, perhaps the most successful (and definitely the most well-known) investor of our time, believes that gold has no place in an intelligently allocated investment portfolio?

Perhaps it has something to do with his mentor, Benjamin Graham.

Graham, author of Security Analysis (1934) and The Intelligent Investor (1949), is correctly respected as one of history’s most knowledgeable investors. Over a career spanning 1915 to 1956, he refined his investment theories, in time becoming known as the father of value investing. Much of modern portfolio theory is based upon Graham’s work.

According to Graham, while no one can tell the future, there are periods when the valuations of stocks and bonds would deviate from fair value by becoming excessively over-or-undervalued. To enhance returns and reduce risk, investors should alter their portfolio allocations accordingly. A quick look at a long-term chart supports Graham’s theory clearly shows periods when one asset class offered a better value than the other:

But what of the periods when both stocks and bonds stagnated or fell together? For much of the 1970s and again from 2001 through today, any portfolio allocated solely between stocks and bonds would have at best treaded water and at worst drowned in a sea of stagflation. To earn any real return, an investor would have needed to seek alternatives.

It’s clear from this next chart that gold was exactly that alternative, a powerful counter-trend investment for periods when both stocks and bonds were overvalued. Yet gold is conspicuously absent from Graham’s allocation model.

But this missing asset class is entirely understandable: for most of Graham’s adult life and the most important years of his career, ownership of more than a small amount of gold was outlawed. Banned for private ownership by FDR in 1933, it wasn’t re-legalized until late 1974. Graham passed away in 1976; he thus never lived through a period in which gold was unmistakably a better investment than either stocks or bonds.

All of which makes us wonder: if Graham had lived to witness the two great bull markets in precious metals during the last 40 years, would he have updated his allocation models to include gold?

We can never know.

We can know, however, that given Graham’s outsized influence on investment theory, there is little question that his lack of experience with gold, and therefore its absence from his observations, has had a profound effect on how most investment professionals view the yellow metal. This, in our opinion, goes a long way toward explaining the persistently low esteem in which gold is held by the mainstream investment community. And, as a consequence, its widespread failure to even be considered as an asset class.

A couple of takeaways: first, perhaps now you can stop wondering why your broker, the talking heads in the financial media, and Warren Buffett continue to misunderstand gold as a portfolio holding. More importantly, however, is that in order to have sustained, long-term investment success, one must accept that an intelligent portfolio allocation needs to include not two but three broad categories of investment – stocks, bonds and gold, with the amounts allocated to each guided by relative valuation.

Given the powerful influence of Ben Graham and his disciples, his curse on gold will not go quietly into the night. But it should.

My take: Gold is not an investment; it is simply non-fiat money or gold is the reciprocal of the market’s view of current and future debasement of fiat currencies.

Your thoughts?