Yearly Archives: 2014

Stephen Roach Takes the Fed to the Woodshed

While the Fed appears to be getting nervous about increasing (and long overdue) criticism for its undue coziness with banks, it has for the most part ignored opponents of its aggressive monetary policies. And for good reason. Most of them have been fixated on the risk of inflation, which is not in the cards as long as labor bargaining power remains weak. There are other, more substantial grounds for taking issue with the central bank’s policies. For instance, gooding asset prices widens income and wealth inequality, which in the long term is a damper on growth. Moreover, one can argue that the sustained super-accommodative policy gave the impression that Something Was Being Done, which took the heat off the Administration to push for more spending. Indeed, the IMF recently found that infrastructure spending pays for itself, with each dollar of spending in an economy with high unemployment generating nearly $3 in GDP growth. And a lot of people are uncomfortable for aesthetic or pragmatic reasons. Aesthetically, a lot of investors, even ones that have done well, are deeply uncomfortable with a central bank meddling so much. And many investors and savers are frustrated by their inability to invest at a positive real yield without being forced to take on a lot of risk.

Stephen Roach, former chief economist of Morgan Stanley and later its chairman for Asia, offers a straightforward, sharply-worded critique: just as in the runup to the crisis of 2007-2008, the Fed’s failure to raise rates is leading to an underpricing of financial market risk, or in layspeak, to the blowing of bubbles. He argues that has to end badly.

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“Summer” Rerun: So Where, Exactly, Did Lehman’s $130 Billion Go?

Dear readers,

We reinstituting a Naked Capitalism feature, the summer rerun. The last time we reprised an archival NC post (aside from a few more recent ones by Matt Stoller) was a July 9, 2009 post that we published again on December 29, 2011.

Interestingly, picking up again from 2009 serves as a reminder of issues that were hot in the aftermath of the crisis that were not addressed adequately, if at all. Here, we discuss the mystery of the magnitude of Lehman’s losses. We pointed out that they are so large and impossible to explain that there had to be accounting fraud, but the bankruptcy overseer had its own reasons not go to there.

Note that this post was published eights months before Anton Valukus released his report on the Lehman bankruptcy, which described the Repo 105 ruse that allowed Lehman to hide over $50 billion of dodgy assets at quarter end and thus not include them in its financial reports.

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The Airing of the Grievances

For those who came in late, Festivus — I’m not big on the whole forced cheeriness of Xmas, as readers can probably, by this point, imagine — is normally celebrated on December 23. However, because Festivus really is for the rest of us, Festivus can also be celebrated at any time, so here we go! […]

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Wolf Richter: First Oil, Now US Natural Gas Plunges, “Negative Igniter” for New Debt Crisis

Yves here. Wolf has been keeping a sharp eye out on how shale gas players were junk bond junkies, and how that is going to lead to a painful withdrawal. Here, he focuses on one of the big drivers of the heavy borrowings: the deep involvement of private equity firms, who make money whether or not the companies they invest in do well, by virtue of all the fees they extract. The precipitous drop in natural gas prices is exposing how bad the downside of a dubious can be, at least for the chump fund investors.

It’s hard to imagine an industry that is a worse candidate for private equity than oil and gas exploration and production. The prototypical private equity purchase is a mature company with steady cash flow. Oil and gas development is capital intensive and the cash flows are unpredictable and volatile, because the commodity prices are unpredictable and volatile.

A less obvious issue is that it actually takes a lot of expertise to run these businesses. This is not like buying a retailer or a metal-bender. Now private equity kingpins flatter themselves into believing that experts are just people they hire, but here, the level of expertise required, and the fact that the majors are way bigger than private equity firms means that the private equity buyers don’t know enough to vet whether the guy they hire is really as good as he says he is. Like all outsiders, they are way too likely to be swayed by the sales pitch and personality rather than competence.* And even with all the money that private equity has thrown at energy plays, it’s not clear that New York commands much respect in Houston.

As one private equity insider wrote in June, ironically just before oil priced peaked:

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Christmas Schedule

Naked Capitalism will be going to a holiday schedule starting tomorrow evening. We’ll have three posts a day (Links plus two additional posts) through and including New Year’s Day.

We hope that those of you who are traveling arrive safely, and wish you a good holiday break!

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