Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - It’s Just a Matter of Time

It’s Just a Matter of Time
by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 80 = 16,919
SPX + 9 = 1981
NAS + 19 = 4527
10 YR YLD+ .02 = 2.40%
OIL (sept) = 94.48
GOLD – 2.00 = 1296.20
SILV - .18 = 19.50

The consumer price index rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in July. Food prices rose 0.4%, but energy costs declined 0.3%; the first drop in energy prices since March. Consumer prices have risen an unadjusted 2% over the past 12 months, down slightly from June. Prices surged in the early spring but have since tapered off. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, the core rate has risen 1.9% in the same span, unchanged from the prior month. Almost all of the increase in consumer prices can be traced back to housing costs, or shelter prices; over the past year, shelter prices are up 2.9%.

Hourly wages have risen about 10% overall since June 2009, to $24.45 an hour. But over the same span they’ve slipped 0.3% in “real” or inflation-adjusted terms. Since the Great Recession ended five years ago, the amount of money Americans earn each hour after adjusting for  inflation has actually fallen. And that largely explains why the economy is growing so slowly.

The Federal Reserve should be in no hurry to raise interest rates because there is no serious threat from inflation, at least not now.

According to the US Travel Association and GfK, a market research firm, you might not take a vacation this year. About 40% don't plan on using all of our paid time off. The share of American workers taking vacation is at historic lows. In the 1970s, about 80 percent of workers took a weeklong vacation every year. Now, that share has dropped to a little bit more than half. The declining popularity of vacation has wide-ranging effects not just on workers, but also on their employers and indeed the overall economy. Studies have found that taking fewer vacations is correlated with increased risk of heart disease; other research has shown that workers who take vacations, or even a small break during the workday, are more productive when they return. This vacation aversion is a North American phenomenon; the US is the only “advanced” economy that doesn’t require companies to give paid vacation days.

Housing starts rose to an eight-month high in July. Groundbreaking for new housing jumped 15.7% last month to a seasonally adjusted 1.09-million unit annual pace; this follows 2 straight months of declines. Groundbreaking for single-family homes, the largest part of the market, increased 8.3% in July to a seven-month high. Starts for the multi-family homes segment, such as apartments, jumped 33%.

Home Depot reported quarterly profit today. Profit rose 14% to $2.05 billion. Sales rose 5.7% to $23.8 billion. The number of transactions rose 4.2%. Home Depot said it expects same store sales to grow faster in the second half of the year, as more people take on remodeling projects. However, Home Depot maintained its full-year sales growth forecast of about 4.8%. Lowe's, the world's second-largest home improvement company, is scheduled to report results tomorrow.

Back in 2006 bust, when the housing market went bust, Phoenix was one of the first cities to get hammered with lower prices; in 2011, Phoenix was one of the first cities to snap back; prices, off by nearly 60% from peak, then rebounded sharply; home prices are up nearly 46% from the 2011 low. The number of homes in some stage of foreclosure has fallen to about 4,300 homes today from more than 50,000 four years ago.

Now, prices and sales are cooling off. Inventories of homes listed for sale have climbed to their highest level in three years while the number of houses sold in June fell 12% from a year earlier. Investors accounted for nearly 15% of homes bought in June, down from about one-quarter last year and one-third of sales in June 2012. The market is moving away from from bargain-hunting investors, who typically pay cash for distressed properties, to traditional buyers with mortgages. The Phoenix market is slowly moving back to normal, but there is still a long way to go.

Employment in Phoenix, after expanding at an average annual pace of 2.6% and 2.8% in each of the last two years, is up just 1.5% so far this year. When people don’t have a job or are not secure in their jobs, they don’t buy houses. The sluggish local economy is compounded by consumers still too battered from the bust to think about getting a loan. Some don't have sufficient equity to turn a house sale into an adequate down payment on their next purchase. Others suffered credit blemishes or income hits that make banks reluctant to lend.

Reuters reports Phoenix based PetSmart is exploring a potential sale of the company. Jana Partners, which has reported a 9.8% stake in PetSmart, has been calling on the company to pursue a sale after what it calls years of financial underperformance. There is no guarantee the review will lead to a deal and PetSmart could still determine that it would be better off on its own.

Today marks the ten year anniversary of Google. The company went public August 19, 2004 at a price of $85 a share; and it’s gone up 1,304% since then. A few stocks have done better over that time, but only a few, and of those, only Apple was in the S&P 500 10 years ago when Google went public. Today, Google’s revenue tops $65 billion, more than all but 40 US companies. Net profit margins exceed 20%, higher than all but three. Ten years ago, Google had a forward PE of 52; today, the forward PE is 20. So as share prices have constantly moved higher, valuation has constantly moved lower; which is a neat trick.

Over the past 10 years, or you could say over the past 25 years, a great deal of wealth has flowed to the tech giants of Silicon Valley; which means that the wealth has flowed away from Wall Street. And the techies have finally figured out they don’t need Wall Street bankers to make a deal. According to data from Dealogic, approximately 70% of the tech deals completed in early August have been sealed without a Wall Street bank consultant helping the buyer identify the transaction. And over the past two years, the trend has been growing, with more than half the tech deals in 2012 occurring without a banker working on behalf of the buyer. This M&A consulting shift highlights a subtle but growing divide between fee-eager bankers and the tech giants of today.

Maybe the problem is that the banks just have a hard time remembering who their clients are. Case in point: you may remember the story of Standard Chartered, the British bank, which back in 2012 paid about $667 million to settle charges that it had engaged in money laundering by making transfers for clients in Iran and other countries that were covered by American sanctions. They had to add compliance monitors. A few months later the bank’s chairman denied any wrongdoing, which was a direct violation of the settlement; and he was forced to quickly recant. Today, it seems that all of those new legal staffers and crime-fighting committees also didn’t get the memo about what they are meant to be doing. New York’s financial regulator slapped another $300 million fine on Standard Chartered for “failures to remediate anti-money laundering compliance problems as required” in its previous settlement.

Part of the bank’s 2012 agreement included hosting an independent monitor permanently installed by regulators on-site to vet anti-money laundering procedures. This monitor was back-testing the bank’s processes and found them lacking, particularly when it came to flagging suspicious dollar transfers from its Hong Kong and United Arab Emirates affiliates.

In a statement, Standard Chartered said that it “has already begun extensive remediation efforts and is committed to completing these with utmost urgency.” And this time they really, really mean it; not like last time. So, this raises the question of how many times a bank can break the law, and get away with a slap on the wrist. What does a bank have to do before they forfeit their charter?

The New York State regulator, Benjamin Lawsky, said: “If a bank fails to live up to its commitments, there should be consequences. That is particularly true in an area as serious as anti-money-laundering compliance, which is vital to helping prevent terrorism and vile human rights abuses.”

So, the penalty is nearly $1 billion in fines over the past couple of years, but actually works out to about 12% of bank profits over the same time.

You might also remember last month when Attorney General Eric Holder announced the $7 billion settlement with Citigroup for its role in packaging troubled mortgages into securities and selling them as investments in the years before the crisis, even though a bunch of Citigroup bankers knew better and did it anyway. And last November, there was a settlement with JPMorgan. And there is a chance that later this week we will see a settlement announced with Bank of America.

It all falls in line with the “too big to fail” idea known as the Holder Doctrine, which stems from a 1999 memo, when then Deputy AG Holder included the thought that big financial settlements may be preferable to criminal convictions because a criminal conviction often carries severe unintended consequences, like loss of jobs and the inability to continue as a going concern. Holder was thinking of the collapse of Arthur Anderson after the collapse of Enron. So, now Holder holds to the idea of settlement over prosecutions.  Instead of the truth, we get from the Justice Department a heavily negotiated and sanitized “statement of facts” about what supposedly went wrong.

The problem is, of course, that these settlements allow for the Wall Street bankers to get away with their bad behavior without being held the slightest bit accountable. And with no real deterrent, as Standard Chartered has just confirmed, it’s just a matter of time until they do it all over again. 

Thursday, August 14, 2014 - The Circular Capex Spending Problem

The Circular Capex Spending Problem
by Sinclair Noe

DOW + 61 = 16,713
SPX + 8 = 1955
NAS + 18 = 4453
10 YR YLD - .01 = 2.40%
OIL - .39 = 97.20
GOLD + .70 = 1313.90
SILV + .05 = 19.95

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stepped down today, a surprising reversal for a prime minister who a day earlier had assured his supporters that he wouldn’t step down unless forced out by Iraq’s high court.

President Obama says the US operations have broken the ISIS siege of Mount Sinjar. Thousands of Yazidi refugees were stranded on the mountain. Many of those displaced had now left the mountain and further rescue operations are not planned, however US airstrikes against ISIS will continue for now. And Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting ISIS will continue to receive US military assistance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia would stand up for itself but not at the cost of confrontation with the outside world, which sounded like a softer, gentler Putin. Trust him about as far as you can throw him. Intense fighting continues as the Ukrainian military kept up its offensive to retake separatist strongholds in Eastern Ukraine.

A new, five-day truce between Israel and Hamas appeared to be holding despite a shaky start, after both sides agreed to give Egyptian-brokered peace negotiations more time. The second extension of the ceasefire, this time for five days rather than three, has raised hopes that a longer-term resolution to the conflict can be found; maybe.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol will take over the supervision of security in the St. Louis suburb that's been the scene of violent protests since a police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager.

Earnings season continued to wind down. WalMart reported earnings and revenue that met expectations, but the company cut its forecast for coming quarters. Last night, Cisco Systems offered a weak outlook for its current quarter and announced massive job cuts despite reporting revenue that beat expectations.

We’ve all heard of jobs offshoring; US jobs that once built the world’s biggest middle class, have been sent overseas, and it’s been going on for quite some time. The idea was heralded as free trade globalism and the argument was that it was merely mutually beneficial free trade; but American jobs have been lost and continue to be lost, not to competition from foreign companies, but to multinational corporations that are cutting costs by shifting operations to low-wage countries.

One result of offshoring is lower labor costs, but that also means lower wages. University graduates in the US are just as likely to be employed as bartenders or baristas as they are to get a job as a software engineer of plant manager. And there’s a good chance that recent grads are still living at home with their parents. More than half with student loans are having a hard time paying down student loan debt; 18% are either in collection or delinquent; another 34% have student loans in deferment or forbearance. And if they do find jobs, they find those jobs don’t pay well. Wages have stagnated.

Even though the economy has been adding jobs, it has not been enough to push a recovery in wages. In July, average hourly wages rose a penny to $24.45, a disappointing result after strong gains in June and May. In 23 of the past 24 months, the yearly increase in hourly pay has ranged from 1.9% to 2.2%, or about one-third less than usual during an economic recovery. The 12-month increase in wages as of July was just 2%; and inflation wiped out about three-fourths of that gain. There’s been no change since the start of 2014. While it might seem counterintuitive that wages are flat while jobs are being added, the likely reason is that there are a lot of poor paying jobs plus a few very good paying jobs. According to revised data from the Commerce Department, employee compensation, including wages and benefits, was lower for each year from 2011 to 2013 than previously calculated.

Jobs off-shoring, by lowering labor costs and increasing corporate profits, has enriched corporate executives and large shareholders, but the loss of millions of well-paying jobs has made millions of Americans downwardly mobile. Between October 2008 and July 2014 the working age population grew by 13.4 million persons, but the US labor force grew by only 1.1 million. In other words, the unemployment rate among the increase in the working age population during the past six years is 91%. Since the year 2000, the lack of jobs has caused the labor force participation rate to fall, and since quantitative easing began in 2008, the decline in the labor force participation rate has accelerated. Clearly there is no economic recovery when participation in the labor force collapses. In addition, jobs off-shoring has destroyed the growth in consumer demand on which the US economy depends with the result that the economy cannot create enough jobs to keep up with the growth of the labor force.

Some people argue that the problem with economic growth doesn’t start with wages and jobs, but rather with credit, and they point to graphs of the recent rise in auto loans; just as mortgages once fueled a housing boom, now, subprime lending is fueling a boom in auto sales. Credit tightened in the wake of the housing collapse and the housing market remains weak, while auto lenders have become aggressively permissive and US auto sales have made a huge recovery, leading some to argue that consumption depends on access to credit. This is wrong. Access to credit is the lubricant for the engine of economic commerce; it is not the engine. The real driver of the economy is good paying jobs.

There have been magnificent innovations in transportation, medicine, communication, and technology as commerce has spread globally. Credit did not create technological advances, people did. Money and credit could always be used to purchase the tools to make money in business, but money could never produce anything by itself; food, clothing, shelter, cars, and thousands of other worthwhile things were always made by the labor of people, not the sweat and intelligence of a coin or a plastic credit card.

The Federal Reserve just released a report showing that two-thirds of American households have no savings set aside for an emergency, and 40% are unable to raise $400 cash without selling possessions or borrowing from family and friends. Offshoring, by lowering labor costs and increasing corporate profits, has enriched corporate executives and large shareholders, but the loss of millions of well-paying jobs has made millions of Americans downwardly mobile. In addition, jobs off-shoring has destroyed the growth in consumer demand on which the US economy depends for expansion. Corporations are borrowing money not to invest for the future but to buy back their own stocks, thus pushing up share prices.

A new report from Morgan Stanley shows the average age of industrial equipment in the US is now almost 10.5 year old. That’s the oldest since 1938, at the height of the Great Depression. Nonresidential capital expenditure; in other words, spending on equipment, nonresidential buildings like factories, and intellectual property, has fallen short of the long-term trend by 15% per year. That means businesses have pumped into the economy $400 billion less than they normally would have every year. That's $1.6 trillion over the past four years, and it's affecting every sector. Spending has been down 14% on buildings, 16% on equipment, and 6% on intellectual property.

Instead of investing that money, corporations have been hoarding cash; by some estimates, corporations are sitting on a pile of almost $2 trillion. Occasionally they dip in for share buybacks. S&P 500 companies bought back an estimated $160 billion in stock in the first quarter; that would lag only the $172 billion in the third quarter of 2007, shortly before the worst bear market since the Great Depression. Repurchases are all the rage, but are all too often made for an unstated and ignoble reason: to pump or support the stock price. Another corporate incentive for buybacks is that a pumped-up share prices make the stock grants and options held by senior executives more valuable. Occasionally they dip into the cash pile for mergers and acquisitions. North American M&A activity stands at $1.2 trillion year to date, up 83% from last year. This year is almost certain to be the best year for M&A since the crisis. Boosting growth and returns through long-term investment in their business hasn't registered nearly as highly.

The problem then becomes circular: weak demand holds back capital expenditures, which drags on growth, which depresses demand. Productivity growth in the United States, the rate of growth in the level of output per worker, is near a 30 year low. Spending on research, development and technology, would surely improve this trend. Productivity alone does not spur capex spending. Rather, spending increases when demand increases. You don’t buy a new factory or new equipment unless your customers are spending. However if your customers are spending, you will happily invest in the facilities to fill their orders. But real median household income fell 10% between 2007 and 2012. And since the financial crisis, demand across the US economy as a whole has been far below trend.

Several of America’s great cities, such as Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis have lost between one-fifth and one-half of their populations. Real median family income has been declining for years, an indication that the ladders of upward mobility that made America the “opportunity society” have been dismantled. So, now we face a tipping point, where we either start to reinvest in industrial production or watch the infrastructure turn to rust, and the US becomes a third world country.

The good news is that we are making progress in some areas. We add jobs every month, more than 200,000 jobs per month for the past six months. Capacity utilization is now up to 79%. US exports now top $2 trillion, the highest level in history. Despite the numerous false dawns since the Great Recession, analysts still expect capex to pick up. If it does, then the broader economy should benefit. Factories and equipment will have to be replaced, eventually. It might represent an opportunity; if we’re lucky.