Wednesday 28 January 2009

The collapse of the Twin Towers - International Trades and Finances

The Institute for International Finance forecasts net private sector capital flows to emerging markets will be no more than $165bn (€125bn, £116bn) this year, less than half the $466bn inflow in 2008 and only one fifth of the amount sent in the peak year of 2007.

The fall in capital flows was consistent with a worldwide reduction in the leverage maintained by financial institutions and investors, and reduced appetite for the risk often associated with such investments.

What made things worse is that private capital inflows surged to all regions (Latin America, Emerging Asia, and Emerging Europe) in 2007, before contracting sharply to all regions in 2008 and, most likely, in 2009. See chart below.

(Source: The Institute for International Finance)

The shortage of capital is particularly acute for companies that soon need to refinance debt. The IIF estimates emerging market institutions will need to refinance about $20bn a month in the first half of 2009, but that the current supply of credit covers only half that.


At the same time, the global economy is going through an unprecedented, large, rapid, synchronous, collapse in global trade.

Figure 5 captures these trends. It shows the median percent deviation from the trend of monthly, seasonally adjusted, nominal exports (in U.S. dollars) for a sample of 23 large economies. Before August of last year, this series moved in a contained range, with 90% of all observations falling in the range of -6.7% to 6.6%. But since August, this series has moved well below its historical range. The figure for November (for which we have complete data) is -21%, and it is -29% for the partial December data. This suggests that the large and widespread collapse in global trade we have seen in recent months has few parallels.

(Source: Citigroup)

The collapse of the Twin Towers - International Trades and Finances, may actually reflect the fact that the growth in emerging market is contracting at a faster pace than most people assumed, and the unprecedented pace of the decline in production and finances around the world at the end of last year implies a very sharp decline in income and a deterioating trading conditions for emerging market countries.


Tuesday 27 January 2009

The President Effect - Too Good a president To Be True for the market?

An interesting study done by Citigroup recently tried to explore the likely market effects following the new Presidential inauguration.

The theory of the stock market “election cycle” holds that stocks tend to perform better late in a presidential term than in the immediate post-election period. The presumed causal dynamic is straightforward. Going into an election, the party in power wants a strong economy; consequently both GDP and stock prices tend to be strong in the last two years of a presidential term. Conversely, it is politically safest to restrain inflation early in a presidential term; if this requires a recession that lasts a year or so, it will set the stage for a nice economic rebound in the second half of the term — just in time for the next election.


During the four years of a President’s term, the postelection year has, historically, been the worst for stocks, with a median performance of -1%.

The median performance of the DJIA in the post-election year of eight postwar first-term Presidents was -5%.

The median performance of the DJIA in the post-election year of five “high expectation” first-term Presidents was -9%.

George W. Bush is leaving office with a relatively low job approval rating of just 34%; his successor is entering office with almost three-in-four Americans (72%) holding a favorable opinion of him. As Figure 2 illustrates, this “popularity gap” of 38% (= 72% - 34%) is the widest in the postwar period. Clearly, expectations are high for President Obama. However, those expectations may prove to be a risk for investors in 2009.

Friday 23 January 2009

When a flow becomes a flood

A very insightful article from Economist.com, "Global economic imbalances - When a flow becomes a flood", tries to tackle the deep root of the current financial and economic crisis.

The key argument is that "the deep causes of the financial crisis lie in global imbalances—mainly, America’s huge current-account deficit and China’s huge surplus."

ASK people what caused the financial and economic crisis and most are likely to plump for some mix of greed and incompetence. Bank bosses have been castigated for fee-seeking gluttony, reckless lending and failure to heed the risks to their institutions. Regulators have been accused of sleeping on watch. Central bankers once lionised for mastering inflation and the business cycle are feted no longer.

Few among the public would be likely to pin the blame on “global imbalances”: the pattern of large, persistent current-account deficits in America and, to a lesser extent, Britain and some other rich economies, matched by surpluses in emerging markets, notably China. The damage done to the financial system by lax controls, rotten incentives and passive regulation is plain. Yet underlying the whole mess was the deeper problem of imbalances. A growing number of policymakers and academics believe that these lay at the root of the financial crisis.

Economists had long feared that America would ruin itself on foreign borrowing. The current account, which measures the balance of investment and saving, has been in the red every year since 1992. Until 1997, the annual saving shortfall was modest but it grew steadily thereafter, reaching a peak of $788 billion, or 6% of GDP, in 2006. America needed to borrow from abroad or to sell assets—shares, bonds, property—to pay for the string of deficits. Deficits need not be ruinous, especially if they finance profitable investment. But economists worried that as America’s consumption boom took it deeper into hock, foreigners would become less willing to lend to it. That could lead to an abrupt halt to financing and a plunge in the dollar.

Puzzles and explanations

The deficits reflected a falling saving rate rather than a rising investment rate. To finance this, America was sucking in savings from abroad that could not be relied on for ever. The dollar started to decline gradually from 2002 but the current-account deficit only got bigger. There were other puzzles: long-term interest rates ought to have picked up to reflect the scarcity of American savings and the concern about the dollar. But even when the Federal Reserve started to raise short-term rates from the middle of 2004, long rates declined. The chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, told Congress in February 2005 that this was a “conundrum”.

This spurred new thinking on global imbalances, which sought to rationalise why poor countries were so willing to send their savings to rich countries such as America and Britain. Ben Bernanke, now the Fed’s chairman, then a governor, argued in 2005 that America’s low saving was a passive response to a global “saving glut” washing onto its shores. It was not that America had lapped up foreign capital; rather capital had been thrust upon it. The money flooding in from willing foreign savers had bid up government-bond prices, lowering interest rates and lifting house prices. That encouraged Americans to run down savings and to keep spending.

As academics found fresh theories to explain the saving glut, they became less anxious about the imbalances it produced. The most developed financial markets were found in America, so it was the natural destination for foreign savers seeking safe returns. It could not run deficits for ever but the day of reckoning might be years away. Americans earned far higher returns on their investments abroad than foreigners did on their American assets. That and a weaker dollar helped to slow the increase in foreign indebtedness.

Both the old-school worrywarts and the new-school optimists got some elements of the story right and others wrong. “The dollar crisis that was predicted by the central view is the only one that hasn’t happened,” says Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas of the University of California, Berkeley. In the depths of the financial crisis in October, the dollar rallied against most currencies. America was not cut off from external funding. But equally there was a crisis—as the pessimists foresaw—and one that has undermined a pillar of the optimists’ thinking on imbalances: that America is a beacon of financial stability.

There are signs of a consensus emerging from these two schools. A growing band of economists agree that the forces behind the saving flows from emerging markets are likely to persist. The continuing thirst for dollar assets, albeit of the right sort, suggests that America remains a magnet for global capital. But the belief that its financial system can handle huge saving flows indefinitely has been punctured. Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, who had given warning of an eventual reckoning, believes that with $800 billion of net capital flows pouring into the United States in a year, some slippage of regulatory and lending standards was perhaps inevitable. The worry now is that if imbalances are not tackled, they may in time breed another calamity.

The size of the saving glut is staggering. In 1996, the year before the Asian financial crisis began, economies designated by the IMF as emerging, developing and newly industrialised ran a collective current-account deficit of $78 billion. Over the next decade this turned into a surplus of several hundred billion dollars (see chart 1), with China and oil exporters accounting for almost all of the increase in the past three or four years. Much of the turnaround is mirrored in a widening American deficit. (The world’s sums do not add up. Statisticians are unable to offset the recent burgeoning surpluses with deficits elsewhere: according to the IMF, in 2007 the surpluses exceeded the deficits by $265 billion.)

The glut and the gap

What persuades developing countries to export capital to the rich world that might be better used at home? Influences on saving vary from region to region. The income of oil-exporting countries, for instance, has ballooned since 2004 because of higher prices for crude. It would have been neither feasible nor wise for oil-rich nations to spend this windfall at home, so much of it was saved and sent abroad. Economists who have looked for something that unifies the saving behaviour of a disparate group of countries, from oil-exporters to metal-bashers, have converged on one important motive: the need to acquire reliable stores of value that can be sold easily when trouble strikes.

This idea has been developed in a series of papers by Ricardo Caballero of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Emmanuel Farhi of Harvard University and Berkeley’s Mr Gourinchas. Their thesis is that emerging countries cannot create enough trustworthy saving vehicles to keep up with the pace of economic growth, because their financial markets are immature. Householders cannot rely on a ready supply of credit—or on government safety nets—so must save hard for a rainy day. But the domestic supply of financial assets is unreliable so the thrifty plump for foreign assets instead. America is the favoured place because it has broad and liquid markets for securities.

That interpretation sits awkwardly with another: that excess saving, particularly in China, is the result of exchange-rate policy. Emerging-market central banks have bought dollars to weaken their own currencies. That encourages exports and depresses spending at home. The result is a high level of net national saving, much of which ends up in central banks’ foreign-exchange reserves. These rainy-day funds have swollen since 2004, mostly because of increased hoarding by oil-exporters and by China (see chart 2). How can this reflect private saving?

Mr Gourinchas doubts that depressing the exchange rate could sustain a high rate of saving for long. By flooding the foreign-exchange market with their own money, central banks risk driving up inflation which would erode the gain in competitiveness from a cheap currency. China has avoided that fate because it has been able to “sterilise” its currency interventions by selling bonds to banks, companies and households. That would be an expensive operation, says Mr Gourinchas, were it not for demand for savings. The reserves are collateral for the bonds held privately.

That may be too neat an explanation. In China’s tightly controlled financial system, savers have little choice. And firms, not households, account for the recent rise in net national saving. There is another puzzle: why have emerging-market currency reserves grown so large? This was largely a reaction to the painful memory of the Asian crisis: Asian countries wanted to insure themselves against another sudden flight of capital. Reserves need to be large enough to draw upon if foreign-currency financing suddenly dries up, and to ensure that trade flows smoothly. But reserve holdings in some emerging markets have gone way beyond levels suggested by prudential rules of thumb—enough to pay for three months of imports, say, or to cover short-term foreign-currency debt.

Research by Maurice Obstfeld of Berkeley, Alan Taylor of the University of California, Davis, and Jay Shambaugh of Dartmouth College views these “excess” reserves as insurance for the domestic banking system. They argue that in economies with managed exchange rates and fast-growing bank deposits, there is increased risk of a “double drain”. When crisis hits, fear of devaluation could spark a rush out of bank deposits into cash, and from cash into hard currency. Reserves are not only a prudent safeguard against a “sudden stop” in foreign finance. They are also needed as insurance against the risk of “sudden flight” by domestic savers.

The authors found that a measure of financial depth—the ratio of broad money to GDP—helped to explain the size of reserves. In a more recent study they found that countries with insufficient reserves to insure their financial systems suffered bigger currency crashes during last year’s turmoil. The currencies of countries with full war chests did not depreciate; some rose. If economies draw the lesson that their reserves were not big enough, global imbalances will be even harder to tackle.

Mr Taylor reckons the policy of accumulating reserves accounts for a significant and growing fraction of global surpluses—enough (in the early years of this decade) to finance as much as a third of America’s current-account deficit. The self-insurance against financial fragility is part of a more general bent towards precautionary saving in the developing world. If it persists, as seems likely, it will throw the problem of deficient global demand back to America.

An unsatisfying implication of the literature on the saving glut is that it paints America as a tragic victim of forces beyond its control (though some of the authors insist this is not their belief). The emerging markets’ need for insurance, in its many guises, drives them to export capital to America (and to similar places, such as Britain). America, by implication, has no choice but to make room for it.

In fact, Asian savings may have provided the rope; but America hanged itself. The macroeconomic forces that drove the capital flows were hard to reverse. But what made them so devastating was that they were met by microeconomic failures—described in the special report in this issue.

The interaction between the two was fatal. After the dotcom bust, American firms turned cautious and investment spending was weak. That ruled out a natural home for foreign capital. Faced with strong external demand for AAA-rated assets, the financial system got creative. Marginal home loans were packaged into supposedly safe securities. That supply of credit lifted house prices and spurred a boom in residential construction, which filled the gap in demand left by sluggish business investment.

As these loans turned bad and losses mounted, it became clear that banks had set aside too little capital to protect themselves against unexpected losses. That left the banks crippled and the economy on its knees. The villains in this story are the banks for making silly loans and regulators for not insisting on more precautions. But what would a well-regulated financial system have done with the money?

The bait for capital inflows is that America provides reliable and liquid assets, which cannot be found at home. Ideally its financial system might have provided an intermediary service—funnelling emerging-market savings into emerging-market projects. That would have lowered deficits in America and surpluses abroad. Only a fraction of the capital that flows into America is swallowed by the current-account deficit. Much of it finances capital outflows—the purchase of foreign assets by American residents (see chart 3).

In a world of perfect regulation, the likely outcome would be fewer new assets, such as securities backed by subprime mortgages, and higher prices (and lower returns) on the best assets. That implies long-term interest rates would have dropped even further. That might have given more life to business investment but it might also have fuelled a bigger housing boom, at least in prime real-estate.

Could macroeconomic policy have better addressed the global imbalances? One option would have been to keep an eye on the current-account balance when setting monetary and fiscal policy. Tighter policy might then have dampened consumer spending and curbed imports.

The trouble is that the much tighter policy needed to make a meaningful dent in the trade deficit would have led to recession in America and perhaps in emerging markets too. It would have been hard to justify with inflation so low (and it would also rule out low interest rates and fiscal stimulus now). Mr Caballero at MIT, for one, is sceptical: “I know from my experience in emerging markets that it is very hard to fight capital when it is flooding in. Policy mistakes may have been made at the margin but no more than that.” Yet America’s loose monetary policy after the dotcom bust does bear some blame. After all, a lot of subprime mortgages with variable interest rates were originated when the federal funds rate was very low.

Illustration by Bill Butcher

An alternative would be to try to tackle imbalances from all sides. That would require co-ordinated action by surplus and deficit countries. Such attempts failed in the past because everyone had something to gain from sticking with the status quo. China might think Americans should save more but only as long as that did not curb their spending on Chinese imports. America would ask China to revalue its currency and boost its domestic demand. But it was also keen for China to keep buying its public debt.

Policymakers blithely assumed they would avoid a dollar crisis and that America would export its way out of any trouble. And that was how things were starting to play out before a quite different crisis, in the financial system, blew up.

With luck and good judgment some of the worst excesses of the financial system will now be reined in. The danger is that by focusing on regulatory reform and less clumsy ways to deal with bank failures, policymakers fail to tackle the underlying causes of the crisis. The anxieties that prompt emerging markets to run big current-account surpluses have not been assuaged. Indeed, the crisis may have spurred some countries to seek even more self-insurance in reserves and other forms of prudential saving.

It’s good to talk

Earnest editorials often call for international talking shops to co-ordinate global demand. Alas, Sino-American exchanges on international economic affairs are often heated: when America’s treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, said recently that imbalances played a role in the run-up to the crisis, he provoked an outcry in China. Past failures of co-ordination initiatives do not offer much hope either. Yet as Raghuram Rajan of Chicago University’s Booth School of Business points out, the crisis has lasted a long time and there is no end in sight: so the situation may soon be ripe for a cooler exchange between surplus and deficit countries. The two big surplus countries in the rich world, Germany and Japan, are suffering deep recessions, which may bring them to the table. The problem of imbalances goes much wider than America and China.

One necessary task is to assure emerging-market countries that they will not be caught out if they run short of liquidity. The IMF might have to be prepared to offer funds more quickly and with fewer strings. Another option would be for emerging markets themselves to pool reserves. The politics of that would be messy at best. As Hélène Rey of London Business School points out, the devaluations within Europe’s exchange-rate mechanism in the early 1990s showed that risk-sharing is far from perfect even where countries have well-established political ties.

The IMF’s resources are puny in comparison with the amounts in the vaults of emerging-market central banks. That is why the swap lines offered by the Fed to four emerging economies in October were a welcome innovation (even if the recipients were flush with their own reserves). But countries will not be persuaded to stop accumulating reserves unless such credit lines can be relied upon in future. The Fed cannot be asked to vet potential recipients: that may be a job for the fund.

America, Britain and other deficit countries have drowned themselves in cheap credit from abroad. Because the structural forces behind the global saving glut are unlikely to abate quickly, there is a real risk that the dangerous imbalances will persist—with America’s public sector as the new consumer of last resort. It would be foolish to focus on fixing the financial industry only to find that the public finances are left in ruins.


Wednesday 21 January 2009

Era of cheap oil is over

An interesting article published on FinanceAsia.com today, putting a rather groomy picture of the energy crisis that could dwarf the current economic problems.

Non-traditional projects that were profitable when prices were high, such as Canada's oil sands and fields that are deep underwater, are now being postponed or even scrapped. At the same time, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) cut production targets in December in a desperate bid to reverse the decline. That move seems to have had some effect, but there is now a fear that supply in the oil market will be dangerously out of sync with demand when the economy starts to recover.

At the current rate of decline, says the IEA, oil production from existing fields will fall to just 30 million barrels a day by 2030 – or roughly 73 million barrels short of the expected level of demand. New sources will make up some of the difference, but to fully meet future demand, the world's energy companies will need to discover the equivalent of six new Saudi Arabias during the next 20 years. Simply maintaining today's levels means discovering four new Saudi Arabias.


Tuesday 20 January 2009

European economic weather map

The latest Financial Times economic weather map for Europe shows a further substantial deterioration since it was last published in October, when the devastating impact on the global economy of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the investment bank, was only just becoming apparent.


Wednesday 7 January 2009

Oil Traders Seek Another 10 Supertankers for Storage

In the psot "Things to look at for 2009H1" (posted on 5 December 2008), I suggested that one thing to look at is the cost of tanker will pick up as the need for oil price arbitrage. Indeed, some people are looking into this matter recently as an investment opportunity.


By Alaric Nightingale

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Oil traders are seeking as many as 10 supertankers to store crude, potentially taking the amount hoarded at sea to almost five days of European Union demand, according to Frontline Ltd., the largest owner of the vessels.

About 25 of the carriers, each able to hold about 2 million barrels of crude, were already hired for storage. There are enquiries for 5 to 10 more, Jens Martin Jensen, Singapore-based interim chief executive officer of the company’s management unit, said by phone today. Traders are storing crude to take advantage of higher prices for supply in the future.

Thirty-five supertankers represent about 7 percent of the global fleet of very large crude carriers, according to data from London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants Ltd. Storing oil in tankers may buoy rental rates that fell by a record 78 percent last year as slower economic growth sapped demand for energy.

“I’ve never before seen storage demand on this scale,” said Didier Labat, a Paris-based shipbroker at Barry Rogliano Salles who has worked in tanker markets for about 20 years.

Commodities prices fell the most in five decades last year, with crude dropping more than $100 from the peak of $147.27 a barrel in July, as simultaneous recessions hit the U.S., Europe and Japan. Oil demand in 2008 fell for the first time since 1983, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Traders are seeking to lease ships for three to nine months, Jensen said. Crude oil for December delivery traded at $61.90 a barrel as of 10:49 a.m. in London, $13.66 more than the February contract. Oil companies and traders may be able to profit from storing the oil, assuming shipping, insurance and financing costs are covered.

Supertanker Rates

A supertanker would cost about 90 cents a barrel a month for storage depending on the length of the rental, according to data last month from shipbroker Galbraith’s Ltd.

Iran, the second-largest member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia, idled as many as 15 of its biggest ships in May to store crude oil. That contributed to three consecutive months of higher rental rates for ships.

The cost of delivering Middle East oil to Asia, the world’s busiest route for supertankers, rose yesterday for the first time since Dec. 5, according to the Baltic Exchange in London.

Forward freight agreements advanced. The derivatives are used by traders to bet on the future price of hauling Saudi Arabian cargoes to Japan, an industry benchmark.

The contracts traded at about 46 Worldscale points for the fourth quarter, according to prices from Oslo-based broker Imarex ASA as of 10:34 a.m. London time. They closed at 45 yesterday.

Tanker Index Gains

Worldscale points are a percentage of a nominal rate for more than 320,000 specific routes. They give owners and oil companies a starting point for negotiating hire rates without having to calculate the value of each deal from scratch.

Frontline, based in Bermuda, has advanced 13 percent in Oslo trading this year. The five-member Bloomberg Tanker Index has gained 12 percent.

EU oil consumption averaged 14.86 million barrels a day in 2007, according to data from BP Plc.

Friday 2 January 2009

Inflation and Industry Returns - A Global Perspective

Inflation plays a prominent role in global equity portfolio selection. While there is a substantial literature on the relation between inflation and aggregate stock returns in single markets, there is littleevidence on the effect of inflation on industry returns from a global perspective. In this paper, we investigate the interaction between global inflation and global industries. Sensitivities to inflation vary significantly across industries and tend to be higher for noncyclical industries than those of cyclical industries. Consistent with previous research, we also find that the negative relation between inflation and stock returns tends to diminish or becomes positive when longer horizon returns are examined. Longer term inflation information is more relevant for investors when considering equity investment decisions. Based on inflation sensitivities, we propose an inflation timing model which outperforms a global benchmark index. As global capital markets and economies become more integrated, we expect industries and inflation to be considered in a global context. Strategies such as the one we propose should be well suited to benefit from such integration.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1321440