Why No Great Rotation?

A popular view among market aficionados is that, with bond prices falling while stocks have been rising, money would shift from bonds to stocks.  Stocks and bonds have historically often moved inversely.  When stocks rose, bonds fell, and vice versa. With bonds falling now, it would seem reasonable to expect investors to rotate their money into stocks.  But there has been no rotation.  Why not?

First, for the past five years, we've had a brave new Fed which has manipulated asset values in ways beyond historical experience.  Since early 2009, central bank easy money has helped to spur a stock rally accompanied by a bond rally.  Both asset classes rose simultaneously, instead of moving inversely.  With their traditional relationship out of whack, it is hardly surprising that they don't cha-cha when they're supposed to.  Investors would be understandably suspicious of stocks in a market that is seemingly dependent on the Fed's methadone program, especially when the Fed is talking about easing out of its role as Dr. Feelgood.

Second, the Great Rotation is an investment strategy for the medium to long term.  Today's stock market is dominated by high-speed, computerized trading, where the holding period for stocks is measured in milliseconds.  The long term human investors that might consider rotating greatly have mostly been supplanted, and many have chosen to invest on autopilot, buying index funds and throwing salt over their left shoulders.

So whither the markets?  That's the $64,000 question, and in truth nobody knows the answer.  With both stocks and bonds having enjoyed years-long bull markets, logic and experience, especially recent very painful experience, tell us that when markets can't keep rising indefinitely, they won't.

Is the Fed Losing Control?

In the past two weeks, we heard from Chairman Hyde and then Chairman Jekyll.  A couple of weeks ago, Ben Bernanke made allusions to gradually winding down the Fed's bond buying program, called quantitative easing.  Up to this point, the market had perceived the current round of QE as infinite, a perception that Fed had encouraged by placing no time limts on the program, and offering only the vaguest of guidance as to when QE might end.

But two weeks ago Chairman Hyde frowned and cleared his throat, and the bond bulls began running.  In their panic, they gored many an investor who had drank the Kool-aid however reluctantly and bought risk assets like long term Treasuries, corporate bonds and junk bonds.

Within days of Chairman Hyde's hint that the punch bowl might be taken away, the ten year Treasury note was yielding over 2.5% (up from 1.6% in May) and 30-year mortgages popped up about 1% to 4.5%.  Stocks quivered, but didn't belly flop like bonds.  Alarmed, various governors of the Fed and presidents of Federal Reserve Banks chimed in and suggested that the punch bowl wouldn't be withdrawn any time soon.  Stocks perked up, but bonds continued to pout and mortgage rates kept rising. This was emphatically not what the Fed wanted, since the Fed is resorting to its old trick of trying to revive the economy by bubbling up the housing market.  Even though this is what got us into trouble in 2007-08 with the mortgage crisis, the Fed evidently has an abiding faith in its old tricks.

With the housing rally now threatened, Chairman Jekyll spoke up this past Wednesday (July 10) and made nice nice.  The little toddler of a recovery would need propping up for a long time, he said, before he'd expect it to walk on its own--a very, very long time.  He also said he was sending the senior Fed staff out for a late night booze run to stoke up the punch bowl.

Stocks did a cheery little conga and stepped up to new heights.  This might produce a bit of a wealth effect to boost the economy.  But it will be hardly a smidgen, if the bond market doldrums continue. Bonds barely budged after Chairman Jekyll's attempted love fest.  The ten-year Treasury dallied briefly with the 2.53% level, but then went back up to 2.59%.  Mortgage rates continue to cloud the skies over the housing market. 

Is the Fed losing control?  This is really two questions.  What message is the Fed trying to send?  The most recent minutes it released indicate sharp divisions within the Open Market Committee, and the truth may be that a highly mixed message would be the most accurate.  Bernanke's initial statements two weeks ago may have been an attempt to be transparent and let the public know what the Committee really thinks.  But the Fed got what it perceived as an over-reaction from the market, and has been trying to cover its tracks ever since.

But did the Fed get an over-reaction, or an accurate reaction?  The sharp sell-off in bonds and rise in mortgage rates may have reflected the erstwhile rationality of betting on a continuing rally in fixed income.  Central banks worldwide have joined together and danced the most accommodative bunny hop in the history of banking.  Anyone who anticipated a reversion to the mean in the money markets has been just about rendered CIA-style. Much of the flash crash in the bond markets may have been hedge funds and other big players unwinding leveraged positions betting on more booze for the punch bowl.  Now that the Open Market Committee may be going wobbly on the idea of giving a drunk yet another pitcher of Martinis, bond pros evidently are becoming wary of the hair of the dog that just bit them.  If so, the Fed may have lost control of the long end of the yield curve.

If the Fed no longer has a clear message to send, and can't maneuver the long end of the yield curve any more, it may lose control of the economic recovery.  But perhaps it never really had that much control.  Maybe things looked good for a while because people wanted to believe, and the Fed provided the only federal economic policy they could believe in.  With Chairman Bernanke now a short timer, courtesy of President Obama, it's unclear what anyone can believe in.  And that won't be good for the market or the economy.

Beware of Overpriced Assets

The delirious exuberance of stocks today is reminiscent of the stock market just before its earlier peaks in March and April 2000, and in the fall of 2007.  Prices move up in defiance of risks and uncertainties.  Stock indices set records every week.  Bulls overrun the markets.  Bears have become a seriously endangered species.

Even as financial messiahs proclaim a brave new market in spite of the stumbling economic recovery in America and recession in the rest of the industrialized world, let us recall the sources of the last two market busts:  highly overpriced assets.  In the late 1990s, the bubble was in tech stocks.  In 2007-08, housing and real estate mortgages were grossly overpriced.  In both instances, the sheer quantity of inflated assets ensured that when the markets turned, losses would be enormous.  Given the dazzling rise of stocks over the past few years, it behooves us to ask if there is a comparable risk today?

The answer would appear to be yes.  Investors have poured vast amounts of money into bonds of every stripe and variety.  Bond valuations, even of junk bonds, have reached highly optimistic levels.  Bonds are priced for perfection.  If any imperfection appears, losses--and a lot of them--will follow.

The most obvious risk to bondholders is that the Federal Reserve and other central banks will step back from the extremely accommodative policies they have instituted.  This will happen sooner or later, probably sooner in America and later in Europe and Japan.  When it does, bondholders will incur losses, and those losses will be big simply because of the huge amounts of money that have flowed into bonds. 

The Fed seems to think it can manage the process of shifting from quantitative easing to unwinding its $3 trillion plus balance sheet (i.e., quantitative tightening).  Perhaps it can do so without causing severe short-term turmoil in the markets.  But it can't circumvent a basic problem:  when interest rates rise and bond prices fall, a lot of losses will be incurred.  These losses must land somewhere.  They might be shifted from one investor to another by means of derivatives and other hedges.  But someone, ultimately, has to take the loss. 

The fact that losses in the financial markets have to land on someone somewhere wreaked havoc on the world's major economies following the real estate crash of 2007-08.  Investors around the globe who bought mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, CDOs squared, and other such financial alchemy paid the price for drinking too much of the Kool-Aid du jour.  We live with the resulting economic pain even to this day.

The bond markets are like a coiled spring that presents a similar problem. Extremely high prices have been paid for bonds, and bondholders face serious risk of losses when rates rise.  The sheer quantity of potential losses is the scary thing.  Those losses will have to land on someone, somewhere, and that will be painful.  The Fed's quantitative easing program has only exacerbated the risks, and the Fed's near term success in preventing depression has burnished its image of competence, which may have blinded bond investors to the dangers of the market downturn that must take place eventually.  As history repeatedly has demonstrated, the Fed is fallible and its fallibility is accompanied by serious consequences for the financial markets and the economy.

By promoting ultra low interest rates for five years, the Fed has allowed a massive build-up of investment in overpriced bonds.  While central bank intervention in a crisis is to be applauded, a years-long distortion of market forces will surely do bad things, and bad things have been done.  The only question now is when and how we will suffer the consequences.

An Omen of Financial Stress?

Something strange is happening in the short end of the Treasury securities market. Treasuries maturing in about 1 month are yielding around 0.01%. Just a couple of weeks ago, yields were above 0.10%. Perhaps this may all seem like peanuts (and it is, if you have, say, $10,000 invested). But a yield of 0.01% was last seen during the dark days of the credit crunch in late 2008 and in 2009, when the world's banking system faced a funding crisis. Such a low yield signified that no one trusted anything except the obligations of the U.S. government; that investors didn't care about getting a return. They just want to keep their money safe. The recent 90% plus drop in the short end of the Treasury yield curve in less than two weeks may be a sign that something is rotten somewhere.

Economists and other fortune tellers are raising their estimates for growth next year. Stock prognosticators are full of holiday cheer, predicting rosy returns for stocks in 2011. Consumers may be loosening their purse strings a bit for this year's holiday season. Recent tax legislation will widen the deficit for next year, ensuring that the federal spending spigot won't slow down. All systems are go, it would seem. What's to get stressed about?

Euro Mess. The European response to the Euro bloc sovereign debt crisis, generously assessed, has been tentative and muddled. The only clear impact has been to transfer risk of loss to European taxpayers and give the can a hard kick down the road. The continued uncertainty makes the U.S. greenback look good by comparison (once again demonstrating that it's easy to lose faith in America, until you look at the rest of the world). If you're going to dump Euros for dollars, it makes sense to buy the short end of the Treasury yield curve, where you're not competing against the Fed's quantitative easing program.

One group of potentially nervous investors would be money market funds that hold commercial paper of banks in shaky Euro bloc nations, like Greece and Portugal. Amazingly, in spite of the money market fund credit crunch in 2008, many money market funds bought this foreign issued commercial paper. (One wonders what happened to prudence, but then again prudence is something isn't brought up in polite company.) Those money market funds now may be quietly easing out of Euro bloc bank commercial paper and shifting into Treasuries before year end, when they'd have to disclose their holdings to investors.

Muni Mess. The muni market has fallen, about 5% in the past month. That may not sound like much, but if you held munis and it was your 5%, you'd be peeved. The future for munis isn't pretty. The federally subsidized Build America Bonds program turns into a pumpkin at the end of this year, and there won't be a fairy godmother for it next year. That means states and municipalities will face the harsh winds of the muni market without a quick fix from Uncle Sam. Many financially troubled states are still struggling with their budget problems. To make things worse, questions over states' pension accounting could compel larger state contributions to employee pension funds. Muni investors with battered portfolio syndrome may be seeking a port in the growing storm and heading for the safety of Treasuries.

Bond Mess. The bond market has fallen since early November, when the Fed formally announced its quantitative easing program. Investors who bet that QE would extend the 30 year bull market in bonds may now suspect that this time, things really are different. Those that aren't ready for the quicksands of the stock market may be parking at the short end of the Treasury curve, waiting to see whither the winds blow.

It's unclear that any of this will push the financial system back into the septic tank. Any analysis of that question would require information about who's holding what exposures in the derivatives markets. (Query: are major banks holding the hot tamale because they took the wrong end of the wrong credit default swaps?) But those markets are as opaque as ever, notwithstanding the enactment of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation this past summer. All we know is that the short end of the Treasury yield curve is at 0.01%, and the last time that happened, canaries in the mine were gasping.

Will the Bond Market Sandbag the Fed?

Improbably, bonds have rallied for the last 30 years. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, rates on 30-year Treasuries were in the range of 15%. Today, they pay about 4%. Economists have estimated that real interest rates (i.e., rates net of inflation) run around 3%. Buying a 30-year Treasury today is like gambling on 1% annual inflation for the next thirty years. That's a riskapalooza if there ever was one.

The corporate bond market is also glowingly optimistic about inflation. Recently, McDonald's sold $450 million of 10-year bonds bearing interest of 3.5%. That's like gambling on 0.5% inflation per year for a decade. Then again, if you bought 10-year Treasury notes, which today pay under 3%, you'd be speculating that there will be deflation for 10 years. One would have to go back to the Great Depression to find a time when these investments would have been winners. Reality is we've got a huge bond bubble.

The Fed is desperately seeking inflation. It's keeping interest rates (short, medium and long) ultra low in an effort to stimulate growth, hoping that a little inflation will be like a round of cocktails before dinner that gets the party going. While neither prices nor GDP are cooperating, the Fed persists, in the belief that manipulating the money supply will somehow work a miracle when consumers are scared, corporations are cautious, and Wall Street finances speculations in derivatives rather than production of goods and services.

Here's the catch: if the economy revives, the Fed will have to raise rates. That could pop the bubble in the bond markets, clobbering yet another asset class. If that happened, holders of capital, already pummeled by the 2000 tech stock collapse and the 2008 stock market crash, real estate crash, auction rate securities collapse, etc., would suffer aggravated battered investor syndrome. They'd pull back from risk and consumption. The stagnation the Fed so publicly fears would follow.

But if the Fed doesn't raise interest rates after the economy revives, inflation would flare, ravaging the value of bonds as borrowers repay creditors with cheaper dollars. The bond bubble would pop in this scenario as well, producing severe battered investor syndrome and stagnation.

Thus, the potential for lasting recovery from the Fed's monetary policies may be capped by the bond bubble. There are other reasons why monetary policies may well fail (banks refusing to lend, consumers too scared to spend). But we've got a built-in booby trap set to spring if the economy revives.

The Fed surely knows this, and will probably hold off on raising rates as long as possible. Forget about the widely accepted view that the Fed should raise rates before inflation rears its ugly head to nip the problem in the bud. By incentivizing borrowing as much as possible, short, medium and long term, the Fed faces the possibility of injuring a constituency, creditors, it has tried to protect 100 cents on the dollar since 2008.

The Fed is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. It has statutory responsibilities to promote full employment and economic growth. But if it succeeds in promoting growth with a little inflation fillip, it will likely pop the bond bubble and produce potentially large investor losses and a renewal of stagnation. Only a slow, agonizing, years-long recovery, with interest rates barely crawling up, would allow creditors to adjust to a rising interest rate environment without sharp losses. But unemployment would have to remain painfully high in such a scenario. Millions of unemployed Americans would pay the price for easing the bond market out of its current dilemma.

The Fed has yet to pop an asset bubble before it became a systemic threat. No doubt, it won't pop the bond bubble now. But it's laying the foundation for painful choices in the future.

Bond Market Tremors Hit Private Equity--and Stocks?

If you read the financial press regularly, you’ve heard of private equity deals. These are transactions where a company’s public shareholders are bought out, and the company “goes private” (meaning its stock ceases to trade publicly). Usually, an outfit specializing in these deals, called a private equity firm (they used to be called leveraged buyout firms), will borrow a pile of money and strike a deal with the management of the company to buy out the public shareholders. Other times, the private equity firm will buy a subsidiary of a public company, again using borrowed money. Once that’s accomplished, management of the acquired company and the private equity firm work to improve the company and then re-issue its stock to the public later at a profit.

One recent example of such a deal was Ford Motor Co. selling its car rental subsidiary, Hertz, in 2005 to a private equity group. The private owners of Hertz then made a public offering of Hertz stock about one year later, and by some accounts realized a profit on their investment exceeding 200%. That’s a lot of lunch money in a pretty short amount of time.

These private equity deals have been fueled by the availability of cheap credit. Interest rates have been low during the 2000s. It’s Econ 101 that when something is cheap, people will consume more of it. Credit is no different—look at how people rushed into the real estate market when lots of “affordable” loans were available. Unfortunately, many of those loans have proven to be a lot less affordable than they first appeared (as we discuss in http://blogger.uncleleosden.com/2007/05/true-price-of-affordable-loans.html). Access to easy credit in the real estate markets puffed up values and created bubbles in many regions that are now popping.

In a similar way, cheap credit fueled private equity deals. Low interest rate bonds, often issued with relatively few terms protecting bond holders (called "covenant lite" bonds), made a lot of the private equity deals possible.

The stock market is up about 18% from a year ago. One reason for this bubbliness is the rash of private equity deals that have taken place recently. Many stocks have been boosted by the expectation that they will be the subject of a private equity buyout. But the horizon is darkening, temperatures are dropping, and the wind is picking up. Interest rates have been rising in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world. Even though the Fed kept its target for the fed fund rate unchanged last week, market rates have risen because of the uncertainties in the mortgage markets (see our earlier blog about the subprime mortgage mess at http://blogger.uncleleosden.com/2007/06/subprime-mortgage-mess-on-wall-street.html). As interest rates rise, the attractiveness of private equity deals lessens. That’s because rising interest rates increase the costs of borrowing that finance these deals, and when costs rise, profits fall.

Last week, a private equity deal stumbled. It involved a grocery store company called U.S. Foodservice, which was a subsidiary of a Dutch company called Royal Ahold. Ahold sold U.S. Foodservice to a couple of private equity firms. They hoped to finance the deal with bonds. As a part of the transaction, a group of investment banks promised to lend the necessary money to finance the purchase first and then sell the bonds afterwards. This is called a “bridge loan.” If the bonds couldn’t be sold, the bridge loan would finance the deal longer term.

This time, the bonds couldn’t be sold. Investors wanted better terms than the bonds offered. Can you blame them? If a private equity outfit can make 200% plus in a year on Hertz, why would a bondholder want a relatively low return investment like a bond with relatively few protective provisions just to let some other private equity people make big bucks on U.S. Foodservice? With interest rates in a rising mode, being a lender to private equity all of a sudden doesn’t look as attractive as before.

A couple of other bond deals last week either had to be altered, or were called off, for much the same reasons. As the costs of private equity deals and other corporate restructurings rise, there will be fewer of them. And that means the impetus to stock prices that these deals provided will diminish. While the stock market has had a good run during the last 12 months, parties don’t last forever on Wall Street and it looks like the booze supply could be running low. The dollar has fallen against other currencies. That means potentially greater inflation in the U.S. It also makes investing in foreign stock markets seem more attractive. Also, the Federal Reserve Board remains concerned about inflation generally, which means it won’t lower interest rates any time soon. The housing market hasn’t found a bottom, and the mortgage markets continue to give Wall Street dyspepsia.

Not all of the picture is negative. The American consumer, as reliable as a Checker Cab, continues to chug and charge through rain, sleet, hail and snow. And unemployment levels remain remarkably low under the circumstances.

Corporate earnings reports will be coming out in the next few weeks. They, as always, will affect the direction of the market. But caution is in order. The availability—or not--of cheap credit shouldn’t be underestimated. Look what it did for the real estate markets--moving them up, and now down. As the bond market shivers, stock investors should think carefully about how much risk they want to carry.

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