Posted on 02/05/2003 11:10:57 AM PST by sourcery
Richard Benson is president of Specialty Finance Group, LLC , offering diversified investment banking services. This article was originally published Oct. 15, 2002 on his website. The recent AOL writedown appears to provide an example of the vaporizing "Fictional Equity" mentioned below.
Simple arithmetic, knowledge of how the world works, and common sense, are all that are needed to see that a long Real Recession lies ahead. The pillars of the U.S. economy: Business, Real Estate, Financial Markets, the Consumer, and, the Government, are still pointing down. In order to meet demand, businesses still have too many workers, too many plants, and too much capital. The $8 Trillion drop in equity values will force companies to write off at least another Trillion in corporate “Goodwill” from their balance sheets. Companies that acquired other companies for stock during the bubble, clearly overpaid. That “Fiction” was booked as Equity in the form of Goodwill. Now that the “Fictional Equity is vaporizing, it is leaving companies with new problems meeting debt to equity covenants with their banks and bond holders. In addition, the drop in equity values has “ripped up” company pension funds. The S&P 500 pension funds alone are suddenly $280 billion under-funded, and major corporations that keep an assumption of an annual 9 - 10% return on their investments are long past the “Laugh Test” for credibility. Corporate revenues are not “Snapping Back”. Indeed, corporations have far too much debt to service, and corporate credit spreads are at record levels. The junk bond market is rapidly expanding because of “Fallen Angles”, and in the next year or two we will certainly see many “household” names of major firms go bankrupt like United Air, Household, and Ford. United Can’t afford to pay its airline pilots up to $300,000 a year; Household can’t keep making credit card loans to people who will lose their job; Ford can’t fund its pension fund and sell cars to people with bad credit, at no profit and at zero interest. The Federal Reserve has tried adding massive amounts of liquidity, and the credit markets are finally waking up to the reality that liquidity doesn’t make “Bad Loans Good”, it makes “Bad Loans Bigger”. Companies can no longer borrow their way to meeting cash-flow needs. Companies are forced to cut new investment and slash employment. If there is any need for new investment, it will certainly be in China, where labor cost 10% of what it does in the U.S. When history is re-written in order to match the actual acts, much of the recent U.S. “Productivity Boom” is nothing more than a strong dollar, importing parts made with “cheap Asian labor”, and final assembly in the U.S. Business is going to continue to be a big negative for the economy and the job market.
Commercial Real Estate is already rotting, and single family real estate has peaked and started a very long slide. Commercial buildings are still being finished for tenants that no longer exist. Commercial vacancy rates are way up, but do not reflect the large amount of “sub-lease” space that is on the market.
The owners of commercial properties with mortgages on the buildings don’t want to look at what will happen when primary leases come up for renewal, and the major tenant decides to reduce the space they are willing to pay for back to what they actually need. The smart property owners are selling now while there is still an impression that Real Estate is better than the stock market. Major corporations, like Citicorp, are selling their corporate headquarters because they need the money. More firms like K-Mart will file bankruptcy and significantly cut the number of locations they lease. New construction for commercial properties has to collapse. Who needs them? Single Family housing foreclosures just hit a 30-year high. This fact undermines the durability of the “Housing Price Bubble” and record cash-out mortgage re-financings.
Housing has helped to hold up the economy but winter is coming. The re-financing binge is running its course and will be ending by the first quarter of next year. The real damage to the housing market has yet to come. New housing construction and record low interest rates have pulled consumers out of multi-family rental units, pushing rents and commercial property prices down. This has encouraged the consumers to greatly overpay for their homes. When this individual loses their job, they will lose their house to the bank. Their new home will become the old apartment they used to rent.
Banks and the GSEs are acting as if housing prices can only go up, and have lent to very marginal borrowers. The good news is that home ownership is at record levels for the population. The bad news is that the records for homeownership will be replaced by new records for housing foreclosures. Look forward to a very long winter for housing and commercial real estate.
The financial markets are still signaling “Major Bubbles”. While the stock markets have started to correct, and have wiped out $8 Trillion in the U.S and at least $20 Trillion worldwide, the major bubble in the debt and credit markets is just stating to unwind. The Federal Reserve created the bubbles and has been desperately trying to protect them with massive injections of liquidity, and encouragement of credit creation. However, the credit markets are beginning to catch on: adding liquidity to markets doesn’t make “Bad Credits Good”; it makes “Bad Loans Bigger”. Too many credits are already too big. Argentina has defaulted. Brazil will default. Turkey will default. United Airlines and Conseco will file bankruptcy. There is a huge list of companies and countries that cannot pay back what they have already borrowed. Lending them more money will change the date of default and increase the amount. The credit markets are saying that you just can’t find anybody that wants to be the “New Lender” to help “Bailout the old Lender.” The problem for the financial markets is that one firm’s debt is a financial institution’s asset. As loans default, they destroy real equity capital in banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, CDO’s, etc.
The capital markets and financial institutions depend on leverage. As equity is destroyed, their ability to leverage and lend is destroyed. Downgrades of a bank like JP Morgan Chase make it harder for them to take on risk. They already have over $20 trillion of derivative exposure. If JP Morgan Chase’s derivative book for interest rate swaps, credit derivatives, structured equity notes and other market bets were put back on balance sheet, they would make the balance sheet of Long Term Capital look quite conservative.
In the financial system there are over $100 Trillion of derivatives. Most of these were booked based on pricing models that assumed that markets do not move more than three standard deviations from long-term trends or averages. We now live in a world where many markets have easily moved four or five standard deviations from the norm. Major financial institutions have tremendous losses that have not jet been realized. The only steady source of earnings for the financial sector is funding long term Treasury notes and mortgage assets with short term CP or Fed Funds. If you think an economy is healthy if it offers a return on a 10-Year Treasury Note of 3.60%, it means you don’t think.
The “Bond Bubble”, based on low and lower short term interest rates, is a catastrophe waiting for the first time the Fed raises interest rates. If the Fed is true to form, it will cut short term interest rates to make this Bond and Agency Security Bubble as big as possible. The financial markets do not offer a quick fix or a long term solution to our current economic problems. Indeed, the financial markets are the problem. Only “de-levering” the financial markets will restore them to health. However, de-levering means less debt, less borrowing, more saving, and much less spending. Less spending means less economic activity.
Will the consumer spend us back to prosperity? The answer is with what? The consumer has been conditioned by the stock market bubble. Since the stock market would take care of his retirement, there was no need to save. Indeed, the consumer could spend every dollar he earned and every dollar he could borrow. This leads us to a world where 1.6 million consumers are now filing for bankruptcy every year. This year the U.S. Treasury will collect $180 billion less in taxes from individuals than last year. That means that $600 billion of income and capital gains has gone missing. This year single family mortgage debt will be up $600 Billion. Borrowing helps keep spending alive. But at some point, decreasing incomes and increased borrowing just don’t add up, particularly when pension funds and 401K’s have been nuked by the Bear Market. Borrowing to spend means that you are spending other people’s money. It’s wonderful; it's fun; Unless, of course, you are the lender. With low incomes, no bonus, job loss, no new jobs, record bankruptcies, and record home foreclosures, we are starting to see consumer spending sag, and slowed down lending to people who can’t pay. The consumer pull-back will trigger the Long Economic Winter.
With Congress approving going to war, you would think that the boost in Federal spending needed for the war effort would boost the economy. The government is not doing enough. While the Federal budget is going into deficit, more of the deficit is coming from a drop in tax revenue than new spending. Moreover, state and local governments are headed for $80 Billion in deficits; except, these governmental entities are not supposed to run deficits. While state and local borrowing is rising, so will taxes and cuts in programs and employment. Because of the November elections, needed fiscal policy will be postponed until next year.
Without massive, immediate fiscal stimulus to offset the major negative forces from business, real estate, the consumer, and financial markets, common sense and arithmetic add up to a very Long Economic Winter.
Actually, Spain, Portugal, France, England, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Romania and Turkey don't have it all that bad, as things go.
The majority of the "growth" was due to mortgage refinancing.
and inflation is dead.
Not quite...We are going to have inflation ( a monetary phenomenon) and deflation ( a credit collapse) simultaneously. Contrary to the Fed, the solution to malinvestment is not another, cheaper loan.
Let's not all be feminized by Leftist gloom and political correctness. Buck up, gentlemen! We are at war!
Agreed.
Spot on.
Regardless of the merits of your opinion, the way you state it strongly suggests that it is based on emotion more than on reason.
I thought that I detected a chill in the air. Amazing that people still don't want to believe that the good time economy of the late 90's is over -- and gone.
Richard W.
And regardless of the merits of my opinion, the fact that Richard Benson is president of Specialty Finance Group, LLC , offering diversified investment banking services
strongly suggests that the author's motivation is based more on personal gain than reason. I'm almost curious to see what "specialty" financial products he's recommending for the impending "doom."
Inflate or die. When you can no longer inflate, you die. That's the FED.
Richard W.
There is always the danger of that, regardless of the persons involved. However, Mr. Benson has provided us with the facts, and his reasoned analysis of them. Provide you'd like to make a comparable effort to present the justification for your opinion--instead of an emotional reaction?
Emotional reactions are so much more fun than reason and fact.
Richard W.
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