In the Mary Mapes Dodge book titled Hans Brinker,
there is a fictional story within the story of a little Dutch boy who,
on his way to school, notices a hole in the dyke. Having nothing else
to fix the leak, he plugs the hole with his finger and stays there
through the night until workers come to repair it. We are now into the
fourth year of efforts to print trillions of little Dutch boys out of
dollars and euros in order to stop a tide from crashing through a
fundamentally damaged dyke. All of this has bought time, but no workers
have arrived, and no real repairs have been done.
The holes seem only loosely related:
non-performing mortgages, widespread unemployment, massive U.S. budget
deficits, a “fiscal cliff” sideshow, inadequate European bank capital,
European currency strains, a surge of non-performing loans in China,
and unexpected economic softness in Asia and global trade more
generally. All of this gives the impression that these problems can
simply be addressed one-by-one. The truth is that they are all
intimately related to a single central issue, which is the utter
unwillingness of politicians around the globe to accept and proceed with
the inevitable restructuring of bad debt, and their preference to
defend the bondholders of a fundamentally rotted financial system.
But haven’t things improved? No doubt, bank
balance sheets have been relieved of transparency through changes in
accounting rules. Nonperforming loans have been easy to kick down the
road thanks to an interminable “amend and pretend” process whereby a
month or two of mortgage service is exchanged for extensions that tack
delinquent payments onto the back of the loans. Meanwhile, banks have
recouped some of their losses through wider interest spreads, by
refusing to refinance higher interest mortgages, and by paying lower
interest costs as a result of monetary policies that provide zero
interest compensation to savers.
But aside from the appropriate equity wipeout,
debt writedown, contract renegotiation and reissuance of General
Motors, very little debt restructuring has occurred anywhere else in
the economy – certainly not in financial or mortgage debt. Meanwhile,
the European banking system faces major capital inadequacies,
particularly in Spain, where delinquent loans have surged to record
highs. The Federal Reserve just altered its annual stress tests for
too-big-to-fail banks to now include the risk of a slowdown in Asia. The
U.S. budget deficit remains near a peacetime high, with little
prospect of substantial reduction even if the so-called “fiscal cliff"
is resolved. The European economy is clearly in a fresh recession. We
continue to infer that the U.S. also entered a recession during the
third quarter. This will not be helpful to deficit reduction efforts.
In recent months, our estimates of prospective
return/risk in the stock market have moved to the lowest 1% of
historical data. In September, and again last week, those estimates
dropped to the worst two observations in a century of historical data.
Importantly, our concerns about global recession, unrestructured debt,
European banking strains, and other issues are not at all responsible
for those negative estimates. If anything, the continued (and I
believe, misguided) speculation in low quality debt and
credit-sensitive corporate bonds is keeping those estimates from being
as negative as they would be otherwise. The end result here is a
combination of global recession, massive and pervasive deficits,
growing volumes of unserviceable and unrestructured debt, a financial
picture marked by rich valuations, depressed risk premiums, and
record-low yields-to-maturity across the menu of investment
alternatives, deterioration in market internals such as breadth
(advances vs. declines) and leadership (new highs vs. new lows) and a
variety of trend-following measures, all alongside a deep-seated
complacency of investors that everything will turn out just fine once
the minor sideshow of the “fiscal cliff” is resolved.
Getting past the “fiscal cliff” is the
comparatively easy part. What it requires is for both aisles of the
U.S. political system to agree on a mutually acceptable (but likely
still intolerably large) federal deficit. Whether this happens before
December 31 or after is not terribly meaningful because there is not an
irreversible outcome on that date. So whatever might happen
automatically would be meaningless shortly thereafter anyway. There
will likely be a combination of modest spending cuts, modest
high-income tax increases, and limits on deductions for second homes.
None of these will have a material impact on the size of the deficit.
Despite the bluster, few in Congress really appear to see deficit
reduction as important as their core interests, which for Democrats is
to preserve spending and for Republicans is to maintain tax cuts. Some
inadequate compromise seems probable, there will be a brief episode of
joy and celebration by investors that they have been released from
their chains, and shortly thereafter the data will remind us that the
global economy is in recession, and that the U.S. economy entered a
recession during the third quarter – well before Sandy was even on the
weather map.
Ultimately, three outcomes would improve the
global economy more durably. The first would be a process of debt
restructuring that might be highly disruptive over the
intermediate-term, but would exert the costs of bad debt on the holders
of that debt rather than the general public. My expectation is that a
large portion of the European banking system will be restructured in
the next few years – meaning receivership, a wipeout of equity value, a
writedown of liabilities to bondholders, and an eventual
recapitalization as the restructured entities are sold back to private
ownership. It isn’t clear that Spain or Italy will be forced to
default, as long as Germany, Finland, and other relatively strong
countries depart from the euro and allow the ECB to monetize as it
pleases. Greece is a basket case in that it seems likely to default
again regardless of whether the euro remains intact. In the U.S.,
efforts to create standardized, marketable mechanisms to restructure
mortgage debt (e.g. debt-equity swaps such as marketable property
appreciation rights in return for principal reductions) remain long
overdue.
It would also be advisable for the next Treasury
Secretary to significantly extend the maturity of U.S. debt, because we
are now too far along to resolve the U.S. debt burden through fiscal
austerity alone, and some level of inflation will have to be tolerated
in the back-half of this decade (and possibly beyond) to reduce the
real burden. This can’t be done if the debt is so short-term that the
interest rate can be quickly reset to reflect inflation.
A second beneficial outcome would be a realignment
of the prices of financial assets to more adequately reflect risk, to
provide an incentive to save, and to raise the bar on rates of return –
so that investments with strong prospective returns are funded while
those with low prospective returns are not. Probably nothing in the
past 15 years has been as damaging to the interests of the global
economy as the constant distortion of the financial markets by central
banks, which has encouraged bubble after bubble, elevating speculation
over the thoughtful allocation of scarce capital toward productive
uses.
Finally, we need innovation in new industries that
have large employment effects. During periods of economic weakness, a
common belief seems to emerge that the government can simply “get the
economy moving again” through appropriately large spending packages –
as if the economy is nothing but a single consumer purchasing a single
good, and all that is required is to boost demand back to the prior
level. In fact, however, recessions are periods where the mix
of goods and services demanded becomes out of line with the mix of
goods and services that the economy had previously produced. While
fiscal subsidies can help to ease the transition, the sources of
mismatched supply – dot-com ventures, housing, financial services,
obsolete products, brick-and-mortar stores – generally don’t come back.
What brings economies back is the introduction of desirable new
products and services that previously did not exist. This has been true
throughout history, where the introduction of new products and
industries - cars, radio, television, airlines, telecommunications,
restaurant chains, electronics, appliances, computers, software,
biotechnology, the internet, medical devices, and a succession of other
innovations have been the hallmarks of long-term economic growth.
Fiscal policies are part of the environment, but their effect should
not be overstated.
No stimulus package or tinkering with tax rates
will produce growth in an economy as distorted by misguided monetary
policy and unrestructured debt as our global economy has become. What
is required is to restructure the burden of past errors, stop the
recklessness and distortion of monetary policy, and allow the financial
markets to adjust and clear, without safety nets, so that they both
allocate capital toward productive investments and are allowed to
punish misallocation. Then – deficit or no deficit – refrain from
bleeding the patient, and do everything possible to encourage (private)
and fully-fund (public) research, development, innovation, investment,
and education.
In my view, we are likely to experience some
difficult disruptions in the global economy in the transition from an
unsustainable economic environment to a sustainable one. Underneath the
veneer of a relatively stable U.S. economy is the fact that government
deficits presently support about 10% of that activity, the Fed has
pushed the monetary base to the largest fraction of GDP in history, and
financial assets have been driven to some of the lowest prospective
returns ever observed. Absent unsustainable levels of government
“stimulus,” the present configuration of U.S. economic activity and
asset pricing is also unsustainable. These policies have bought time,
but we have done nothing with it, because somehow everyone has become
convinced that the house of paper is real even though we all watched it
being built.
All of this will change, and despite major
challenges over the intermediate-term, there is no reason to lose
long-term optimism for the U.S. or the global economy. The problem is
that in our view, long-term assets are priced in a way that ignores the
prospect for significant disruptions, and allows for inadequate return
even in the event that the long-term works out very well. So we do
have long-term optimism for the global economy, but also believe that
financial assets are mispriced even if that long-term optimism is
entirely correct. In bonds, yields-to-maturity remain near record lows.
In stocks, valuations only appear tolerable because profit margins
remain about 70% above long-term norms, largely because of low savings
rates coupled with massive federal deficits (see
Too Little to Lock In for the accounting relationships).
Meanwhile, the intermediate-term challenges are
daunting, and should not be underestimated. Europe will not likely
resolve its challenges without major dislocations and restructuring,
Asia is likely to experience the exaggerated supply-chain disruption of
a global recession (the Forrester effect, or what
ECRI
calls the “bullwhip effect”), and though the U.S. will probably move
quickly past its immediate “fiscal cliff,” that resolution is unlikely
to significantly reduce the deficit, nor to avert a recession that we
believe already started in the third quarter.