Category Archives: Investment outlook

Yves here. Wolf like to paint in bright colors, but the points he makes are consistent with business and financial press reporting, if you cut through the hype. Europe is still teetering on the verge of recession. Growth in Japan has gone negative. China is slowing down, to a degree that led the authorities to give it a monetary shot in the arm. And the US simply is not getting to liftoff. Even with official unemployment falling, consumers are cautious about purchases, with most planning to spend less on Christmas than last year. Corporate capital expenditures in the US are increasing, but so far, this is in the “a robin does not mean it’s spring” category. So with the US as the one possible engine for world expansion, and that one not firing robustly, it’s not hard to see the reason for global business leaders getting more nervous.

And to add a wild card into the mix: contrary to current conventional wisdom, bond maven Jeff Gundlach thinks the Fed will raise rates next year. That seems plausible, given that ZIRP gives the Fed no policy room if anything bad happens to the financial system and that the central bank is also coming under more political heat for its continuing extreme monetary policies. Crisis junkies may recall that the Fed went from 25 basis point interest rate cuts to 75 basis points (“75 is the new 25”), when it wasn’t clear that reductions that large were necessary (ie, signaling that the Fed was on the case and taking matters seriously was probably sufficient). The magnitude of the cuts brought the central bank deeper into super-lowe interest rate terrain. I recall thinking when the Fed cut the Fed funds rate below 2% that they would come to regret that decision.

Yves here. As Matt Stoller wrote recently, Amazon’s business strategy is all about becoming a globally-dominant trading company. It might have helped if Amazon and its investors had studied the closest historical analogue to what Amazon is seeking to become: Japanese trading companies. In their heyday, Japanese trading companies, such as Mitsubishi International Corporation, which intermediated trade for the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, and its post-World War II less-tightly-integrated incarnation, a keiretsu, had an almost impossible-looking financial statements: staggeringly large revenues, extremely thin profits (those went to the industrial companies) and enormous balance sheets with breathtaking leverage.

The Amazon 2.0 version has a lot of improved features, the biggest being impressive cash flow, since it manages to get income before it has to pay for goods. However, Amazon, like its Japanese forebearers, is interested in dominance above all. For the Japanese trading companies, that made sense because they were the sales arms for the companies in their group, so the objective wasn’t for them to prosper but to merely get by. But for Amazon, plowing its vast cash flow into growth looks less and less sensible as losses gap up. It’s one thing to incur large costs to obtain a monopoly or oligopoly position, since high margins are expected to come later. Amazon has gotten away with no profits because, in reality, cash flow generation is in many ways a better measure of the true productivity of a business. But in Amazon’s case, its hugely positive cash flow is entirely dependent on its collection v. when it pays suppliers. If suppliers, which Amazon is also squeezing on cost, start to push back this hugely successful machine will look a lot less pretty. And this ins’t a theoretical concern; Justin Fox at the Harvard Business Review points out that Amazon of late hasn’t been able to stretch payables as much at it once could. Amazon is moving on so many fronts where establishing a dominant position is far from assured, which could call its entire model into question.