Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive Office Charlie Scharf said there are significant risks to segments of the US office sector and that his bank will see losses stemming from real estate loans.

“We look city by city, we look property by property to look at our exposures, and I would say there’s no question that there will be losses,” Scharf said Wednesday at a conference hosted by AllianceBernstein Holding LP. The San Francisco-based bank is proactively managing its loan portfolio and working with borrowers to restructure terms with the goal of helping clients and minimizing risk, he said. 

Many office owners are struggling amid the rise in remote work and the surge in borrowing costs, which has made financing more difficult. Landlords such as Columbia Property Trust, owned by funds managed by Pacific Investment Management Co., have defaulted on office debt, often in a bid to renegotiate terms with lenders. Brookfield Corp. recently handed over control of a building in downtown Los Angeles to a receiver after it stopped payments on the office tower.

“If you’re reserving conservatively, then you’ve derisked the financial impact to the company,” Scharf said, noting that Wells Fargo has a little less than 6% reserve coverage in its office portfolio. “In the context of the overall portfolio and the overall size of our loan portfolio in the company, we’re not overly concentrated in office.”

I was speaking with a friend in San Francisco recently who related the story of a major landmark office building. The building had leased at $1000 a square foot before the pandemic. Today it is vacant despite rates having fallen to $200 and there is speculation it will eventually lease for $100. The cost of retrofitting the building to make it residential is $750 and the cost to knock it and completely rebuild is also $750. That’s a white elephant project no one is going to touch and it is only one example. 

By 2050, the UK’s Environment Agency expects the gap between available water and what’s needed by homes and businesses to reach 4 billion liters per day in England — enough to fill 1,600 Olympic size swimming pools. Leaks are part of the picture, but so is a neglected network, some of which was built more than 150 years ago, that doesn’t store enough for times of drought, and water consumption that outstrips many other parts of Europe.

The crisis has become a national obsession. The public is furious with a privatized English water industry that has paid out millions to executives and shareholders while failing to keep pace with population growth and climate pressures, and the government and regulators that have allowed it to happen. As well as the threat of water shortages, underdeveloped pipes and treatment plants mean raw sewage is frequently dumped in rivers and the sea, causing environmental damage.

Now, after years of delays, the UK is racing to fix its broken water system before it’s too late. “The worst risk has not materialized yet,” says Jim Hall, a professor of climate and environmental risk at Oxford University and a member of the government’s official infrastructure adviser. “There is some sense until now that we’ve got away with it,” he says, but “a severe and prolonged drought could materialize at any time.”

The population of Greater London declined between the 1950s and early 1980s but then jumped around 50% over the last forty years. There was no incentive to invest in water infrastructure during a time of declining population growth and it takes a long time for institutional mindsets to change. Today, there is urgency to the investment case because urgent remedial action in both storage and usage are necessary. 

Mounting rate-hike expectations have pushed short-term yields up relative to longer-term ones, flattening the Treasury curve. The flattening continued Tuesday as yields declined, briefly pushing 30-year yields below the five-year for the first time since March.

The trend has temporary support from Wednesday’s month-end bond index rebalancing, which may create demand for the long-maturity Treasuries created during the month in quarterly auctions. 

Later this week, Friday’s release of US labor market data for May has the potential to alter expectations for Fed policy. Job creation exceeded economists’ median estimate in April and each of the previous 12 months. However Fed officials in their public comments have been divided on how to balance an anti-inflationary stance with the possibility that the central bank’s 10 rate increases totaling 5 percentage points in the past 14 months warrant a pause in June.

The deal announced over the weekend relies on capping spending and growing defense spending below the rate of inflation. The headline impact will be to grow the national debt less quickly. That is supporting Treasury prices today. 

But the latest swing higher in real yields shows that in spite of fraught debt-ceiling negotiations, the world’s biggest bond market senses another jolt of policy tightening and an extended period of staying on hold may be warranted. A similar outlook is being echoed in the swaps market, with traders almost fully pricing in a quarter-point hike within the next two policy meetings.

That view has found support in recent data pointing to a resilient US economy and sticky inflation. A report on Friday showed the inflation rate for US personal spending on items excluding food and energy running firmer than forecast at an annual pace of 4.7% in April. That comes amid upside surprises in UK and European inflation numbers, reminders that central banks may have more work to do and bond yields may keep climbing. 
 

PCE inflation, the trimmed kind followed by economists who don’t like volatile real life data, surprised on the upside today. That is a mirror of the UK result earlier this week. It suggests the primary sources of inflation are now services and shelter. The sources of inflation which can be influenced by interest rates are already subsiding. For example food prices are now contracting. 

Treasury-bill yields slated to mature early next month surged, driving them above 7% amid building concern that talks in Washington will fail to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis and the US might default.

The rate on the June 1 and June 6 maturities soared more than a percentage point on the day, while others for early June also climbed sharply. By comparison, the earliest June tenors yield around 4 percentage points above the May 30 issue. 

The Fed minutes reflected a split decision between hiking and holding rates. They are not talking about cutting rates but they seldom do until they are actually doing it. The next question is how quickly a deal on the debt ceiling will be made. 

A temporary slowdown in inflation may give Egypt’s MPC room to pause, especially after Governor Hassan Abdalla signaled higher interest rates are doing little to cool prices.

The central bank “is likely to remain data-led, and will see declining global commodity prices and a reduction in domestic inflation as supportive of their current monetary stance,” said Farouk Soussa, an economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The monetary authority sees inflationary pressures stoked mainly by supply issues, “reducing the rationale for a further hike in the medium term,” he said.

Emerging markets have no choice but to aggressively hike rates when inflation surges. They don’t have deep domestic capital markets and rely on offering a real rate of return to attract inward investment. Egypt’s year over year inflation has probably peaked at around 30% but with overnight rates closer to 18%, there are still sharply negative real rates. That’s the primary reason for the downtrend in the Egyptian Pound. 

President Joe Biden expressed confidence that negotiators would reach an agreement to avoid a catastrophic default, even as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy criticized his decision to travel to Japan for an international summit.

“I’m confident that we’ll get the agreement on the budget and that America will not default,” Biden said Wednesday at the White House, shortly before departing to Hiroshima, Japan for a Group of Seven leaders summit.

On Capitol Hill, McCarthy and other Republican lawmakers criticized Biden for his decision to travel, with the House speaker labeling the president “a big obstacle” to an agreement.

“Mr. President, stop hiding, stop traveling,” McCarthy said.

On Tuesday, Biden and congressional leaders agreed to a new narrower round of staff-level talks with hopes of reaching a bipartisan deal to avoid an unprecedented US default. The US president also announced he was canceling planned stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea, and would return to Washington by the beginning of next week for continued negotiations.

The decision to attend the G7 meeting is a clear signal there are more important issues at stake than the inward facing decision about how spending and taxing priorities are apportioned. Holding the sovereign debt market to ransom is not the most productive use of anyone’s time but at least it ensures there is a discussion about the trajectory and sustainability of the national debt and obligations. 

Codelco’s production is down by about a fifth from only six years ago. After a double-digit-percentage drop in 2022, it’s expected to fall as much as 7% this year, to 1.35 million metric tons.

Ore quality is deteriorating around the world as existing deposits are depleted and new ones are more difficult and costly to develop. “There’s no easy mining left—not in Chile nor the rest of the world,” said Sougarret at a shareholders meeting on May 2.

Because Codelco is the world’s biggest copper supplier, its production wobbles have greater impact on a market where warehouse inventories are near their lowest levels in 18 years. The company’s travails also have tremendous impact on Chile’s economy: Copper accounts for more than half of the country’s exports and a significant share of the government’s income. President Gabriel Boric’s administration is budgeting a 40% drop in tax revenue from Codelco in 2023 at a time when it’s trying to boost social spending.

When the world is having difficulty sustaining production of a key commodity, it is reasonable to expect prices to rise. That’s generally the best way to attract the risk capital required to bring new supply online. It will not have escaped the notice of traders that copper prices are falling. That suggests one should be more concerned with demand than supply. 

The US dollar is on pace for its biggest rise in nearly two months as concerns about a slowing US economy, hawkish policy messaging, a US debt-ceiling standoff and the solvency of regional banks supported havens. The pound fell after the Bank of England lifted its policy rate 25 basis points and indicated more hikes may be required to slow inflation.

The dollar firmed today as more of risk-off move than any other factor. When investors seek the haven of cash they end up holding dollars. Bond yields also compressed as some of that cash was redeployed in the expectation that during a recession, inflationary pressures are likely to go into reverse. 

“Unfortunately, the negative sentiment is dragging down the real estate sector more broadly,” the firm’s president, Connor Teskey, told investors during an earnings call Wednesday. “We think that’s completely unfair.” 

The Brookfield group is one of the world’s largest owners of prime office properties, with a portfolio that includes New York’s Manhattan West and London’s Canary Wharf. Office landlords in major cities around the world are being squeezed by a combination of higher borrowing costs and lower occupancy, as many companies continue to allow employees to work from home at least part of the time. 

Brookfield Asset’s parent company has defaulted on mortgages covering more than a dozen office buildings, mostly in Los Angeles and around Washington.

The property market is “bifurcated” as high-quality assets perform well and lower-quality assets struggle, Teskey said on the call. 

 

The durability of the work from home phenomenon will be tested by the upcoming recession. I’ve been working from home since 2007 and I can attest the better description is you live at work. However, the experience of entrepreneurial people versus those simply marking time is very different.  Flexible time arrangements are not appropriate for every position. Efficiency metrics will quickly be developed to decide whether the cost of a large office building is outweighed by the productivity gain for happier more flexible workers. 

US officials are coordinating talks to rescue First Republic, with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve orchestrating meetings about throwing a lifeline, Reuters reported, citing unidentified people. 

But some of the biggest US banks, which have already contributed $30 billion in deposits to prop up First Republic, have balked at getting more involved and potentially throwing good money after bad, Bloomberg News reported. 

The focus has shifted to a US takeover, according to CNBC. For its part, First Republic has acknowledged it’s engaged in discussions with multiple parties about strategic options.

It is very likely today is First Republic’s last day of active trading. Trading was halted on several occasions today as the stock plunged anew. By the end of the weekend a deal will have been completed for a large bank like JPMorgan to take it over. 

The outlook depends largely on the resiliency of the job market. Low unemployment and persistent wage gains have so far allowed consumers to weather high inflation and keep spending.

The personal consumption expenditures price index grew at an 4.2% annualized pace in the January to March period. Excluding food and energy, the index rose 4.9%, faster than forecast and the most in a year. March data will be released Friday. Services inflation remained hot while prices of non-durable goods accelerated.

The inflation and consumer spending figures likely keep the Fed on track to raise interest rates by a quarter percentage point next week. First Republic Bank’s continuing struggles, however, do raise the possibility that the central bank could pause.

Consumer demand surged in the early part of the first quarter and eased back in the later part of the quarter. At the same time economic growth eased and inflation increased. 

Aggregate hours worked in the private sector declined in February and declined again in March. Last week we walked through why we estimate the labor market has come back into alignment over the course of the last year. We also note that for all the talk of labor hoarding, filings of initial claims for unemployment insurance over the last four weeks have run higher than all of 2019 and most of 2018. Layoff announcements have been running above the post-GFC pace. Clearly some employers are laying off.

In our economic baseline, we assume the labor market carves out a peak this summer, and we pencilled in the July employment report as the time we expect the first negative payroll print. We'll see. However, our empirical models are moving that way. In the recent compendium (on page 17 at this link) , a leading indicator model developed by UBS's Pierre Lafourcade noted that a rising share were in contraction (defined as having passed a cyclical peak), and the same for a broader set of employment indicators that reflect labor market conditions.

"Historically, once roughly 50% of all series contract, payrolls go negative (which is intuitive), but it's the leading indicator bucket that tells you when that is likely to happen (it shoots up from 40% to 80% of series contracting in just a few months). The upshot is that while private non-farm employment is still growing, an increasing share of the underlying dynamics is turning sour," he wrote in the compendium in late March.

The big question for all investors is the rationale for raising rates. The answer to that question will inform the decision on how much they will cut rates during a downturn and how long rates will stay down before tightening resumes.

I see four scenarios: 

However, lower risk in emerging markets isn’t just a China story. Fundamentals have also improved more broadly. Over the past 20 years, per capita GDP in emerging markets has roughly doubled as a share of developed markets (Exhibit 5, left side). Measures of external vulnerabilities have also improved from their periods of peak fragility in the 1980s and 1990s. Current account balances in emerging markets are now positive in aggregate, and measures of external debt sustainability (e.g., external debt as a percentage of exports) look much healthier (Exhibit 5, right side).

Bottom line: there are many reasons to believe that the relatively attractive valuations found in emerging markets represent a 5-10 year opportunity. In other words, the current expected premium is likely due to these markets being relatively underpriced, as opposed to representing compensation for assuming meaningfully greater portfolio risk.

The technology sector is a bet on the future and as such it is a long duration asset. When rates are low and credit is abundant, the penalty for taking long-term bets declines and the allure of those assets is boosted. Cashflows, valuations and sustainability are only truly relevant when there is a discount rate to compare them to. Another way of thinking about it is expected returns tend to fall when bond yields are high. In order to surmount the hurdle rate of money market funds, fundamentals and valuations matter. 

What is FedNow?
FedNow is an instant payments system—a sort of update to Fedwire and the Automated Clearinghouse (ACH). Individuals will not have direct access to FedNow, but they will have access to faster payments so long as their bank or credit union opts into the FedNow network. Although creating FedNow was not necessary to achieve faster payments, one big difference with FedNow will be that payments will no longer be held up on weekends, holidays, or after traditional business hours.
FedNow is Not a CBDC
Astute eyes will likely recognize that FedNow does vaguely resemble a wholesale CBDC. Where a wholesale CBDC would be restricted to financial institutions for use during interbank settlement, FedNow would also be restricted to financial institutions. The difference, however, lies in their design. Where a CBDC is a currency, FedNow is a payment rail. If we think of dollars and cents as water, then FedNow is the plumbing that gets those dollars and cents where they need to go. In contrast, a CBDC would involve replacing the water itself in this analogy.

Under the current system, interbank settlement is performed on the Federal Reserve’s payment rails, thus ultimately affecting retail banking customers’ settlement times. It’s for this reason that Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman said, “My expectation is that FedNow addresses the issues that some have raised about the need for a CBDC.” This statement should not be misunderstood to say that FedNow will take CBDCs off the table, but it does show that the Federal Reserve itself sees FedNow and CBDCs as distinctly different.

There are many ways the Fed could speed up payments and transactions across the economy. Afterall, the USA is still somewhere cheques are commonplace. However, I think the reason they chose to use the FedNow protocol is to blunt the thrust of the digital currency movement. 

So that’s where we are at the minute. I think they’re rushing round trying to do something piece-by-piece. I suspect that in the last-, since the blowout of gilt yields, I see a moving hand here, rather than someone playing whack-a-mole. I see a government, increasingly, that they’re somewhere in there, whether it’s in the treasury of somewhere else, that realises the direction of travel has to be financial repression. So, I think the best example of that in the UK is, I don’t know if he’s passed it yet, but Rishi Sunak was looked for the power to overhaul all our financial regulators to push that power into the hands of the prime minister. The question is why? As chancellor of the exchequer, this is not a power that he sought.

So, I think people are beginning to realise that, yes, you can go round and whack-a-mole, so it’s happening anyway, but there could come a time where we have to something more aggressive. For me, it’s pretty obvious what that aggressive is, which is forcing savings institutions to buy government bonds. That’s the core of a financial repression. We haven’t taken that giant leap yet, but I think since the crisis in the gilt market, there is evidence I think, that someone realises that that is where we might end up and they’re preparing to have to take that leap. To stress this is not a UK problem, it’s the entire developed world and actually, Japan might have to go first in terms of that major jump.

Inflation running well above the prevailing interest rate for a prolonged period will improve government debt to GDP ratios. The caveat is the total debt cannot simultaneously continue to accelerate higher. That’s the route to hyperinflation. Therefore financial repression works by changing the weightings of where credit is created and pushes the burden from the public sector back onto the private sector. 

Ether's dominance rate remains stagnant between 19% and 20%. That compares with a rise to 21% from 14% in the weeks before a software upgrade last September known as the Merge. That technological overhaul replaced Ethereum's at-the-time energy-intensive proof-of-work mechanism of verifying transactions with a proof-of-stake system and set the stage for Shanghai. Staking involves depositing coins in the blockchain to boost the network's security and verify transactions in return for rewards.

Investor caution in pricing ether ahead of Shanghai stems from several factors, including concerns tokens unlocked after the upgrade will flood the market and regulatory issues.

"The Shanghai upgrade will unlock over 18 million ether staked since late 2020. The market is worried that the unlocking may bring about a sell-off, causing uncertainty in the market," Griffin Ardern, a volatility trader at crypto asset-management firm Blofin, told CoinDesk.

Ethereum has been lagging bitcoin for the last couple of months as traders price in the risk of additional supply coming back onto the market. However, that does not explain why bitcoin is breaking out to new recovery highs. 

Blackstone Inc. has closed on its largest global property drawdown fund, targeting opportunistic deals across sectors such as rental housing, hospitality and data centers. 

The company secured $30.4 billion of total capital commitments for the fund, called Blackstone Real Estate Partners X, according to a statement Tuesday. Blackstone’s latest fund is the largest of that type, according to PitchBook data going back to 2002.

The real estate market has come under pressure over the past year due to a pullback across commercial-property lending, as borrowing costs skyrocketed. At the same time, the stocks of public real estate investment trusts have also suffered amid the uncertainty in the market and increasing concerns about certain property types such as offices. 

“Pullback with all forms of capital will create opportunities,” said Kathleen McCarthy, global co-head of Blackstone Real Estate. “We can use our capital and expertise to capitalize on the moment for our investors.”

Blackstone’s latest fundraising helps cement the private equity firm’s status as a powerhouse in the real estate market. Blackstone’s real estate business, which started in 1991, now has $326 billion of investor capital under management.

The vintage of property funds is likely to be a major conversation piece over the next few years. Those that closed on purchases between 2019 and 2022 in commercial real estate paid top prices and will be sitting on implied and real losses for years. They are in much the same position as investors that bought bonds with negative yields. 

China’s dominance is underlined further by the fact that it is a key trade partner for the commodity exporters, which have industrial cycles that clearly track the ebb and flow of the Chinese credit cycle. And after the attack on Ukraine, China’s financial influence over isolated Russia has risen further.

It is obvious but Chinese strategic interests are not especially aligned with those of the other countries. One of China’s priorities is finding somewhere to park its external surpluses beyond the reach of the US Office of Foreign Assets Control and finding stores of value other than US Treasuries. While none of the other four Brics members can provide liquid assets, they can provide investment opportunities especially in raw materials. As with the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese authorities prefer to have control in such matters.

Russia and the gulf energy exporters prefer to accumulate “rainy day” sovereign wealth funds away from the US. However, the alternative to the US is not a diversified group of growing countries, but essentially one country — China — with a vast thirst for energy and other raw materials.

So not only are there practical challenges in a common Brics currency. In seeking one to challenge US hegemony in foreign exchange, the non-Chinese members of countries of the group may just increase their dependence on Beijing.

During the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the US took the decision to debase the currency in service to avoiding a depression. Money supply exploded and purchasing power of the dollar collapsed as asset prices leaped higher. Like any major event, there are both positive and negative outcomes. An even more severe economic decline was avoided. The downside was political populism has gained a foothold in many countries and the USA’s creditors became suspicious that they are no longer willing to take the hard decisions necessary to support the value of the currency. 

The group’s index of new orders at service providers dropped more than 10 points to a three-month low of 52.2. While still consistent with expansion, the scale of the drop suggests a significant slowing in the pace of bookings growth. The business activity measure, which mirrors the ISM’s factory production index, slipped to 55.4.

“There has been a pullback in the rate of growth for the services sector, attributed mainly to a cooling off in the new orders growth rate, an employment environment that varies by industry and continued improvements in capacity and logistics,” Anthony Nieves, chair of the ISM Services Business Survey Committee, said in a statement.

The pandemic shutdown represented a massive dislocation which pulled the pendulum of demand into sharply negative territory. Massive fiscal and monetary stimulus was implemented to revive. That ensured when demand recovered, it swung to an extreme level in the opposite direction. Like any pendulum there are several swings to less extreme amplitudes, before it settles back to equilibrium. 

Treasury 10-year note futures spike to fresh session highs after February JOLTS job openings declined more than estimated with January revised lower. At the same time February factory orders missed estimates for headline and ex-transport readings. 

US 10-year yields flip to richer on the day into the move as 10-year futures top at 115-28, with around 60k 10-year note contracts changing hands over 3-minute period

Belly- and front-end-led gains steepen 2s10s, 5s30s spreads onto session wides, higher by 7bp and 4bp on the day

Fed-dated OIS for May meeting drops to around 15bp of additional hikes priced, giving up around 5bp of hike premium in the aftermath of the data

Job openings are down two million in the last 15 months. It is arguable how much predicative power the jobs openings have primarily because it is a relatively new data series and there are questions about how the number reflects conditions on the ground. However, there is no dispute a top is in place and the number is trending lower. It stands to reason that job openings should be a lead indicator for decisions on firing workers since it should be a lead indicator. Afterall most firms stop hiring before they fire workers. 

The US’s largest car insurer, State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., reported a $13.4 billion (!) underwriting loss last year, the largest shortfall in its 100-year history; Allstate Corp.’s auto-insurance underwriting loss was $3 billion, while Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Geico car-insurance unit lost $1.9 billion.

In the UK, Direct Line Insurance Group Plc’s chief executive departed in January after mounting losses at the motor division forced it to scrap its dividend. The stock has declined more than 50% in the past year.

These woeful results have shaken confidence in the industry’s purported ability to assess risk and forecast accurately. Insurers are belatedly hiking premiums, though often not as quickly as they’d like. Customers who drive Range Rovers and other vehicles prized by thieves, may struggle to get coverage at all.

Soaring used-car prices are the proximate cause of insurers’ woes – a textbook example of how supply chain upheaval can cascade through the economy. Historically, vehicles were a depreciating asset, but suddenly the cost of replacing a stolen or damaged vehicle was far more than insurers had calculated.

The insurance sector is not in the habit of sustaining losses on underwriting so premiums are most assuredly going up. That’s true of every area of the insurance business and not only automotive rates. Everything from commercial, to health to cyber rates are rising.

This news struck me as interesting because it follows hot on the heels of Piguet Ademar’s issuing a replacement guarantee on any high end watches bought over the last couple of years. The threat of theft has growth so high it is impacting sales of their timepieces. 

The announcement came during a Brazil-China business forum in Beijing on Wednesday in which government officials and company executives from both sides discussed trade and investment opportunities. Much of Brazil’s agricultural and mineral products are shipped to the Asian nation.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was due to be in China for an official state visit this week, but was forced to postpone after he was hospitalized with pneumonia.  

China and Brazil also agreed to settle trade in their own currencies, without the need of an intermediary currency like the US dollar, according to a statement from the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency. The expectation is to reduce the costs of commercial transactions with the direct exchange between Brazilian reais and yuan.

Tatiana Rosito, Brazil’s Secretary of International Affairs at the Finance Ministry, says the goal is to boost liquidity of the Chinese currency, giving options to investors and traders.

“It’s not a game changer in relation to the impact on short-term trade, but it has the potential to expand transactions and familiarize agents” with transactions in yuan, she said in a telephone interview.

The entire global financial sector is built on trust. It is logical for countries trading with one another to accept their respective currencies in exchange for goods and services. The reason it is not commonplace is because currencies are volatile and bilateral relationships have no fallback if one of the party’s proves unreliable. 

This year’s survey, however, collected information on $400 billion of bank-held commercial and multifamily mortgages—23 percent of the outstanding universe. Using this year’s survey results, for the first time we are expanding our loan maturity analysis to include an estimate of the maturity profile of all commercial and multifamily mortgages—including the more than $1.7 trillion on bank balance sheets.

The analysis estimates that of approximately $4.4 trillion of outstanding commercial/multifamily mortgages, $728 billion (16%) matures in 2023 with another $659 billion (15%) maturing in 2024. Hotels/motels see the largest share maturing in 2023 (34%) followed by office (25%). Multifamily is the property type with the smallest share of outstanding mortgage maturing this year (9%).

Among capital sources, 26 percent of the outstanding balance of loans held by credit companies and other investor-driven lenders will mature this year, as will 23 percent of the balances held by depositories and 22 percent held in CMBS. Only 7 percent of life company loans and 2 percent of GSE/FHA loans come due this year.

The high yield corporate sector used the pandemic to refinance. The maturity of that part of the debt market is now a lot closer to the end of the decade. Commercial real estate did not have that opportunity because vacancy rates were so high, no one was willing to throw money at them. 

Sweden has long fallen short on its constitutional pledge to provide an affordable place to live for all of its 10.4 million people, but until recently that was masked by the growing economy which had helped disguise flaws in the system. 

The shortage of affordable accommodation is hitting recruitment. The Stockholm Chamber of Commerce reported last year that three out of four heads of human resources said the housing situation was making it harder for their firms to hire new staff. 

Rents are negotiated annually by landlords and the tenants association. Advocates say the system helps create a rental market in Stockholm where teachers, police officers, street cleaners and other public sector workers can afford to live alongside bankers, software developers and government officials. Yet supply hasn’t kept up with demand for decades. Average waiting times for a rent-controlled apartment is now 9.2 years, but can stretch up to 20 years in some parts of the capital.

Socialism’s only hope of functioning is to ensure the cost of living never rises. That means creating a social contract where the only means of generating personal wealth is through ingenuity and productivity. It’s a high bar and apparently unachievable for long. 

Fund managers are also concerned. A systemic credit event poses the biggest threat to global markets, and the most likely source of one is US shadow banking, according to a survey of investors published last week by Bank of America Corp.

The US government’s top financial regulators signaled in February that they would consider whether any nonbank firms merit tougher oversight as systemically important institutions. 

The Financial Stability Oversight Council will put “nonbank financial intermediation” back on the table as a priority for 2023, according to a statement from the Treasury Department. The Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Financial Stability Board declined to comment for this story. 

European Central Bank Vice President Luis de Guindos warned in an interview with Business Post published on the ECB website Sunday that nonbanks “took a lot of risks” during the era of low interest rates and potential vulnerabilities “can come to the surface” as monetary policy changes. 

It has been my view for at least the last 2 years that the epicentre of risk resides in private markets. What does that mean? It was where leverage was focused in the bull market and where valuations have increased the most. It is therefore the most likely to experience stress as liquidity tightens. Trouble within the sector is also likely to be the catalyst for central bank easing as they move to forestall the risk of a deep recession. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will convene a meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council Friday.

FSOC comprises the heads of the nation's top financial regulators, and was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to enable the government to coordinate efforts at combating systemic risks to the U.S. economy.

The announcement comes amid concerns over the health of the banking sector following the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

The uncertainty is being felt overseas as well with shares of Germany's Deutsche Bank (DBK.XE) slumping as its credit default swaps widened.

Financial sector equities (XLF) were under pressure Friday, ranking as the worst performing sector in the S&P 500 in morning trade.

The Plunge Protection Team is convening so the monetary and fiscal authorities are fully aware of the $1.7 trillion in unrealised losses in the US banking sector. The simple fact is anyone who bought long-dated bonds between 2019 and 2022 is sitting on fat losses. 

“What’s changed in the last few weeks is the credit markets,” said Rich Hill, chief of real estate strategy research at Cohen & Steers Capital Management Inc. “It went from a story of work-from-home and the impact on occupancy and the lack of rent growth to also the compounding of tighter financial conditions given everything happening with banks.”

Fears of tighter credit are adding to risks for offices that have been building for some time, Green Street analysts wrote in a Tuesday report. Hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, Marathon Asset Management and Polpo Capital Management founder Daniel McNamara are among those who have been betting for months that landlords will struggle to lure staff back to workplaces. 

“This regional banking crisis is just throwing fuel on the fire,” McNamara said in a telephone interview. “I just don’t see a way out of this without a lot of pain in the office sector.” 

Commercial real estate is a massive and highly diversified sector that forms the basis for most alternative asset portfolios. That’s because it is the only asset class large enough to absorb the flow of cash out of conventional assets when yields were too low to meet pension and institutional return requirements. 

“As we keep on telling our LPs, we are not alternative anymore,” said Lockhead. “Every deal that gets done, private credit is in the mix.”

Regulatory arbitrage is one of the commonest ways new financial sector solutions thrive. For example, Alibaba circumvented China’s wide difference between the lending and deposit rate by going direct to consumers via the internet and created Ant Financial. When regulators felt threatened by the company they move to contain its growth.

The fintech sector is attempting to carve a piece out of traditional banking operations by going online and direct to consumer via mobile apps. Companies like Block and PayPal avoid banking regulation but offer credit services in the same ways as credit card companies.

The cryptocurrency sector is primarily aimed at further disrupting the payments and international transfer market.

Private lending and private equity more generally thrived in a falling interest rate environment because asset prices of all varieties rose. Active markets were created in everything from businesses to fine wine and whiskey.  

Hardly. The world’s population of people aged 60 years and older is expected to double by 2050, according to the World Health Organization, while fertility rates are in long-term decline. The financial strain is challenging old-age support systems and leaving many countries facing tough choices about raising the age of retirement, cutting benefits or lifting taxes. Pension shortfalls will be the equivalent of about 23% of world output by 2050, the Group of 30 consultancy estimated. One key measure is the old-age dependency ratio — the number of older people compared to the population that is working age. In Europe and North America, that ratio will be about 50 per 100 by 2050, according to UN forecasts, a rise from 30 per 100 in 2019. In short, we’re on a trajectory toward a smaller share of people paying taxes and a higher proportion drawing pensions. By 2035, the basic US system known as Social Security will no longer be able to cover payments, forcing a 20% reduction in benefits, according to its trustees. 

Very few people are keen on the idea of working more than they have to. That has been one of the primary selling points of union negotiators for decades. You might not like your job, but we’ll make sure you are looked after in your (lengthy) retirement. With union workers negotiating favourable terms, government pensions have also become more generous. 

“We are committed to restoring price stability, and all of the evidence says that the public has confidence that we will do so,” Chair Jerome Powell said at a press conference following the Fed’s two-day meeting. “It is important that we sustain that confidence with our actions as well as our words.”

Officials are prepared to raise rates higher if needed, he said.

Powell also emphasized the US banking system is sound and resilient, reiterating what officials said in their post-meeting statement, and said the agency is prepared to use all of its tools to maintain stability.

He also acknowledged recent banking turmoil is “likely to result in tighter credit conditions for households and businesses, which would in turn affect economic outcomes,” but added, “It’s too soon to tell how monetary policy should respond.”

Fed policymakers projected rates would end 2023 at about 5.1%, unchanged from their median estimate from the last round of forecasts in December. The median 2024 projection rose to 4.3% from 4.1%.

The Fed raised rates as expected and left the door open to hiking further. The bond market continues to expect rate cuts before the end of the year. That implies inflationary pressures are expected to contract significantly this year. That entails higher unemployment and a recession risk. 

Good morning, Eoin I hope you and yours are well. I am considering baby steps into Bitcoin ownership. I would welcome any guidance you may have. Particularly, where best to purchase and how to hold/protect. Many thanks for the excellent ongoing guidance.

Thank you for this question which may be of interest. At present, the safest way to hold bitcoin is in a cold storage wallet. Then you must ensure that it is kept somewhere safe. The second best option is a fund like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust which has done a reasonable job of tracking the price. The last would be to buy bitcoin miners which offer leverage to the price. 

A link to the full report is posted in the Subcsriber's Area. 

Crisis-era swap lines were reopened over the weekend to ensure Europe has sufficient liquidity to deal with its unfolding banking crisis. Credit Suisse will not be the only bank caught on the wrong side of bonds with negative yields suddenly having positive yields.

The Fed’s balance sheet jumped last week in response to the actions to support the US banking sector. While this is not technically QE, it is certainly confidence boosting. The conclusion is clear. If they are willing to unwind half of the quantitative tightening program to deal with the collapse of several mid-sized banks, what will they do when unemployment rises and earnings roll over?  

DB’s CDS has widened by virtually the same as UBS’s over the last month, even though it has not had to digest a rival with $575 billion in assets over a weekend.

Deutsche Bank’s revenues have fallen over most of the last decade, and the bank has faced questions around its governance, with BaFin, the German bank regulator, censuring it over its money-laundering controls. However, over the last two years the investment bank has spearheaded a recovery, with revenues and profitability improving.

Nonetheless, DB lagged the rebound seen in European bank shares that began last summer, while its price-to-book ratio remains subterranean.

Contagion risk is much lower than it was in 2008, but it is not zero. And contagion is not always fully logical: Credit Suisse’s tier 1 capital ratio was higher than DB’s.

No one reads prospectuses until they must. They are both long and boring, so file searches will now be underway to identify those with similar characteristics to the CoCos issued by Credit Suisse and UBS. Bond investors are not in the habit of being zeroed, and particularly so when the equity is still trading.

I would be grateful if Mr Treacy could provide comment on which casualty will government and central banks choose

The way I see the situation now is:

Printing money to save banks = increasing inflation + sinking small people
Raising interest rates = reducing inflation + sinking banks + sinking small people with adjustable/variable mortgages
EQUALS
government and central banks caught in vicious circle of their own making

Which casualty will in Mr Treacy's opinion governments + central banks choose going forward?

Thank you for this question which may be of interest to other subscribers. The big question is about the permanence of inflationary pressures.

In your first scenario, the return of excessive money printing takes place before inflationary pressures are under control. That would greatly increase the scope for a wage price spiral and would result in significantly higher interest rates than are currently in place. The net result would be a complete repricing of asset prices and financial risk which equates to market crashes in stocks, bonds and property. That sinks everyone not just small people. In fact, the lease affected would be those with fewer assets.

Support from the Swiss National Bank, which offered as much as 50 billion francs ($54 billion) from its liquidity facility, had brought some temporary relief to Credit Suisse and risk gauges for the broader European banking sector. That fizzled amid comments from the European Central Bank that some of the region’s lenders could be vulnerable to monetary policy tightening, followed by its decision to proceed with a planned half-point increase in interest rates.

The continued selloff signals more action may be needed to arrest a collapse in confidence that’s prompted clients to step back from the Swiss lender and banks to shield their finances from the potential fallout. While the panic surrounding Credit Suisse has so far shown little sign of infecting the broader financial system, any further turmoil would pose a significant risk for markets already on edge amid soaring interest rates and rampant inflation.

I have always been intrigued by the idea of Aleph null. It’s the infinity of infinities [ℵ0]. The set of natural number is infinite, but so is the set of even numbers, and so is the set of uneven numbers. There is also an infinite number of times a single number can be divided. Most of the time that is an academic novelty but when it comes to confidence and bailouts infinity matters. 

Fears that anything but a half-point hike would trigger panic among investors helped settle the European Central Bank’s interest-rate decision on Thursday, according to people familiar with the talks.

As officials met over the past two days, traders were scouring financial markets for signs that other lenders might suffer the same strains that had hammered Credit Suisse Group AG and Silicon Valley Bank. ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos already warned European finance ministers earlier in the week that banks could be vulnerable to rising borrowing costs.

While the ECB dropped language in their Thursday statement on the future path for rates, there remains a live discussion on the need for more increases to bring inflation under control once market turmoil subsides, said the people who declined to be identified because such deliberations are confidential.

Several hawkish officials still see the terminal rate well above the current 3%, the people said, pointing to President Christine Lagarde’s remark that the ECB “would have more ground to cover” if its baseline outlook for the economy were to be confirmed. Yet, some are questioning whether the peak in borrowing costs might now be lower than previously thought. 

The beginning of a hiking cycle leads to central banks trying to re-establish credibility they will do what is necessary to combat inflation. That also implies they will accept whatever pain in the economy is necessary to achieve that goal. The end of a hiking cycle forces them to reverse course because the economic pain grows so intense that it overwhelms the desire to appear credible. 

Defence budget and levelling up
Mr Hunt confirmed the government will add £11 billion to the defence budget over the next five years and another £30 million is being allocated for veterans.

There will be 12 new investment zones, and they will potentially be in the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, the North East, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, East Midlands, Teesside and Liverpool. There will also be at least one in each of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Mr Hunt also announced a series of levelling-up and local transport-related funding pots.

Taxes
The chancellor confirmed the planned increase in corporation tax to 25 per cent will be going ahead, but announced a new policy of “full capital expensing” over the next three years, which will mean every pound invested in IT equipment, plant, or machinery can be deducted immediately from profits.

Mr Hunt said he will introduce a new tax credit for small and medium-sized firms that spend 40 per cent of their expenditure on research and development. Tax reliefs for film, TV and video gaming will also be extended, he said.

Up to £20 billion will be allocated for the early development of carbon capture and storage.

Mr Hunt said that, subject to consultation, nuclear power will qualify for the same investment incentives as renewable energy and alongside that “will come more public investment”.

Falling Gilt yields could not come at a better times for the UK and its mortgage holders. The upgraded growth estimate which expects to avoid a recession this year helps to highlight the efforts of the Bank of England to talk the market down were more about affecting sentiment than actually containing growth. 

Charles Schwab Corp. tumbled the most ever on an intraday-basis as the online brokerage sought to reassure investors that it has sufficient liquidity to handle any volatility following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Shares of Westlake, Texas-based Schwab dropped as much as 23% to $45 after trading was halted for volatility. The stock later pared its decline and was down 17% to $48.93 at 10:09 a.m.
in New York.

The firm has a broad base of customers and capital in excess of regulatory requirements, founder and Co-Chairman Charles Schwab and Chief Executive Officer Walt Bettinger said in a statement on its website Monday.

“Schwab’s long-standing reputation as a safe port in a storm remains intact, driven by record-setting business performance, a conservative balance sheet, a strong liquidity position, and a diversified base of 34 million-plus account-holders who invest with Schwab every day,” the executives wrote.

The company, with roughly $7.4 trillion of client assets, said it has access to about $100 billion of cash flow, more than $300 billion of incremental capacity with the Federal Home Loan Bank and other short-term facilities, and that more than 80% of deposits at its bank are insured by the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corp.
 

Companies like Schwab offered an attractive service to their customers during the big bull market. Instead of selling highly appreciated assets and absorbing the capital gains tax hit, why not offer the stock portfolio as collateral against a loan to buy a new house, car or boat? Real Estate agents I know report that was a major source of funding during the pandemic housing boom. 

80% of the leveraged finance market does not have a maturity until 2026 or beyond, so they have a lot of runway, a lot of liquidity, you got a well telegraphed recession as you talked about, they are cutting expenses and conserving cash. They are well set up to buy themselves time to see how this market unfolds…you just don’t have that crunch. We are coming off the greatest financing wave in history and so maturity has been pushed out and this plays out in that 80% stat I referenced. 

This is one of the most important topics in the debt markets today. Higher rates are obviously troubling for the holders of debt but you don’t get system problems until the borrowers have to pay to refinance and struggle. 

An office landlord controlled by Pacific Investment Management Co. has defaulted on about $1.7 billion of mortgage notes on seven buildings, a sign of widening pain for the industry as property values fall and rising interest rates squeeze borrowers.

The buildings — in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Jersey City, New Jersey — are owned by Columbia Property Trust, which was acquired in 2021 for $3.9 billion by funds managed by Pimco. The mortgages have floating-rate debt, which led to rising monthly payments as interest rates soared last year.

“We, like most office owners, are addressing the unique and unprecedented challenges currently facing our asset class and customer base,” Justina Lombardo, a spokesperson for Columbia Property Trust, said in an emailed statement. “We have engaged with our lenders on a restructuring of our loan on seven properties within our larger national portfolio.  We look forward to a collaborative process yielding thoughtful solutions that reflect current market conditions and best serve the interests of all stakeholders.”

Over the last few months I have been struck by the number of conversations I’d had where investors have been investing in private credit for years already. One way of thinking about it is investment banks are going back to their roots. 

The British premier had been preparing to unveil a new deal this week, but vocal opposition from unionists in Northern Ireland and Brexit hardliners in Sunak’s own Conservative Party scuppered the plan. Sunak had a positive talk with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen late Friday and they will speak again soon, a person familiar said. He’s also gearing up to talk to his Cabinet before Monday, people directly involved in the plans said.

Sunak also wants to have further discussions with DUP Leader Jeffrey Donaldson, whose party has blocked the formation of Northern Ireland’s devolved power-sharing government for more than a year over the current post-Brexit trading arrangements, known as the Northern Ireland Protocol. His endorsement is likely to prove crucial and without it an announcement of the deal may be further delayed. 

There are three potential solutions to the question of how the Good Friday Agreement fits into the overall Brexit question. The first is the border with the EU is in the middle of the Irish Sea. This is the current situation which Boris Johnson implemented. 

I was watching your commentary today, you seem once again to be somewhat circumspect with regards to longer term bonds the world over, and as you have repeatedly said over recent weeks, yields are in a consistent trend higher. Why then do you continue to hold TLT, a very long duration bond that gets harder hit when yields rise, and the DoubleLine fund too? Can you explain your thinking on this front, as your commentary seems at odds with your actions, in this instance at least.

Thank you for this question which I’m sure will be of interest to the Collective. The simple answer is that bond yields are still trending higher but I do not expect that condition to last. I initiated my long positions at yields I found attractive. I’ll buy more if yields go much higher from here. 

The concern is that inflation doesn’t tick down as quickly as the BOE anticipates. Prices increased 11.1% in October, the most in 41 years. That eased in each of the past three months, but the latest inflation reading at 10.1% remains five times the BOE’s target rate.

The BOE will be heartened by news that inflation in the services sector eased in January. It’s one of the key indicators being watched by policymakers, who see it as gauge of domestically generated inflation that is hard to shift once it takes hold.

The other red flag is wage growth, which is now running at the fastest pace on record outside of the pandemic as labor shortages hand workers unprecedented bargaining power. 

The BOE fears inflation could become entrenched as companies keep raising prices to cover their salary costs. There were some signs of hope in the latest data, however, with figures for December alone showing a slowdown in private-sector pay increases.

The bond market is signaling it is a little early to declare victory over inflation. Gilts yields continues to steady from the region of the 200-day MA and a sustained move below 3% would be required to question potential for continued upside. 

Where next? The best comment, as it also applies to us, comes from one of our managers, Terry Smith: “Our companies should demonstrate a relatively resilient fundamental performance in such circumstances, and the only type of market which ends in a recession is a bear market.”

We are reminded by another market veteran we’ve followed for 40 years, Ed Yardeni, that the FAANGS, the mega tech US stocks which led the 2014 to 2021 bull market, still inflate the PER market rating. Without the FAANGS, the forward market multiple is only 16.7x, making it barely 2 points higher than the long-term average. Bearish commentators claim that earnings are about to take a hit, raising the PER, and rate rises are still in store. (Remember that 2 main factors influence share prices: the valuation of earnings, influenced largely by interest rates, and the earnings themselves). There may indeed be something to the bears’ claim.

Here is a link to the full report. 

Some of the biggest movers in the US market since the beginning of January have been the eight mega-cap household names stocks. Tesla and Nvidia rebounded impressively while Alphabet has been a clear laggard and all largely because of enthusiasm about the promise of AI. 

Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.’s earnings rose in the fourth quarter as it wrapped up a record year of fundraising that has given the firm more than $90 billion to invest. 

The Canadian alternative asset manager reported distributable earnings of $569 million, or 35 cents a share, up 6% from the prior year. It’s the first quarterly report for Brookfield Asset as a public company after it was spun out of parent Brookfield Corp. in December. 

The company raised a record $93 billion in capital last year. “Our fundraising outlook remains strong,” Chief Executive Officer Bruce Flatt and President Connor Teskey said in a letter to shareholders. “In 2023, we expect to have three flagship funds in the market, along with several complementary perpetual strategies and other long-term funds.”

Brookfield Corp. spun off a 25% stake in the division in an effort to gain a higher valuation by separating the money-management business from its own investment capital. Brookfield Asset managed $418 billion in fee-bearing capital at the end of December across asset classes including real estate, infrastructure, credit, private equity and renewable power.  

The Toronto-based company plans to more than double that to $1 trillion by 2027, driven by ambitious plans to grow in private credit and insurance. Some of the growth may come through acquisitions, Flatt suggested at a conference in December.  

$93 billion raised during a bear market for stocks and amid rising yields is an impressive feat. Blackstone is also chasing the moniker of the first alternative asset manager to reach $1 trillion under management. 

Powell says the labor market report from Friday “underscores the message” he sent last week, that there’s a significant road ahead to get inflation down. There’s an expectation that inflation can come down painlessly, but “that’s not the base case.”

The primary conclusion investors have taken from Jerome Powell’s interview today is pain might be coming but rates will quickly adjust when it does. The volatility on the Nasdaq-100 showed the development of this conclusion with a 1% advance, drop back to flat and recovery to finish up 1%. 

A broad gauge of dollar strength jumped after the jobless rate in the US hit a 53-year low as traders amped up bets on a higher policy rate.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index extended gains for its biggest two-day climb in four months after data highlighted the resilience of the labor market and another report showed resurgence in consumer demand, suggesting even more tightening may be in store from the Federal Reserve. 

The greenback gained as much as 1.2%, climbing against all of its peers in the Group of 10, with the Japanese yen, the Australian dollar and New Zealand dollar falling the most. 

“The headline number for nonfarms was shocking, and the US dollar is clearly reacting to that,” said Bipan Rai, a currency strategist at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. “We still have plenty of data to comb through before the picture is complete.”

The simple logic is you cannot have a recession without unemployment rising. That suggests the Federal Reserve is under no pressure to cut rates and may even continue to raise them. That lent considerable support to the Dollar Index and it is working on a large upside weekly key reversal which marks a lot of at least near-term significance. 

The inflation that we originally got was very much a collision between very strong demand and hard supply constraints, not something that you really have seen in prior, you know, in business cycles.

And

I think it's -- because this is not like the other business cycles in so many ways. It may well be that as -- that it will take more slowing than we expect, than I expect to get inflation down to 2 percent.

And

this is not a standard business cycle where you can look at the last 10 times there was a global pandemic and we shut the economy down, and Congress did what it did and we did what we did.

There is some logic to that statement. We have never shut down the entire global economy or printed so much money in such a short period of time. The clear conclusion Powell is taking in predicting a soft landing is that inflation really is transitory. 

The European Central Bank lifted interest rates by a half-point, with President Christine Lagarde saying another such move is almost certain next month, despite conceding that the inflation outlook is improving.

Policymakers, as expected, raised the deposit rate to 2.5%, the highest since 2008. Lagarde warned that the most aggressive bout of monetary tightening in ECB history isn’t done — even as energy prices plunge and the Federal Reserve moderates the pace of its own hikes.

In a statement, the Governing Council said it “intends” to raise rates by another 50 basis points at its March meeting, then “evaluate the subsequent path of its monetary policy.”

The ECB may hike again at the next meeting but clear implication is the peak of the hiking cycle will be lower than the USA’s. The same is true for the Bank of England. The vast sums spent to avoid an energy crisis mean governments will be under pressure to contain costs in future. That will siphon money from speculative activities and help to contain demand driven inflationary pressures. 

Table 1 contains historical return data for the S&P 500 in the first five days of January as well as annual returns. This is the “Early Warning System.” The last 46 times that the first five days had positive returns, the full-year return was positive 38 times, for an 82.6% accuracy ratio. The average S&P 500 gain was 14.3% in those years.

The second part is the S&P 500 return in January and the accuracy in forecasting the return for the year. In years when the S&P 500 had positive returns in the month of January, the average return for the year was 17.6%. The indicator has registered 10 major errors since 1950, for an 85.7% accuracy ratio.

74% of time, the stock market finishes up on the year in nominal terms. The big question for investors is whether the strong positive return for just about every asset in January will improve those odds. At least the market is starting from a lower level so the odds of achieving that goal has been improved. 

There has been no suggestion that the Adani entities would struggle to make these payments, and Adani has flagged interest coverage ratios that show it has the wherewithal to meet such obligations.

But Hindenburg’s report last week alleging “accounting fraud” along with its short position in Adani’s US-traded bonds and non-Indian-traded derivatives has put the debt in the spotlight. Some of the notes have fallen to distressed levels below 70 cents on the dollar that generally show mounting concern about creditworthiness. The securities extended declines Monday after a rebuttal by the Indian conglomerate and as Hindenburg followed with its own response.

Tightening global liquidity causes liquidity issues. We’ve seen several examples of that in the last 12 months. The UK pension crisis, South Korean perpetuals, frontier country sovereign defaults, REIT withdrawal issues are all symptoms of that theme. The issues currently being explored with Adani are part of the same trend. The longer rates stay high and as liquidity tightens the more these issues will appear. Eventually we will see solvency issues arise.

In a recent article, Joseph Stiglitz argues that the current inflation is primarily due to the supply-side shock of the Covid crisis and to shifts in the demand patterns. His view is that the rate of inflation has already peaked - it is 1% higher now than in June 2022. He claims that the rise in interest rates has been largely passed on to consumers via higher prices and that any future interest rate rises would be inflationary.

Thank you for this email which may be of interest. I believe the article you referring to is Stiglitz’s one in Project Syndicate. Here is a section:

Worse, it is not even clear that there is any upside to this approach. In fact, raising interest rates could do more harm than good, by making it more expensive for firms to invest in solutions to the current supply constraints. The US Federal Reserve’s monetary-policy tightening has already curtailed housing construction, even though more supply is precisely what is needed to bring down one of the biggest sources of inflation: housing costs.

Moreover, many price-setters in the housing market may now pass the higher costs of doing business on to renters. And in retail and other markets more broadly, higher interest rates can actually induce price increases as the higher interest rates induce businesses to write down the future value of lost customers relative to the benefits today of higher prices.

To be sure, a deep recession would tame inflation. But why would we invite that? Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues seem to relish cheering against the economy. Meanwhile, their friends in commercial banking are making out like bandits now that the Fed is paying 4.4% interest on more than $3 trillion of bank reserve balances – yielding a tidy return of more than $130 billion per year.

The assumption the passthrough mechanism from costs to rents is seamless is a big leap. Without a healthy economy that delivers wage growth, rental yields increase through lower purchase prices. This article describing how robo-purchases by institutional investors in property have gone wrong, particularly Opendoor, may also be of interest. 

But in a Nov. 30 speech at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, Powell said he was watching something even more specific -- not core PCE, but core services PCE less housing. "[This] may be the most important category for understanding the future evolution of core inflation," Powell said at the time.

That isn't just specific, it is super specific. Core PCE already strips out food and energy. Core services PCE strips out food, energy, and the cost of physical goods. Powell wants to remove housing as well because "as long as new lease inflation keeps falling, we would expect housing services inflation to begin falling sometime next year," he explained.

When Powell refers to core services PCE less housing, he is really talking about the job market. "Because wages make up the largest cost in delivering these services, the labor market holds the key to understanding inflation in this category," he said. "Thus, another condition we are looking for is the restoration of balance between supply and demand in the labor market."

The Core services ex-housing PCE inflation measure continues to hold above 4% which is higher than at any time since 1992. It does look like it has peaked so the question is how quickly it will contract. The hopes for a soft landing reside in this measure falling back to below 3% and staying there without an uptick in unemployment.  

“In terms of just the macro and company performance, I think it will be much more muted as people capture the inflationary pressures,” he said. “Private equity M&A activity I think will be dampened.”

Concerns around portfolio company performance were not the only challenges up for discussion in the south of France, with private equity firms struggling to secure the debt financing they need to do big deals and juice returns and facing more competition when raising funds. 

The chief economist at German insurer Allianz SE, Ludovic Subran, said the industry had “nowhere to hide” when markets turned last year. “The private equity world has not been immune or has not defied gravity,” he said.

Banks pulling back from lending on buyouts was described as a “new reality” by Francois Jerphagnon, head of Ardian Expansion, in an interview with Bloomberg TV. This will open up an opportunity for private credit funds to step in, others said.

“There is much more interest in private credit and infrastructure where you do have that hedge against inflation and that hedge against rising rates,” said Richards at Pantheon.

Blackstone’s Eapen said private credit providers are in “the middle of a golden age” and that last year had been one of his business’s biggest ever for deploying capital. 

After the credit crisis, the vindictive wish of anyone who lost money in the crash was for banks to go broke. At the very least everyone concluded they needed to be heavily regulated. Today the burden of regulation is heavy within the banking sector and we are in our 15th year since the crash. 

Many junk-rated companies will require urgent funding. They may struggle to find it at a time when investors’ demand for sky-high premiums has effectively shut public capital markets as a refinancing avenue for the most stressed firms.

While default rates are expected to increase, it may not immediately become a flood of failures. A large chunk of high-yielding debt has weak investor safeguards — loose covenants that mean highly indebted firms will be able to delay engaging with creditors until further down the line. 

Moody’s forecasts the global default rate for high-yield companies will increase to 4.9% by November, up from 2.9% a year earlier. In a “severely pessimistic scenario,” however, the rate could go up to 12.6%, it said in a report published last month. 

It stands to reason that when the artificial support for failing companies is removed, they will go bust. Interest rates have surged over the last 12 months, the availability of credit is drying up as banks withdraw from lending and money supply growth is close to contraction on a year over year basis. That suggests many highly leveraged companies will have issues refinancing. 

“The private equity model works,” he said in a Bloomberg TV interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday. “It puts capital to work with experts that really help drive these companies.”

Pagliuca said private equity has “absolutely not” peaked and will still be able to deliver the standard 18% to 20% rate of return in the coming decades. 

“We’ve maintained those returns now every decade for 40 years,” he said. “It’s a great business model.”
Buyout firms are readjusting to an environment of higher interest rates that’s making it harder to finance deals and juice returns by loading companies with cheap debt. Valuations have tumbled in both the public and private markets.

Rising rates are bringing a reckoning for those firms that invested heavily in speculative technology companies at super-high multiples, according to Pagliuca. Bain has largely steered clear of this market and its portfolio is doing “pretty well,” he said.

There is no doubt that a version of the private equity business model continues perform. The investment practices of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, where the holding periods stretch from years to decades is a case in point. They have the financial resources to buy in times of market stress and hold for the long term. There will never be a time when buying low and securing growing cashflows with an infinite holding period will fail. 

As part of its deal with the IMF, Egypt agreed to shrink the footprint of all state-run enterprises, including “military-owned companies,” and committed to allow for a more flexible exchange rate.

“We are also looking at our region, and we want to be a role model for the region,” Al-Jadaan said. “We are encouraging a lot of the countries around us to really do reforms,” he said.

 

The UAE’s reluctance to offer donations but attach support to investments is a model Saudi Arabia is now also following. The big oil exporters want regional stability. This change of policy suggests they now appear to believe that will best be achieved through economic reforms.

The Arab Spring shook up the Middle East more than a decade ago and resulted in significant turmoil. It now appears that the policy suite developed in response to those events has matured. Large young populations need to be offered a route to a productive life or rebellion is inevitable. 

The Bank of Japan’s decision to keep its settings unchanged Wednesday gave global investors a modest jolt, leaving markets from the yen to Treasuries at risk from a potentially larger shock if officials opt to shift policy in the future.

Standing pat caught some traders by surprise, but it’s unlikely to douse speculation that the BOJ will normalize policy as inflation in Japan accelerates and Governor Haruhiko Kuroda nears the end of his term. It suggests just a temporary setback to bets on a stronger yen and a bond selloff as analysts say it’s still a question of when — not if — the central bank exits its yield-curve control policy.

Indeed, while Japan’s currency at one stage slumped more than 2% against the dollar in the wake of the decision, it clawed back some ground as the session proceeded, helped by a swath of US economic data that dented the greenback. Japanese government bonds surged as traders covered short positions and stocks pushed higher. US Treasury yields declined.

There were fireworks in Japanese markets this morning as the BoJ demurred from the tampering with its yield curve control policy. However the rebound in bonds and weakness in the Yen were short lived. Traders don’t see yield curve control lasting beyond Kuroda’s tenure. 

Thanks for the interesting comments about Saudi - I spent a couple of years working in Riyadh in the late eighties.

On a different subject do you see the re-occurrence of the US debt ceiling with the Senate's inability to pass (anything...) creating any problems?

Thank you for this topical question which I’m sure will be of interest to other subscribers. On another note, I suspect even veterans of living in Saudi would be surprised at the extent of progress made since MBS has taken power. 

The Tea Party movement gained traction in the aftermath of the credit crisis. They eventually gained enough sway over the Republican Party to force fiscal constraints onto the 2nd Obama administration. The Freedom caucus has given us a sneak peak at the trajectory of budget negotiations in the concessions they squeezed out of Keven McCarthy. 

“I suspect tumult” for markets in 2023, Summers told Bloomberg Television’s “Wall Street Week” with David Westin. “This is going to be remembered as a ‘V’ year when we recognized that we were headed into a different kind of financial era, with different kinds of interest-rate patterns.” 

In every other instance where quantitative tightening has been attempted bonds yields go up first. That is fuelled by fears central bank selling of bonds will crowd out other investors which pushes down prices. That process lasts for several months, then yields come back down. The collapse in yields is driven by rising deflationary fears as liquidity is drained out of the economy.

A link to the full report is posted in the Subscriber's Area. 

The topic of geopolitics and the world order is endlessly surprising because it does not submit readily to a formulaic approach. In fact, it is just when one thinks the future is most visible, that events transpire to muddy the outlook.

Debt markets are increasingly sorting US leveraged loans into two categories: money good, and distressed. 

A growing proportion of prices in the market are either very high, or very low. About 5% of the market is trading under 80 cents on the dollar, a share that has more than doubled since June, according to a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysis. And more than half the market is trading above 96 cents on the dollar, an amount that has also more than doubled.  

With more loan prices reaching extremes, companies that run into any sort of difficulty can see their loans plunge quickly. That can translate to surging borrowing costs, boosting the chance of corporations defaulting. 

“This puts the worst companies at risk, as they’ll have a harder time refinancing,” said Roberta Goss, senior managing director and head of the bank loan and collateralized loan obligations platform at Pretium Partners LLC, in an interview.  

I used to live around the corner from “Nakatomi Plaza” and always got a kick out of driving past the setting for the Die Hard movie. This property is a prime example of the issues facing many commercial properties. Occupancy rates are spotty. Regions depending on the tech sector are most at risk of high vacancy rates. That is going to put pressure on owners are they refinance loans in a tight liquidity and high interest rate environment.

Good morning, Eoin I would welcome your perspective if I may. I have been long only forever, 40 years and counting. In view of the current global challenges, I am thinking of taking the remaining 60% (40% currently in cash or cash equivalents) off the table and holding all in cash for the time being. I would welcome any observations you may have. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you for this important question which may be of interest to the Collective. The biggest argument for remaining long forever is the market always comes back…eventually. Being an investor requires an optimistic mindset. That means there is always a risk of selling too late. There is also the risk that the sectors which lead a recovery are not those you currently own.

The yen whipsawed in Monday trade after reports on a potential change to a key agreement between the government and central bank fueled speculation policy makers are moving closer to a hawkish pivot. 

Japan’s currency jumped as much as 0.6% after Kyodo said on Saturday that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida may seek to revise a decade-old accord with the Bank of Japan and consider adding flexibility to the 2% inflation goal, potentially paving the way for an end to its ultra-dovish policy. The yen pared gains after a top government spokesman denied the report.

The existing agreement commits the government and the BOJ to achieving its 2% inflation goal as early as possible. 

The BOJ has long since missed Kuroda’s original timeline of around two years. Still, removal of the phrase would go a step further in recognizing that achieving stable inflation is a longer term goal while implying that factors other than time also need to be considered.

Japan has been trying to achieve its inflation target for a lot longer than two years. The challenge in the past was the global economy was going through a long-term disinflationary trend at the same time Japan was going through a deflating property bubble. Attempting to inflate while companies were moving jobs and manufacturing capacity offshore was a challenge. Today, the aging population and depressed consumer demand are headwinds to inflation.

As I’ve written many times about the economy and markets, we never know where we’re going, but we ought to know where we are. The bottom line for me is that, in many ways, conditions at this moment are overwhelmingly different from – and mostly less favorable than – those of the post-GFC climate as described above. These changes may be long-lasting, or they may wear off over time. But in my view, we’re unlikely to quickly see the same optimism and ease that marked the post-GFC period.

We’ve gone from the low-return of 2009-21 to a full-return world, and it may become more so in the near term. Investors can now potentially get solid returns from credit instruments, meaning they no longer have to rely as heavily on riskier investments to achieve their overall return targets. Lenders and bargain hunters face much better prospects in this changed environment than they did in 2009-21. And importantly, if you grant that the environment is and may continue to be very different from what it was over the last 13 years – and most of the last 40 years – it should follow that the investment strategies that worked best over those periods may not be the ones that outperform in the years ahead.

That’s the sea change I’m talking about.

There is really only one big question. Will the Fed relent and revert to the GFC playbook when unemployment rises and economic hardship stokes deflationary fears? 2023 will probably deliver an answer.

The product is known as a “collateralised fund obligation” and its aim is to diversify risk by parceling up the companies’ providing returns. CFOs are, in some ways, a private equity variant of “collateralised debt obligations”, the bundles of mortgage-backed securities that only reached the public consciousness when they wreaked havoc during the 2008 financial crisis.

So far, CFOs have flown largely under the radar. Although some of private equity’s largest names such as Blackstone, KKR, Ares and the specialist firm Coller Capital have set up versions, this is often done privately with little or no public disclosure of the vehicle’s contents — or even, in some cases, of its existence, making it all but impossible to build a full picture of who is exposed and on what scale. CFOs introduce a new layer of leverage into a private capital industry already built on debt. Their rise is one illustration of how post-crisis regulation, rather than ending the use of esoteric structures and risky leverage, has shifted it into a quieter, more lightly regulated corner of the financial world.

In the world of investment banking everything can be made better with leverage. Private equity offered rich rewards in the decades before zero interest rates. Then the volume of cash available to the sector ballooned and valuations for the assets they acquired rose in tandem. Leverage is the easy answer for how to sustain returns despite high valuations, which would normally compress yields.

Morgan Stanley projects that a multi-asset income fund can now find some of the best investing opportunities in nearly two decades in dollar-denominated securities, including inflation-linked debt and high-grade corporate obligations. The interest payments on regular 10-year Treasuries, for example, has hit 4.125%, the highest since the global financial crisis.

Meanwhile Pacific Investment Management Co. reckons long-dated securities, the biggest losers in this era of Federal Reserve hawkishness, will bounce back as a recession ignites the bond-safety trade, with government debt acting as a reliable hedge in the 60/40 portfolio complex once more.

“People are excited, believe it or not,” said Maribel Larios, founder and CEO of Fiduciary Experts, a Murrieta, California-based registered investment advisor. “It’s all relative, as they’ve seen these fixed-income accounts pay little to nothing in the past. So, 4% — or even about 2% to 3% in some cash accounts — is relatively good now.”

Banks like Deutsche and Morgan Stanley are taking an axe to their earnings estimates for the S&P500 next year. Corporate earnings have been resilient, even as the Fed has hiked rates faster than at any time in the last 40 years. That is unlikely to persist as the lagged effects of tightening catch up.

Professional investors are loading up on bets that an economic recession can be avoided despite all the warnings to the contrary. It’s a dangerous bet -- for a variety of reasons.

Money managers have been favoring economically sensitive equities, such as industrial companies and commodity producers, according to a study from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on positioning by mutual funds and hedge funds with assets totaling almost $5 trillion. Shares that tend to do well during economic downturns, like utilities and consumer staples, are currently out of favor, the analysis shows.

The positions amount to wagers that the Federal Reserve can tame inflation without creating a recession, a difficult-to-achieve scenario often referred to as an economic soft landing. The precariousness of such bets was on display Friday and Monday, when strong readings on the labor market and American services sectors drove speculation the Fed will have to maintain its aggressive policies, increasing the risks of a policy error.

“Current sector tilts are consistent with positioning for a soft landing,” Goldman strategists including David Kostin wrote in a note Friday, adding that the fund industry’s thematic and factor exposures point to a similar stance. 

I am reminded of 2007 and 2008 when commodities were surging and banks beginning to roll over. At the time commodity inflation was running rampant but there was relatively little upward pressure on wages. The growing weakness in the housing sector effectively kept wage demand growth under control. Nevertheless, the spike in energy prices and overleverage in the financial system caused a significant problem.

“There will be geographic expansion as these markets continue to evolve along a similar trajectory with a lot of the same trends we saw in the US,” Michael Arougheti, chief executive officer of Ares Management, said of private credit in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “If we continue to demonstrate durable performance through cycles then the appetite for the asset class will continue to grow significantly.”

Yet it is not without risk. With the US economy slowing, more companies that private credit funds lend to may begin defaulting on their repayments next year as earnings decline and interest on their floating-rate loans rises.

“Private credit is a place people can go to benefit from rising rates,” Arougheti said. “The flipside of that is that as rates are going up, debt service becomes more challenging.”

An additional problem is the less stringent valuation process for private credit portfolios compared with assets in public markets, which can leave poor investments hidden for longer.

Private credit ballooned in size following the credit crisis as big banks retreated from riskier parts of the lending market and quantitative easing flooded the market with liquidity. Non-bank lenders now dominate the US mortgage markets. Companies like Citadel dominate market making in stocks. Private equity groups are now some of the largest property owners in the world. Private credit groups are now also dominating commercial credit markets. The fact they are migrating to international markets suggests the domestic US market is at capacity.

In Australia, where the pace of housing declines has eased, the outlook for mortgagees is similarly tough: borrowing capacity has fallen and monthly repayments have surged. In addition, a large chunk of loans that were fixed at record-low rates during the pandemic are due to roll over in 2023 at a much higher rate. 

With the full impact of past hikes yet to be felt, rates still rising and the economy set to weaken, there’s likely still some way to go before prices bottom, said Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital Markets in Sydney. 

Given expectations that rates will rise higher in both countries, some economists see home values dropping more than 20% from their peaks. 

Rolling fixes is likely to be a major topic of conversation in Australia, Canada, and the UK in 2023. The impending step higher in mortgage payments for millions of consumers is the central dilemma for their respective central banks. They need to raise rates to try and tackle inflationary pressures but every hike makes the problem of consumer debt sustainability worse.

The threshold of 2.52 francs is “the ‘hard underwriting’ price for the consortium of 19 banks,” JPMorgan & Co. analysts said in a research note. If Credit Suisse’s shares keep trading above that level until “the last day of rights trading on Dec. 6, 2022, we can assume at that point the capital raise was most likely a success.”

Having a large number of underwriters makes it easier to find buyers and reduces the risk for the investment banks to get stuck holding a large amount of the shares. As part of the lender’s capital raise plans, Saudi National Bank to invest up to 1.5 billion francs in the lender, becoming a top shareholder. 

Credit Suisse Chairman Axel Lehmann, speaking at a conference in London on Thursday, said that the stock would stabilize after the rights issue is completed and that investors should expect volatility until then. The new shares are due to start trading on Dec. 9. 

“I cannot predict where the share price is going,” Lehmann said. Until the end of the capital raise process, “we will have a little bit of volatility, but then I think it will start to somewhat stabilize and bottom out, and then we go from there.”

Credit Suisse’s share price continues to accelerate lower. A catalogue of management errors has seen the share lose close to 90% of its value since 2013. Tightening global liquidity is a proximate cause of stress, but the bank also needs to address many of the internal controls that led to this condition too.

Since returning from the Chart seminar in London I have spoken to several people who work in the Israeli high-tech industry, They all tell me that about 10% of their colleagues have lost their jobs recently. Today you referred to your MIIN index. How can we invest in these countries?

Thank you for this additional insight. The market for big ideas ballooned with the delivery of free money. Suddenly, no idea was too grand, or time to delivery/commercialization too long. That trend was looking tired in 2019, as the Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening was siphoning liquidity from the global economy.

“The time for moderating the pace of rate increases may come as soon as the December meeting,” Powell said in the text of his speech. “Given our progress in tightening policy, the timing of that moderation is far less significant than the questions of how much further we will need to raise rates to control inflation, and the length of time it will be necessary to hold policy at a restrictive level.”

Policy-sensitive 2-year Treasury yields fell on Powell’s remarks, erasing increases on the day, and the S&P 500 index reversed losses to trade higher. The dollar slipped in value against major rivals on foreign-exchange markets.

The Fed’s actions -- the most aggressive since the 1980s -- have lifted the target range of their benchmark rate to 3.75% to 4% from nearly zero in March. Powell said rates are likely to reach a “somewhat higher” level than officials estimated in September, when the median projection was for 4.6% next year. Those projections will be updated at the December meeting.

Jerome Powell confirmed today that the pace of Fed hikes will moderate; not reverse or pause. Nevertheless, cashed-up traders are more than willing to take anything less than outright hawkishness as good news.

I see a third question more related to the protests, not COVID, and I apologize in advance for the potential false equivalency. When comparing Europe's energy situation and the global supply chain / China sourcing situation how will each unfold in future years? Certainly both are heading directions (reversing) that will not turn. Are Europe's hooks deeper into the Russian supply habit or is the global supply chain China habit even deeper?

I am most interested in the impact similarities these two withdrawal themes may have on the West, and the length of time change will take. I have long thought North America "has it all" when you look at materials, labor, and markets.

Thank you for this question which raises some important points. The conclusion that Europe is in a more difficult position than North America is clear but nothing is ever so simple.

Europe relied on Russia to supply much of its energy and much of the money spent on imports was recycled through European countries. That is over. Europe now needs to mirror the USA’s success in becoming energy-independent.

Global bond yields will likely fall slightly in 2023 as the balance between demand and supply will improve by $1 trillion, strategists at J.P. Morgan said in a note.

There will be a $700 billion contraction in global bond demand next year compared to 2022, while bond supply will likely drop by $1.6 trillion, J.P. Morgan strategists, led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, estimated in the note issued on Thursday.

"Based on the historical relationship between annual changes in excess supply and the Global Aggregate bond index yield, a $1 trillion improvement in the demand/supply balance would imply downward pressure on Global Aggregate yields of around 40 basis points," the Wall Street bank said.

J.P. Morgan said that while major central banks trimming their balance sheets in 2022 was the single largest contributor to deterioration in bond demand, sell-offs by commercial banks and retail investors were also much higher than estimates.

There is a strong likelihood inflationary pressures will fall next year. There are three major reasons for believing that.

By March, it will be a year since the Bank of Canada began raising interest rates — meaning ever more of the record number of people who took out short-term or floating-rate mortgages at historically low rates will find themselves fully exposed to the roughly fourfold jump in borrowing costs since then, a potentially catastrophic shock to their personal finances.

The fate of Canada’s housing market will depend on whether or not they can hold on. And just as the country was a leader in the years-long global real estate frenzy, how its downturn plays out — a relatively orderly correction, or a brutal crash — may be a harbinger for what awaits the rest of the world.

Housing markets around the globe are wobbling under the weight of central bank rate-hike campaigns, with a handful of frothy countries joining Canada in already seeing precipitous price declines. More than a dozen developed economies, from Australia to Sweden to the US, are in the midst of downturns — defined as two consecutive quarters of falling prices — or will be by the beginning of next year, according to Oxford Economics. If those slumps prove worse or more widespread than expected, it would deepen a potential global recession. 

 

The Canadian 10-year yield appears to have reached a near-term peak in the region of 3.5%. The rate is coming back towards the trend mean so this will be a significant region to test whether demand dominance has returned beyond short-term steadying.

On the income side, if you earn more than £100,000, you really should be looking at how to put as much of your salary as you can above that amount into a pension via salary sacrifice. Why’s that? Because contrary to what you might think, you’re not paying a 40% marginal tax rate. As the team at tax advisors Blick Rothenberg point out, your marginal tax rate is in fact closer to 60%, because £100,000 is the point at which your personal allowance starts to get whittled away. (This is also why the 45% rate was cut to £125,140 rather than £125,000 — so that it aligns with the point at which your personal allowance is all gone.)

As a result, any money you can shield from this rate is doing a great deal more work than any other pound you save. That said, given that your mortgage is probably going up, and your heating bill is through the roof, it’s quite possible that you are already doing as much as you can on that front without causing a major liquidity crisis in your household.

On the investment side, falling squarely into the “be thankful for small mercies” category, at least the chancellor didn’t mess around with the annual allowances for tax-efficient “wrappers” — you can still put up to £20,000 a year into an individual savings account, and up to £40,000 a year into a pension (assuming you earn that much each year). The latter of course is still subject to the (frozen) lifetime allowance, so do be careful if you’re in danger of breaching that £1.073 million lifetime cap.  

So if you have grown a bit sloppy with your admin, and you are holding any shares outside a tax wrapper (i.e. an Individual Savings Account or a pension), then now is the time to get a handle on that and move them. At least then you’ll be shielded from dividend or capital gains taxes. If you have already exhausted these allowances, you might want to start looking at venture capital trusts or enterprise investment schemes, though those are a topic for another day. 

Government rules tend to change investor behaviour. The perversion, that is the tax system, means the incentive to make a lot of money from working is actively under attack. Instead one is being encouraged to invest as much as possible to shield assets from the tax regime. That basically means outsourcing the job of making money to companies rather than individuals. That’s not great news for hard workers, but it certainly benefits the asset management sector.

Interested in your investment purchase of DoubleLine Income Solutions Fund. as a long term subscriber I’ve now moved into another investment age whereby I am now an income & growth investor and the timing of your purchase appears to be potentially beneficial.

I have checked with a number of UK online investment portals and they do not appear to offer access to this closed end fund and therefore my question is whether you accessed this via a US trading platform or direct?

Any help will be appreciated.

Thank you for this question which may be of interest to the Collective. Growing up in Ireland in the last 1970s and early 1980s interest rates were very high. My grandmother used to buy national savings certs for all her grandchildren. They automatically rolled over the interest at maturity. As a teenager, I cashed them in and found they had risen by over 300%. That taught me the simple lesson. Buying bonds when rates are high and before inflation peaks is very attractive.

For lower-earning families unaffected by the child benefit clawback, but perhaps struggling even more, it is usually possible to transfer £1,260 of a non-working spouse’s personal income tax allowance to the working partner. This can potentially save £252 a year. Again though, this is not automatic, it must be claimed.

And these are far from the only tax anomalies. Since 2009, those earning more than £100,000 a year have had their personal income tax allowances clawed back at the rate of £1 for every £2 earned above the threshold. Worse still, the threshold has been unchanged for more than 13 years. Anyone earning £125,140 or more loses the entirety of their personal income tax allowance. 

Here again, making additional pension contributions is a good option for reducing your taxable income — and for those earning more than £100,000, it might be a more realistic option. The sweetener is that the effective tax relief for those affected can be up to 60%. For these people, the government effectively contributes £60 for every £40 they pay into their pensions.

Stealth taxes make things more complicated for everyone. Many lower-earners end up paying far more tax than necessary, or not receiving a benefit to which they might otherwise be entitled, often both.

Unfortunately, especially during periods of rapid inflation, such tax strategies are the gift that keeps on giving for governments, raising additional revenue without having to increase tax rates. .

As an old ad for Morgan Stanley once claimed, “You must pay taxes. But there’s no law that says you have to leave a tip.”

I saw this chart from Eurostat yesterday and it surprised me that the European aggregate tax haul had risen so much ahead of the pandemic.

With the overwhelming spending patterns of the pandemic and the resulting inflation, there is clear need to fiscal consolidation. At present that is focusing on tax hikes but the ultimate nettle that needs to be grasped is spending cuts. That’s not just true of the UK, it’s an issue most European countries and the USA have to deal with eventually.

Even though markets gained on Zhao’s tweet, such a fund may not be best for the industry, said Quantum Economics founder and Chief Executive Officer Mati Greenspan. Binance already has too much control in a decentralized market, he said.

“That sort of concentration of power makes me uncomfortable,” said Greenspan. “It’s the kind of thing crypto was designed to avoid and one of the lessons we should have learned from last week.”

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s tweet that Bitcoin “will make it” also gave crypto markets a boost, said Greenspan. Dogecoin, a token the Tesla CEO has touted in the past, gained as much as 7.9%.

This is yet another example of the paradox of decentralized finance. It’s appealing in theory but the benefits of centralized control become evident during crises. A truly decentralized system does not have a buffer against bank runs. It is looking likely Binance will come through this crisis with a dominant position in the “decentralized” finance market.

Thanks a lot for another very informative Friday video. Could you please kindly comment on the Chinese Construction Companies’ default situation. How serious and general are the defaults of their international bonds. Thanks in advance.

Thank you for this topical question which may be of interest to the Collective. This Reuters article, dated September 2nd, included a table of the biggest bond defaults up to that point in 2022.
 

As the hosts point out, the best time to buy bonds is when yields are high and inflation is peaking. The higher yield offers a margin for error even if it takes time for the macro details to work themselves out.

Treasury bill supply could rise by $1 trillion by the end of 2023, but the impending debt ceiling episode will complicate the timing, according to Bank of America strategists. 

Strategists Mark Cabana and Katie Craig estimate Treasury will issue about $193 billion of bills in 4Q 2022 and $257 billion in 1Q 2023, with particularly strong months of supply in November, February and March because they are typically heavy deficit months that require additional issuance to sustain the cash balance

However, bill supply projections and the associated market impact are complicated by uncertainty around the timing of the debt limit, another round of money-market reform and the Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening

Positive quarters of bill supply should help cheapen bills relative to overnight index swaps, and strategists estimate spreads should narrow by 10 basis points or more

Still, the monthly path of bill issuance is “much less clear” because of the debt ceiling, which could become constraining as early as December 2022

At that point Treasury would enter a debt issuance suspension period, which would restrict their ability to issue debt -- likely cutting bills to keep coupon sizes unchanged

Strategists project the potential default, or x-date, would be in August or September 2023. After that, there would be a surge of bill supply to replenish the cash balance

The big question for anyone issuing debt is whether there is a sufficiently large pool of willing buyers to support the market. The Bank of Japan has been buying bonds for so long that it has largely crowded out the domestic market. Liquidity in the 10-yeasr is at an all time low. This condition raises important questions for the US government because $1 trillion deficits appear to be the norm.

“This is a devil’s bargain,” said Steve Chiavarone, senior portfolio manager at Federated Hermes. “Size of rate hikes will likely fall, but terminal rate is likely higher -- the implication is a greater number of smaller rate hikes. That is not dovish.” 

Jay Powell said in plain English it is better to overtighten, and cut later, than to under tighten and risk allowing inflation to become entrenched. That’s about as hawkish as it gets. The Fed wants a recession and they will keep going until they kill demand.

Turkey was the biggest buyer of gold during the quarter, followed by Uzbekistan (26.13 tons) and India (17.46 tons). Not all countries report their gold purchases regularly, so it’s difficult to know how much, for example, China and Russia bought during this same period.

India is also shoring up its gold reserves.

Indian consumers habitually purchase gold jewelry ahead of the festive season every October. But that aside, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) bought 13 tons of gold in July and 4 tons in September, pushing its reserves to 785 tons, according to the WGC.

Any foreign exchange and gold reserves Russia had overseas have been confiscated. That’s a big lesson for every country that is suspicious of NATO’s motives now and in the future. It is therefore reasonable for countries to favour gold over holding foreign currency because at least the gold is a physical entity that can be held internally. Nuclear weapons are now also a must have to defend against invasion for any country that holds opposing views to NATO.

The surprise pickup in vacancies highlights unrelenting demand for workers despite mounting economic headwinds. The persistent imbalance between labor supply and demand continues to underpin robust wage growth, adding to widespread price pressures and reinforcing expectations for yet another large rate hike on Wednesday.

The latest increase in openings erased much of August’s slide, which, at the time, had suggested a notable moderation in labor demand.

“After the shock of last month’s report, the September JOLTS data is returning to a familiar story: demand for workers remains robust,” Nick Bunker, head of economic research at Indeed Hiring Lab, said in a note. “By all the key metrics in this report, the labor market is resilient.”

There is no easy way to address a shortage of workers because someone is going to be upset by whatever solution is suggested. Immigration is the most expedient but it comes with significant political pitfalls and will invariably change the culture of wherever migrants congregate most.

In September, a sharp slide in the yen following the policy statement and dovish comments by Kuroda prompted Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki to order Japan’s first entry into markets to prop up the currency in 24 years. While the governor moved the market again during Friday’s briefing, his tone was more cautious and his remarks weren’t preceded by falls in the currency like the previous month. 

Kuroda continues to hold firm as the last anchor of low global rates just a day after the European Central Bank went ahead with another jumbo rate hike. But the governor is walking on a tightrope as his stance risks putting further downward pressure on the yen despite billions of dollars spent by the government to support the currency.  

“The likelihood of the BOJ pivoting toward tightening is still small as Japan’s inflation is not broad based at all and is only rising about a third of the pace seen in Europe and US,” said Kyohei Morita, chief Japan economist at Nomura Securities.

The speed of the Yen’s decline since March has alarmed politicians and not least because the price of oil is in the region of the 2008 peak when redenominated into the currency. The Bank of Japan’s challenge is much of the inflation is imported. Domestic demand needs a cultural change and that will not be achieved by transient price pressures.

Inversions of this segment of the Treasury curve typically occur late in Fed tightening cycles as three-month bills track the policy rate while longer-term borrowing costs reflect expectations for economic growth and inflation. While other widely-watched yield curve segments such as the two- to 10-year and five- to 30-year have been deeply inverted for much of this year, the Fed follows this one more closely.

“We are certainly in territory with the Fed’s official barometer of the yield curve that will raise concerns,” said Gregory Faranello, head of US rates trading and strategy at AmeriVet Securities. “The Fed will definitely watch this, and there is a sense in the bond market that they will soon throttle back the pace of rate hikes and take a step back.”

The 10-year – 3-month spread spent part of today inverted following an 11.65 basis-point contraction. The spread was at 223 basis points in May so this tightening has been the fastest in decades. The fact there was such a wide divergence between the 10-year – 2-year and the 10-year – 3-month was regarded as an oddity but reflected the stresses in the bond market.

The US economy does not appear to be on the brink of recession at the moment. In thinking about the odds of a recession next year, we break the risks into three categories: (1) the risk that a recession will prove necessary to bring inflation down, (2) the risk that the Fed will cause a recession that is not necessary, and (3) the risk that something else will cause a recession.

The odds that a recession will prove necessary have fallen a little because the first two steps of the required adjustment—slowing GDP growth to a below-potential pace and rebalancing supply and demand in the labor market— have gone remarkably well so far. But it would be premature to say that this risk has fallen too much until we see consistent evidence that labor market rebalancing is slowing wage growth and breaking the wage-price feedback loop.

The odds that the Fed will cause a recession that is not necessary have likely risen somewhat. It is increasingly clear that shelter and health care inflation— and by extension commonly used measures of the underlying inflation trend such as trimmed-mean inflation—are likely to remain uncomfortably high throughout 2023 and would even if the labor market rebalanced tomorrow. While it is not our base case, we see some risk that too great a focus on lagging indicators, too little patience, or tightening too quickly to gauge the impact on the economy could result in a recession that is not necessary.

A link to the full report is posted in the Subscriber's Area.

I used this slide in my IFTA conference slide deck a year ago. At the time, worry about inflation was not urgent even through the 5-year has broken highs and had first step above the base characteristics.

As I thought about what to talk about at the NAAIM conference today, I thought it would be time to update my chart. In the last year, yields have surged and instead of the illusory dragon, today Jay Powell is being tasked with slaying the inflation dragon.

“Credibility is hard won and easily lost,” Ramsden said. “That credibility is being recovered. That has to be followed through. A return to the kind of stability around policy making and around the framing of fiscal events will be really important.”

He said the issue with the Sept. 23 statement was that “it had one side of the fiscal arithmetic in it” and that the decision to include forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility will help underpin the confidence investors have in assessing the UK budget due out next week.

“What we are going to get on Oct. 31 will be very important,” Ramsden said. “My sense is that will take account of all the statements on both the revenue and on the spending side.”

 

The bond market has become relevant in politics again for the first time in decades. Liz Truss was unfortunate to find that out in real time. Donald Trump demonstrated that you could engage in procyclical policies and manufacture a swifter expansion. Now most politicians think they can do the same thing. The problem is he did that before inflation took off. Now, the quantity of debt has multiplied, inflation is problematic and fiscal austerity is back on the menu.

Nochu dominated the CLO market until 2019, when it exited amid regulatory and political scrutiny. The Japanese bank would buy all the top-rated securities in a deal. It returned to the US market in late 2021 and to Europe in recent months, but it was buying far fewer securities. 

But with Nochu backing out again, a critical buyer is gone, potentially slowing down CLO sales, money managers said. And others are buying existing deals in the secondary market.

“In a tight CLO liability market the loss of any buyer makes a difference,” said Dagmara Michalczuk, an investor at Tetragon Financial, in an interview. CLO issuance for the remainder of the year is likely to be more uneven than in the last quarter of 2021, she said.

Big institutional buyers will buy every day as long as they are making money. When a favoured strategy stops working it causes a crisis of confidence. Whole business lines have been developed to thrive from the trade. When it stops making money the best performing sector becomes an internal problem that requires a remedy.

Banks in Switzerland sought the most dollars since 2008 using an emergency dollar swap facility provided by the Federal Reserve in what is likely to be a bid for easy profits.

In Wednesday’s auction conducted by the Swiss National Bank, 17 institutions took up $11.09 billion. That’s the most since October 2008, when the Global Financial Crisis was raging in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ collapse. 

This is the fourth week in a row when banks have accessed the facility. Last Wednesday, 15 banks took up $6.27 billion in funds. 

According to economists at Credit Suisse, Swiss banks swap the dollars into francs in order to generate a profit. The lenders can even sell the cash back to the SNB using its reverse repo auctions, or deposit it at the institution to benefit from a positive interest rate.

“We do not believe that the increased demand for US dollar liquidity by domestic banks reflects any liquidity issues in the Swiss banking system”, Credit Suisse economist Maxime Botteron wrote in a report last week.

The dollar swap facility was created during the crisis that began in 2007 as a lifeline to provide safe access to Greenback liquidity, while the SNB’s cash-taking repo auctions are designed to drain excess liquidity from the market. 

It’s not clear that Swiss officials are likely to act to stop banks from taking advantage of the facility. Conditions of the dollar auctions are controlled by the Fed, and the reverse repos are a core instrument in the SNB’s current tightening of monetary policy.

All Swiss and foreign banks which have a branch in Switzerland or are registered with Swiss authorities are entitled to participate in the dollar auctions. Credit Suisse expects predominantly smaller banks to take advantage of the profit play.

The world is dealing with falling supply of Dollars as rates rise and money supply shrinks. Tapping swap lines to source dollars which can then be sold for a profit is a handy money making exercise for banks. 

A rally in the S&P 500 faded after Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said officials are likely to raise interest rates to “well above” 4% this year and hold them at restrictive levels to combat inflation, while leaving the door open to doing more if needed.

Traders also sifted through a mixed bag of corporate earnings, with Tesla Inc.’s sales disappointing and International Business Machines Corp. surging on a bullish forecast. Several market observers remarked that the bar has been lowered quite a bit ahead of the current earnings season, boosting the odds of upside surprises. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s been no shortage of warning signals about the economy when it comes to corporate outlooks.

Alcoa Corp. -- which is a dependable barometer of US economic health across industries including construction, automotive, aerospace and consumer packaging -- said demand for the world’s heavy industries is falling. Union Pacific Corp., the largest US freight railroad, cut its forecast for volume growth to reflect a “challenging year.”

As traders wade through corporate results, “with an extra eye on guidance, expect volatility to remain elevated,” said Mike Loewengart at Morgan Stanley Global Investment Office

Earnings are holding up but guidance is being lowered. CEOs are at their most bearish in years but investors have cash to burn and are eager to salvage a dire year for their performance. Appetite for buying the dip following upside key day reversals for mega-cap stocks last week is still evident.

We study the impact of remote work on the commercial office sector. We document large shifts in lease revenues, office occupancy, lease renewal rates, lease durations, and market rents as firms shifted to remote work in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that the pandemic has had large effects on both current and expected future cash flows for office buildings. Remote work also changes the risk premium on office real estate. We revalue the stock of New York City commercial office buildings taking into account pandemic-induced cash flow and discount rate effects. We find a 45% decline in office values in 2020 and 39% in the longer-run, the latter representing a $453 billion value destruction. Higher quality office buildings were somewhat buffered against these trends due to a flight to quality, while lower quality office buildings see much more dramatic swings. These valuation changes have repercussions for local public finances and financial sector stability.

San Francisco commercial real estate occupancy is below 40% while New York and Los Angeles are just higher than that figure. This is a looming issue for the owners of vacant properties, many of whom are pension funds and other private investors. 

Despite the drop in valuation, the listing is set to be one of the year’s biggest IPOs. Amid heightened volatility and disappointing debut performances of last year’s listings, IPO volume in the US has plummeted to $22.3 billion this year, compared with $277 billion at this point in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Instacart Inc., another highly anticipated IPO, last week cut its valuation for the third time, to $13 billion, and is waiting for the markets to settle before going ahead with a listing. Another deterrent for new listings is the fact that many companies that went public in 2020 and 2021 are trading below their IPO prices.

But some analysts said it was reasonable for Intel to go through with the listing despite the poor market timing. Analysts at Bernstein said Intel likely needs the money it will receive from the deal, “given the way their own business is currently trending.” And Vital Knowledge analysts wrote that the “headline is negative, but keep in mind the $50B valuation was floated back in December, so no one should be shocked that the number is now lower today.” Intel shares were up about 1.4% in early trading in New York. 

At present we have straws in the wind but the issues with alternative asset valuations are going to become pressure points for investors over the next couple of years. The LDI debacle in the UK where pensions engaged in financial engineering to avoid leverage rules is the thin end of the wedge.

The reality is QE and the low interest rate environment robbed savers, like pension funds, and forced them to become speculators. At the same time it favoured risk takers and inflated their assets. That allowed both to prosper for a long time but rising rates and tighter liquidity mean the party is over.

Margin calls for more collateral are still coming through, though at a less aggressive pace than two weeks ago, according to market participants, who asked not to be identified. Funds are still selling assets to meet them, managers are trying to lobby the BOE, everyone is bracing for next week when the central bank support has gone, they said. 

Many funds are making tough choices in the run up to the deadline. Almost daily they have been having to decide whether to dump assets to raise cash for possible future margin calls, which would weigh on returns; reduce their LDI positions, which would leave them more exposed if rates turn back around; or find other ways to get some cash.

Some have asked the corporates, whose employees pensions they manage, for emergency short-term loans so they don’t have to sell prized assets. Others have agreed that the companies could accelerate already-agreed payments they would have made to their pension schemes over several years, according to consultants, who asked not to be identified discussing their clients. This means some companies have been stumping up large one-off payments to their pensions, the people said.

“For instance, if they had a pre-agreed payment plan to put in cash on a monthly schedule, some have decided to make an advanced contribution equivalent to one year’s deficit recovery payment,” Norbert Fullerton, a partner at Lane Clark and Peacock said.

“Across the industry there are schemes that can’t raise enough cash and have had to reduce their leverage and hedge ratios,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate situation to be in but some don’t have sufficient liquid assets to sell.”

Every pension fund has been faced with the same challenge. They need an assumed return of 7-8%. When bond yields collapsed and stayed down for a decade, the scope for compounding disappeared. Quantitative easing was often described as favouring traders at the expense of savers and the dilemma faced by pensions is a vivid example of that.

European Central Bank Governing Council member Pierre Wunsch said interest rates may eventually have to top 3% to get record inflation under control. 

“My bet would be it’s going to be over 2%, and I would not be surprised if we have to go to above 3% at some point,” Wunsch told CNBC in an interview in Washington. 

Wunsch also said:

The ECB’s deposit rate, currently 0.75%, will “most probably” need to exceed 2% year-end

“Frankly on the basis of our base case, which is now more or less a technical recession in Europe, I think we are going to have to go real positive somewhere”

“We’ve been claiming that what happens in Europe is different from the U.K., from the U.S. But over the last six months basically the direction we’ve been taking was not that different”

The ECB’s rate peaked at 4.25% in 2008. That suggests the anticipated peak of hiking, at 3%, will be well below that 2008 peak. That’s only relevant because the Fed Funds rate could exceed its 2007 peak at 5.25% before this hiking cycle has ended. That raises the question why is the Euro rebounding?

“Has the government finally heeded the calls from markets and the Bank of England? Price action in gilts and the pound suggests markets believe so,” said Simon Harvey, head of FX analysis at Monex Europe. 

The plan to freeze corporation tax next year has come in for particular attention from detractors within Truss’s own Tories. Under a strategy set out by the previous Conservative administration, the levy on companies was due to rise to 25% from 19% in April. But scrapping that move was one of the key measures in Kwarteng’s fiscal plan announced Sept. 23.

The initial market reaction on Thursday suggests that a U-turn on corporation tax -- along with the bank’s greater buying activity this week -- could help ease any turbulence next week after the Bank of England halts its bond purchases on Friday. Investors will be focused on the details of the plans the government is drawing up, and that may determine whether the broad market rally can be sustained.

“Given investors are short, the reaction of sterling is not a surprise,” said Gareth Gettinby, portfolio manager at Aegon Asset Management. “Ultimately, the UK has an extremely negative external balance that remains reliant on foreign funding which remains a negative. So a short term bounce on government noise and then expect the currency to weaken.”

Confidence in the standard of UK governance has taken a beating recently. The government has few options when the bond market is throwing a fit at the prospect of modern monetary theory gone wild. They will inevitably have to walk back the commitment to lower taxes and will hopefully double down on deregulation.

“Bailey’s words did sound harsh but from the BOE’s perspective they need to sound stern,” said Pooja Kumra, rates strategist at Toronto-Dominion Bank. “The BOE has been very receptive to markets. If chaos continues we doubt that they will run away.”

The Bank of England is in a very difficult position. They desperately need to act against inflationary pressures but are constrained from using the tools at their disposal because of the risk posed by leverage in the financial system, not least in the pension sector.