Tactical Nukes

The fundamental case for a bull market died a long time ago and has not terribly sound in a long, given the combination of high valuations, slowing growth and a significant portion of earnings that were an outright illusion. Strategically speaking, the last time the bull case made any sense was in early 2006. That has not prevented tactical factors from pushing an overvalued market still higher in the interim. The primary tactical focus has been "liquidity" which readers of this blog will recognize as simply a synonym for growing debt.

The UDB threw off a tremendous amount of this "liquidity" as debt expanded rapidly. The serial collapse of mortgage finance, CDOs, MBS, asset-backed CP and other debt markets has reversed the flow as outstanding debt/credit shrinks. But how is this affecting stocks, you might ask? Well, there is the obvious collapse of profits in the building and financial sector as well as similar impending action in the consumer sector. But these are indirect effects and failed to knock down the indexes for long until recently.

There is now a much more direct impact on supply and demand for stocks and the financial pressures are affecting both sides of the equation. On the supply side, many distressed financial firms will be forced to issue new equity to bolster their crumbling capital base. Two major sources of "greater fool" demand for stocks have essentially disappeared - leveraged buyouts and corporate buybacks financed with debt. Lenders are no longer willing to finance such foolishness now that it has been exposed as such. The WSJ has this to say:

Driven by billions of dollars in share buybacks, record-setting buyouts and a wave of mergers, the amount of stock in the market shrank by hundreds of billions of dollars in the past four years.

With the supply of stock down and demand strong, the market rallied. Now, as the economy slows and credit markets buckle, high-profile companies are cutting back on buybacks, and some wish they held on to the cash they gave back to shareholders.

The reversal of the trend exposes a flaw in the buyback strategy -- many companies bought high and are selling low.

Big Buybacks Begin to Haunt Firms

"Liquidity" has been removed. LBOs of any real size are dead. Instead of buying back shares to reduce the supply, corporations are starting to issue more stock and increase supply just as demand is falling. It looks to me as if the even the tactical bull case has been nuked at this point. The strategic case is long-dead. What is the reason to still own stocks today?

Sea Change on the Street

Guys, there was a huge change of tone over the last two weeks and especially this week. The denial that has ruled Wall Street for so long is beginning to show major cracks. We're finally seeing grudging admissions that this is a much bigger problem than they were willing to admit. What used to be just a "subprime" crisis is now a "mortgage" crisis.

The terrible reports from major retailers like Pennys, Macys, Kohls and the spectrum of apparel shops along with restaurants like Starbucks, PF Chang, Chipotle, Brinker and Panera are causing the Street to question the "resilient consumer" thesis. They should since it is based on the ability of the consumer to dig themselves into an every deeper hole of debt. But McDonalds and Target did well and Walmart OK. What does it tell you when spending is switching from department stores to discounters and from premium or sit down restaurants to the golden arches?

We don't hear the word "contained" much anymore do we?


Smacking Fannie
Fannie Mae is messing with their accounting to hide rapidly rising losses. They snuck in the accounting change that cut reported losses by almost half. This sort of game has been very common at financial companies in the last few years. They usually get away with it but this time investors noticed and slammed the stock down 20% in just a few sessions. The executives at Fannie must feel like Mike Leach when one of his OLinemen gets called for holding. We're going to see a LOT more of this simply because there is so much out there to find.
More doubts about Fannie Mae's disclosures


Commercial Divers
Next, we get the first real world confirmation that commercial real estate pricing is now falling. Synthetic indexes like the CMBX and credit indicators have been indicating decline for many months. The MIT index covers CRE owned by large pension funds and showed a decline of 2.5% for Q3. That would imply that prices rolled over either during Q2 or early in Q3. Commercial joins residential and commercial construction spending should follow shortly.
MIT index shows first drop in commercial property value since '03

Just incidentally, the subtitle "Indicates housing woes, credit crunch 'may be spreading' " trips one of my pet peeves. There is not a housing crisis spreading to other sectors like a contagious disease. This is more like a genetic heart defect inherited by a group of brothers from the Credit family. One, let's call him "Bob Residential" has a near-fatal heart attack. Another, named "Joe Consumer" is in the hospital for major symptoms but nothing life-threatening yet. "Jim Commercial" and "John Corporate" are having chest pains. The media wants to blame Bob for everybody's problems but the reality is they were all flawed from birth (of the current crop of loans).


Goldman Shocker
Goldman Sachs, which had previously been very bullish, is now calling for $400 billion in direct losses from the crisis in mortgages, plus $2 trillion in withdrawn credit as bank reserves shrink. Well, at least they've got the right number of zeros now but they still fail to account for anything beyond residential real estate.
U.S. could face $2 trillion lending shock

Quote:

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"The macroeconomic consequences could be quite dramatic," Hatzius said in the note to clients. "If leveraged investors see $200 billion of the $400 billion aggregate credit loss, they might need to scale back their lending by $2 trillion."

Hatzius said such a shock could produce a "substantial recession" if it occurred over one year, or a long period of sluggish growth if it occurred over two-to-four years.

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The related article in Forbes made me roll my eyes and mumble "nice job Goldman, what took you so long?" This was obvious to anyone who bothered to do elementary analysis even a year ago. It's also why the Ben Stein's of the world have always been full of it. His "analysis" failed to account for how much the losses would push down the price of everyone else's houses or how the damaged financial system would be forced to cut lending. Duh!
Cost Of The Crunch? $2 Trillion, Says Goldman

Quote:

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In July, for example, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke put subprime-related losses at $50 billion to $100 billion. "Even at the time, these numbers seemed quite optimistic," wrote Goldman economist Jan Hatzius, in a note Friday. "Now it is clear to most observers that they are far too low."

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So it looks as if the new bull case is huge losses and probable deep recession. Goldman has been a constant cheerleader since they have a lot to lose from this scenario. IMO, they have simply calculated that the loss of credibility from continuing to spew slanted nonsense now outweighs the loss of business if the economy and market fall a little sooner. Make no mistake, they would be extremely unlikely to make such a change unless they felt the events were already on the doorstep.


The Bleeding Edge
Of course, Hatzius at Goldman is just catching up to David Rosenberg at Merrill, who turned quite bearish 6 months. The guys who had this right from the beginning are Paul Kasriel at Northern Trust and a pair of academics - Nouriel Roubini at NYU and Robert Shiller at Yale. Notice that none of them work for investment or money center banks. Earlier, I linked the Bloomberg interview with Morgan Stanley's head of credit strategy, calling for a greater than 50% chance of the credit markets coming to a "grinding halt." The scary thing is that Roubini is now going further and saying the "risks of such a generalized systemic financial meltdown are now rising."
Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor

This is obviously not something I've foreseen. My expectation has been for severe and widespread losses, with a few major firms failing. Roubini has not yet published his full analysis but I pray that his conclusions are wrong though I will consider them with an open mind. Just as I've prayed that my own conclusions were wrong despite believing in them wholeheartedly. The problems seem inescapable. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Tech Wreck

We've had ongoing weakness in profits for much of the technology sector so far this reporting season. But the sound of all the earnings misses has been drowned out by a handful of rapidly-growing companies with high multiples and even higher expectations. Jim Cramer of CNBC infamy has dubbed them the Four Horsemen. GOOG, RIMM and AAPL produced big numbers to feed the Nasdaq frenzy but the 4th horseman stumbled badly after the close today.

AMZN delivered strong revenue growth and beat profit expectations slightly - which was fine. Then they dropped a bombshell with their guidance.

Operating income is expected to be between $221 million and $291 million, or grow between 12% and 48% compared with fourth quarter 2006.

First problem is the range is wide enough to drive a truck through. That tells you they have no real idea what is going to happen - rarely a good sign. Second problem is that expected EPS growth for 4Q is 100% year over year. At the top of their guidance, they only fall short by half. At the bottom of the range, their profit growth will be one-eighth of expectations. That kind of miss is really bad and potentially disastrous for a high-flyer like AMZN.

What is important here is that the miss by Amazon will force people to look at what is actually happenning to earnings in technology and not just a few hyped up names. When they do look, they will see a rather ugly picture behind the hype. Almost every major technology company to report so far has had serious problems - either revenue shortfalls or forward-looking weakness as reflected in guidance. Many of them are big, even dominant players in their sector. Here's a partial list:

Chipmakers
Texas Instruments - analog semis and digital signal processors
Broadcom - WiFi and other communications chips
Altera - PLDs (key components in telecom and networking gear)
Linear Tech - analog and mixed-signal semis
Microchip - microcontrollers for consumer and industrial applications

Systems
Ericsson - cellphones and cellular network gear
Alcatel/Lucent - communications equipment
IBM - weak hardware demand

Many of the semiconductor companies are telling us that 4th quarter revenues will be weaker than last quarter. That is the opposite of the normal seasonal pattern, suggesting a significant weakening of underlying demand. These chipmakers' customers are a very broad cross-section of the global technology sector and encompass tech's A-list, so the weakness is broad-based as well.

For months, the question has been "if a tech company falls in the forest, will it make a sound?" The answer has been a resounding NO. Now we're about to find out what happens when one falls in the front yard and crushes the house.

Reserves, Profits and Multiples

One of the key problems with valuation in the stock market today is the difficulty of determining actual profits are trying to compare the numbers that are reported to previous years where different standards were used. Many bulls have tried to tell me that I should buy because the S&P 500 is selling at a P/E of only 16x 2008 earnings. Well, there are a ton of problems with that statement so let's just cover the fatal flaws.

First, I don't know what 2008 earnings are going to be and neither do they. They are using a guess as the denominator to get that multiple. The number we do have is the historical reported numbers and based on that the multiple is 18x, significantly higher.

Second, 18x is very expensive and even 16x is far from cheap. 16x would be a normal peak multiple over the business cycle. 18x would be extreme territory normally. During the 20th century, the P/E for the S&P 500 has exceeded 18x on a sustained basis 3 times: the late 1920s, the mid 1960s and the late 1990s. Each of them was followed by epic bear markets. Not a good set of precedents.

Each of those periods also featured prolonged (multi-year) periods of high earnings growth. We had the same thing this time in 2004-05 but EPS growth has fallen from 18% to 0% while equity indexes make new highs. Dangerous? You bet! In the past stocks rolled over shortly after earnings growth started to slow down. This time they refuse to roll over even when the slowdown is about to go to negative growth.

Then there is the quality of the profits themselves. The financial sector and banks in particular are quite problematic. The NY Times has done excellent coverage on the severe depletion of loss reserves at the big banks.

Some investors seem to think that banks’ current share prices reflect whatever grim earnings news remains ahead for the sector. But anyone who thinks that we have hit bottom in the increasingly scary lending world is paying little mind to the remarkably low levels of reserves that the big banks have set aside for loan losses. Indeed, loss provisions as a percentage of total loans held for investment plummeted to a historic low in the second quarter of 2007, the most recent period for which comprehensive figures are available.

Yep, we're heading into a major default crisis and banks have the lowest reserves ever. That's not a problem or anything that the Fed and Treasury want us to worry about. But the weak reserves have allowed financials to over-report profits for the last several years. Time to correct that and the price will be weak profits and for some, losses instead for the forseeable future. And I'm supposed to be interested in paying extreme peak multiples for inflated financial sector profits? No thanks.

Global Reversal

It's been a few weeks and there's been a bit of excitement surrounding the Fed. But from an economic and credit standpoint, it's largely "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Risk spreads are still wide, lots of high-grade and few low-grade bonds are being issued, market rates (all but the shortest maturities) are higher not lower. Sure, stock markets are rallying on the promise of inflation but the Fed may not be able to deliver, especially since only the Bank of Japan is using the same playbook.

If you look closely, the recent past is very similar to the 1970s. We have rising inflation everywhere, though masked this time using statistical manipulation in the First World. Inflationary credit excess driving unsustainable demand for all kinds of stuff. This benefits rising industrial exporters (Japan then, China now) and commodities producers (OPEC, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Texas, Alberta and various African nations). We experienced a co-ordinated global boom then, just as now and for the same reasons. In fact, we are currently experiencing the highest sustained rate of global GDP growth since the early 1970s - not a terribly auspicious precedent.

Even with cuts in the Fed funds target rates, the US economy seems to be well along the road to a severe recession. Housing can only be described as collapsing. To those who argue that prices haven't come down much, you are correct - that comes later. Prices are sticky in housing since the average market participant is poorly informed. Price declines often continue well after a bottom in sales and construction. Just given what's happened already, we can look forward to 18-24 months of falling prices.

Predictably, lending against depreciating collateral isn't terribly popular and the initial effects of less EZ credit are being seen in the first small drops for consumer spending and retail sales. The declines would have been worse without rapid growth of credit card balances.

The Federal Reserve reported that consumer credit rose at an annual rate of 5.9 percent in August, the biggest increase since a 7.9 percent jump in May.

The increase was led by an 8.1 percent leap in revolving credit, the category that includes credit card loans.

This will get much worse for at least a year. With consumer spending now accounting for an unprecedented 72% of the economy, the vulnerability to a consumer spending slowdown is obvious. Of course American consumers have been spending money they don't have for the last 5 years and the engine for excess spending - the housing bubble has been sputtering and has now shut down.

What's fascinating is that similar dynamics are now being seen overseas. Many nations have experienced simultaneous housing bubbles and their associated wealth effects. A number of them are now rolling over in credible imitations of the US housing market of 2006. What ties them all together is credit. Live by the (credit) sword, die by the sword. It hasn't hit the inflation boom economies yet but it very likely will.

UK Builders
UK Lenders
Australia
New Zealand
Ireland
Spain

There's evidence of housing rolling over in such diverse locations as Sri Lanka, the Baltic States and Thailand. Once again, the only common thread is a deflating global credit bubble.

Australia Leads the Way

The race to the bottom in financial responsibility reached a new milestone today. The Reserve Bank of Australia - their equivalent to the Fed agreed to take asset-backed debt paper as collateral for repo loans to commercial banks. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning:

Banks that may be forced to assume assets from the conduits that have financing coming due could themselves face shortages of capital.

To head off such a problem, Australia's central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, has relaxed rules on collateral it will accept for short-term funding. This would enable banks to take more time to evaluate which portions of the asset-backed commercial-paper market are most affected by ailing subprime mortgages.

In doing so the Australians went beyond the Federal Reserve, which doesn't accept such paper as collateral in repo operations but did recently clarify it was willing to accept a wide variety of such paper for its lesser-used, and costlier, "discount window" loans to banks.

Basically, the RBA is willing to accept asset backed paper as collateral for loans now. The Fed will apparently do the same but only at the discount window where distressed banks come to borrow, hat in hand.

Conduits and structured investment vehicles (SIV) enabled banks to move assets off the balance sheet, where they would no longer count against their required capital. By providing these entities with a guaranteed line of credit, the bank was on the hook if investors who normally provide funding got cold feet. Of course, it was assumed that the high times would last forever so such a thing could never happen but naturally it did.

In hindsight, it can be seen that the conduits and SIVs were an attempt to evade the reserve requirements and banking regulations. These things traded on the credit and the good name of the bank but never appeared anywhere in the financial statements. Simply another clever, legalized fraud. Taxpayers should not be on the hook for this sort of gamesmanship.

Behind the Numbers

Today we hear that 4,000 fewer people had jobs in the USA in August than in July. Don't believe that - the losses are much worse than just 4k.

The numbers of losses have just gotten too big for the statistical "adjustments" to hide. The actual employer survey data showed job losses throughout the second quarter and minimal gains in the first quarter. The Birth/Death Model added 120k jobs in August. That is the assumed net addition from startup businesses, less the losses from existing firms folding. Does anybody actually believe that number should be positive instead of negative given the number of small business failures? The actual employer survey showed 124k losses. The reality is likely to be worse than that once the actual net jobs from business startups and failures is measured.

The household survey has been flashing danger even longer. No jobs created since November of last year. August household survey shows 316k jobs lost. The unemployment number stayed flat because they just took nearly 600k people out of the workforce for no apparent reason. The household survey captures people not considered employees - sole proprietors and independent contractors mostly. That would describe a lot of building subcontractors, realtors, mortgage brokers, etc. With what's happening in the housing sector, you should expect large discrepencies for a while as many such people lose their jobs.

August Employment Report

BLS Birth/Death Model