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

Financial Review with 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.

Monday, August 04, 2014 - Giving Up the Ghost

Financial Review with Sinclair Noe

DOW + 75 = 16,569
SPX + 13 = 1938
NAS + 31 = 4383
10 YR YLD - .01 = 2.49%
OIL + .09 = 98.38
GOLD – 6.00 = 1289.20
SILV - .17 = 20.23

Let’s start with economic data; on Friday we had the monthly jobs report: 209,000 jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.2%. It was a decent jobs report but came in a little under expectations. Still the economy has been adding jobs at a strong clip this year. Early in 2014, the Conference Board’s employment trends index pointed to stronger job creation even though the economy temporarily contracted, and that’s exactly what happened. Hiring accelerated, the economy snapped back in the second quarter, and over the past six months the economy has added jobs at the fastest clip since 2006.

The Employment Trends Index increased in July to a reading of 120.31, up from 119.91; this represents a 6.6% increase from a year ago. The 6 month growth rate in the index is the strongest in over 2 years, and suggests solid job growth is likely to continue in the coming months. Job openings keep hitting post-recession highs. There were 4.64 million job openings in May, near an all-time high; and layoffs are extremely low, even compared to the prerecession period.

While there are some signs of strength in the jobs market, wages have been stagnant. Worker pay was a smaller piece of the US income pie than earlier estimated as some Americans collected significantly more in interest and dividend payments over the past two years.  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. With the revisions, employee compensation was reduced by $9.5 billion in 2011, $5.1 billion in 2012 and $14.6 billion last year. It accounted for 52% of gross domestic income in the last quarter of 2013, down from a prior estimate of 52.2%.

More rank-and-file workers are participating in the recovery as companies report record profits and boost hiring. Compensation has accelerated this year, rising $134 billion after a $153 billion surge in the first quarter. It marked the biggest back-to-back gains since the six months ended in the first quarter of 2007. That’s because companies are hiring again and more people are returning to the workforce, not necessarily because paychecks are getting fatter. We’ve added millions of people to the payroll since the low point of the economy, but we haven’t added at all to the payouts that workers are receiving. Little has flowed to workers except as an increase in their employment rate.

The latest data on consumer credit is due out Thursday. It’s likely to show non-revolving debt like auto and student debt is continuing to grow rapidly. But credit-card debt has barely budged. Auto loans made up a big part of the growth in second quarter GDP. In the second quarter, motor vehicle and parts spending grew an annual 17.5% rate. Put another way, cars made up 3.7% of all consumer spending, the highest rate since the first quarter of 2008. Growth in subprime auto loans has climbed more than 130% in the past five years.

The New York Times recently reported that many subprime auto lenders are loosening credit standards and focusing on the riskiest borrowers, and then many of the subprime auto loans are bundled into complex bonds and sold as securities by banks to insurance companies, mutual funds and public pension funds, a process that creates ever-greater demand for loans. Subprime loans make up about a third of new car-sales and two-thirds of used cars; with many subprime loans carrying interest rates of 23% or more; the loans were typically at least twice the size of the value of the used cars purchased.

Now maybe you are thinking that there were financial reforms put in place following the downturn; reforms that would prevent subprime lending practices. The Dodd-Frank Act did create the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and you might imagine this would protect consumers from less- than scrupulous lenders. Auto loans were stripped out of the CFPB's jurisdiction by an amendment proposed by Representative John Campbell (R-CA), a former used car dealer. Ripping off poor people has become an art form, and one of the requirements is that the companies engaging in this performance art keep themselves outside regulation as much as possible.

General Motors Financial said today it was served with a subpoena from the Department of Justice directing it to turn over documents related to underwriting criteria on subprime auto loans. The Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, allows the Justice Department to sue over fraud affecting a federally insured financial institution.

A Federal Reserve survey of 75 domestic and 23 foreign banks shows that banks are seeing solid demand for loans, but the banks aren’t making it easy for borrowers. Banks reported stronger demand for prime residential mortgages for the first time since last summer and for home equity lines for the first time since October 2013. Credit standards on prime mortgage loans have eased somewhat, but mortgage standards still remain tighter than in 2005. The July survey also shows that new qualified mortgage rules has reduced approval rates on applications for prime jumbo home-purchase loans and nontraditional mortgages but have not impacted prime mortgages. Banks were somewhat more willing to make consumer-installment loans than they were in the April survey.

New research from the Federal Reserve and Northwestern University finds that expanding unemployment insurance benefits reduces the likelihood of mortgage delinquency. About 5 million foreclosures were completed between 2008 and 2012, but it could have been much worse. The survey says unemployment benefits prevented about 1.4 million foreclosures between 2008 and 2012.  

The researchers discovered there were other side benefits from jobless benefits. Banks who saw a lower default risk expanded credit access. Mortgage investors lost less than they otherwise would have. Local governments took a smaller hit. Also, more owners hanging onto their properties meant that homes stood a better chance of not falling into disrepair, which in turn would have sunk property values in their neighborhoods. And here’s one key finding for housing-policy wonks: Fewer troubled properties cut the government’s costs for expanding jobless benefits by narrowing the number of bad loans that would have been covered by federally controlled mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Savings related to Fannie and Freddie decreased net costs for the federal government’s jobless-benefits expansion by about one-fifth.

Today’s bank failure comes from Portugal, and it was a big one. Banco Espirito Santo gave up the ghost; the bank will be shut down, and its healthy businesses transferred to a new bank. Portuguese officials were unable to find private investors to prop up the bank, and so the government will use 4.9 billion euro, or about $6.6 billion of its own funds to bail out the bank, or at least part of it. The bank will be spit in two, with the healthy part going to Novo Bank; the healthy part will include deposits and viable assets; so for now, the depositors and senior bondholders are safe.

Regulators are investigating possible accounting fraud and abuse of privileged information by the Espírito Santo family. Toxic loans, mainly to the Espirito Santo corporate parent and various subsidiaries, will be quarantined in a separate bad bank, which will be owned by shareholders and junior bondholders. Eventually, the new bank, or Novo Bank, will be sold in an attempt to recover the taxpayer loan. It is not clear whether even a sanitized version of Banco Espírito Santo will be worth enough to repay the loan.

Banco Espírito Santo provides something of a preview of what may happen in October when the European Central Bank discloses the results of an exhaustive review of bank holdings in the eurozone. The review is intended to uncover precisely the kind of hidden problems that have undone Banco Espírito Santo.

The central bank review is expected to expose an unknown number of other banks with problem loans or other woes that they have failed to disclose to regulators or shareholders. There has been concern that the central bank’s findings could destabilize the eurozone financial system. The European Union still lacks a comprehensive system for dealing with troubled banks, meaning countries must finance their own bailouts.

There is a new study taking a look at the state of banks in the US, the limits of Dodd-Frank reform, and what should be done with banks that are too big to manage. The study was requested by Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Republican Senator David Vitter, and the study finds that some institutions remain too complex and interconnected to be unwound quickly and efficiently if they get into trouble. That means that banks still would be able to force a taxpayer bailout in some form, and the banks are essentially receiving value in that implied guarantee. And the new study had the Government Accounting Office look at the value of that implied bailout. Turns out it was a tough calculation as the value of the implied guarantee varies, skyrocketing with economic stress (such as in 2008) and settling back down in periods of calm. If we were to return to panic mode, the value of the implied taxpayer backing would rocket. In other words, the threat of high-cost taxpayer bailouts remains very much with us.