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Political Reality Meets Economic Reality
The purpose of this memo is to describe what happens when political behavior collides with economic reality, as illustrated in one area where the government is taking steps – tariffs – and another in which debate among politicians is heating up – restrictions on the capitalist system.
Latest Thinking
Travel to clients abroad and preoccupation with my coming book on cycles (final draft submitted just the other day) have combined to keep me from writing a memo since September, but fortunately not from thinking. Thus I have ideas to set down on two significant subjects: the market environment and the new tax law. Further, I’m highly motivated to do so, since if I skip a few months, people start writing in, “Are you sick?”
Yet Again
“There They Go Again . . . Again” of July 26 has generated the most response in the 28 years I’ve been writing memos, with comments coming from Oaktree clients, other readers, the print media and TV. I also understand my comments regarding digital currencies have been the subject of extensive – and critical – comments on social media, but my primitiveness in this regard has kept me from seeing them. The responses and the time that has elapsed have given me the opportunity to listen, learn and think. Thus I’ve decided to share some of those reflections here.
There They Go Again...Again
I’m in the process of writing another book, going into great depth regarding one of the most important things discussed in my book The Most Important Thing: cycles, their causes, and what to do about them. It will be out next year, but this memo will give you a preview regarding one of the most important cyclical phenomena.
Lines in the Sand
In my 2016 year-end review, which went only to clients, I included a discussion of the use of subscription lines by closed-end funds in areas such as private equity, real estate, distressed debt and private credit. It’s my impression that their use has become fairly pervasive in recent years, and in response to clients’ requests and market trends, Oaktree has utilized subscription lines in some of its newer funds.
Expert Opinion
The opinions of experts concerning the future are accorded great weight . . . but they’re still just opinions. Experts may be right more often than the rest of us, but they’re unlikely to be right all the time, or anything close to it. This year’s election season gave us plenty of opportunities to see expert opinion in action. I’ll start this memo by reflecting on them.
Go Figure!
While people search the market’s behavior for logic, there really doesn’t have to be any. In “On the Couch,” I mentioned that sometimes the market interprets everything positively, and sometimes it interprets everything negatively. The market often fails to act rationally in the short run, primarily because of the role played by people in determining its course. Thus two key observations can be made based on last week’s developments.
Implications of the Election
I’m starting this memo a week before Election Day. I promise to try to stay away from the merits of the candidates and the question of who will win, and instead confine myself to the important messages that we should take away from the election and the actions we should push for as a result. The outcome of tomorrow’s election won’t change these things as far as I’m concerned.
Political Reality
The world of politics has its own, altered reality, in which economic reality often seems not to impinge. No choices need be made: candidates can promise it all. And there are no consequences. If something might have negative consequences in the real world, politicians seem to feel free to ignore them. If someone annoying, like a journalist or an opposing candidate, asks about potential consequences, it’s easy these days to misrepresent them or deny they exist. And if it turns out that costs or consequences were willfully ignored, no redress is available: election victories based on unmet promises can’t be rescinded, and candidates can’t be sued over falsehoods on the stump.
Economic Reality
Fundamental improvements – intelligent changes in investment incentives, the tax system or infrastructure, for example – can increase the slope of the growth curve and provide substantial net long-term benefits for a society (although not necessarily for every individual member). Short-term fixes simply cannot create wealth out of thin air.
What Does the Market Know?
In Thursday’s memo, “On the Couch,” I mentioned the two questions I’d been getting most often: “What are the implications for the U.S. and the rest of the world of China’s weakness, and are we moving toward a new crisis of the magnitude of what we saw in 2008?” Bloomberg invited me on the air Friday morning to discuss the memo, and the anchors mostly asked one version or another of a third question: “does the market’s decline worry you?” That prompted this memo in response.
On the Couch
I woke up early on Saturday, December 12 – the morning after a day of significant declines in stocks, credit and crude oil – with enough thoughts going through my mind to keep me from going back to sleep. Thus I moved to my desk to start a memo that would pull them together. I knew it might be a long time between inception and eventual issuance, since every time I dealt with one thought, two more popped into my head. In the end, it took a month to get it done.
Inspiration from the World of Sports
An angle on the investing/sports analogy has occurred to me: an investment career can feel like a basketball or football game with an unlimited number of quarters. We may be nearing December 31 with a substantial year-to-date return or a big lead over our benchmarks or competitors, but when January 1 rolls around, we have to tackle another year. Our record isn’t finalized until we leave the playing field for good. Or as Yogi Berra put it, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” It was Yogi’s passing in late September that inspired this memo.
It’s Not Easy
In 2011, as I was putting the finishing touches on my book The Most Important Thing, I was fortunate to have one of my occasional lunches with Charlie Munger. As it ended and I got up to go, he said something about investing that I keep going back to: “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.”
Risk Revisited Again
In April 2014, I had good results with Dare to Be Great II, starting from the base established in an earlier memo (Dare to Be Great, September 2006) and adding new thoughts that had occurred to me in the intervening years. Also in 2006 I wrote Risk, my first memo devoted entirely to this key subject. My thinking continued to develop, causing me to dedicate three chapters to risk among the twenty in my book The Most Important Thing. This memo adds to what I’ve previously written on the topic.
The Lessons of Oil
I want to provide a memo on this topic before I and hopefully many of my readers head out for year-end holidays. Ill be writing not with regard to the right price for oil about which I certainly have no unique insight but rather, as indicated by the title, about what we can learn from recent experience.
The Lessons of Oil
I want to provide a memo on this topic before I and hopefully many of my readers head out for year-end holidays. Ill be writing not with regard to the right price for oil about which I certainly have no unique insight but rather, as indicated by the title, about what we can learn from recent experience.
Risk Revisited
In April I had good results with Dare to Be Great II, starting from the base established in an earlier memo (Dare to Be Great, September 2006) and adding new thoughts that had occurred to me in the intervening years. Also in 2006 I wrote Risk, my first memo devoted entirely to this key subject. My thinking continued to develop, causing me to dedicate three chapters to risk among the twenty in my book The Most Important Thing. This memo adds to what Ive previously written on the topic.
Dare to be Great II
In September 2006, I wrote a memo entitled Dare to Be Great, with suggestions on how institutional investors might approach the goal of achieving superior investment results. Ive had some additional thoughts on the matter since then, meaning its time to return to it. Since fewer people were reading my memos in those days, Im going to start off repeating a bit of its content and go on from there.
Getting Lucky
Sometimes these memos are inspired by a single event or just one thing I read. This one - like my first memo 24 years ago - grew out of the juxtaposition of two observations. Ill introduce one here and the other later on. Contrary to my wife Nancys observation that my memos are "all the same," the subject here is one Ive rarely touched on.
The Race is On
Theres a race to the bottom going on, reflecting a widespread reduction in the level of prudence on the part of investors and capital providers. No one can prove at this point that those who participate will be punished, or that their long-run performance wont exceed that of the naysayers. But that is the usual pattern.
The Role of Confidence
The so-called wealth effect plays an important and well recognized part in the functioning of an economy. When assets appreciate in value, the owners translate their increased wealth into increased spending. While at first glance this is unsurprising, it should be noted that this is true even if the appreciation is unrealized, and thus the increased wealth exists solely on paper. The relationship can be stated as follows: the richer people feel, the more they spend. Changes in confidence have an impact on behavior similar to the wealth effect. Thats what this memo is about.
The Outlook for Equities
It doesnt take much to get me started on a memo. In this case one sentence was enough, in an article from the February 4 online edition of Pensions & Investments, as described by FierceFinance on February 28: The long-term equity risk premium is typically between 4.5% and 5%.
Ditto
Anyone who reads my memos of the last 23 years will see I return often to a few topics. This is due to the frequency with which themes tend to recur in the investment world. Humans often fail to learn. They forget the lessons of history, repeat patterns of behavior and make the same mistakes. As a result, certain themes arise over and over. Mark Twain had it right: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The details of the events may vary greatly from occurrence to occurrence, but the themes giving rise to the events tend not to change.
A Fresh Start (Hopefully)
For years I kept these memos away from anything related to politics. But more recently I began to discuss issues facing the US, and this has required some mention of policy and thus of politics. Ive tried very hard to be non-partisan, with a goal of not having readers know my leanings. I hope Ive succeeded; at least no one has complained. Because I found Americas recent presidential election and especially the results so fascinating, Im going to move explicitly to the field of politics, but with the same goal of non-partisan expression.
Its All a Big Mistake
Mistakes are a frequent topic of discussion in our world. Its not unusual to see investors criticized for errors that resulted in poor performance. But rarely do we hear about mistakes as an indispensable component of the investment process. Im writing now to point out that mistakes are all that superior investing is about. In short, in order for one side of a transaction to turn out to be a major success, the other side has to have been a big mistake.
Assessing Performance Records A Case Study
What are the non-negotiable requirements for accurately assessing investment performance? Id say: a record spanning a significant number of years, a period that includes both good years, and a benchmark or peer universe that makes for a relevant comparison. The other day, at an event for alumni and other constituents of the University of Pennsylvania, president Amy Gutmann reviewed the performance of the university during the financial crisis. Thinking about it afterward, I realized that I should share with you the story of Penns endowment and its lessons.
Its All Very Taxing
But what is the fair share? How is it to be determined, and by whom? When Senator Reid says, its time for millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share, he implies they havent been doing so thus far. How does he know? Whats the standard? If theres an objective standard for ones fair share, why does it only seem to be those from the left side of the political spectrum who say its not being paid? And if there isnt an objective standard, how can the fair share be determined? The truth is, fairness is almost entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Whats Behind the Downturn?
I feel the prosperity we enjoyed in the final decades of the twentieth century was considerably better than normal, and better than were likely to see up ahead. Im not implying a world without growth or otherwise permanently negative. Just one without the prosperity, dynamism or positive feelings of past decades. In addition, the newness of the macro picture and some of the problems and the opacity of the solutions certainly make it less clear in which direction well go.
Down to the Wire
The problem isnt the ceiling, its our behavior. The debt ceiling merely imposes a discipline that our national leaders should provide but generally havent. On this note, in his press conference on July 15, when asked about conservatives insistence on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, President Obama replied, We dont need a constitutional amendment to do that [balance the budget]; what we need to do is to do our jobs. But clearly we do need some enforced discipline, because the years in which we havent run a deficit have been by far the exception of late, not the rule.
How Quickly They Forget
Asset prices fluctuate much more than fundamentals. Rather than applying moderation and balancing greed against fear, euphoria against depression, and risk tolerance against risk aversion, investors tend to oscillate wildly between the extremes. They apply optimism when things are going well in the world (elevating prices beyond reason) and pessimism when things are going poorly (depressing prices unreasonably). If investors remembered past bubbles and busts and their causes, and learned from them, the swings would moderate. But, in short, they don?t. And they may be forgetting again.
On Regulation
You can tell businesspeople precisely what to do, but you can?t make the economy or companies comply with policies and social aims. Regulations are limited in their scope and effect, and like a balloon, when you push in one place, self-interested behavior pops out in another. Those who enact regulation are rarely able to anticipate and control the response of those being regulated or the second-order consequences of the rules. Bubbles will lead to crashes, and the willingness to dispense with regulation and rely on free markets will never be complete, regardless of regulation?s limitations.
All That Glitters
I have ave no doubt: gold is the ideal investment. It serves as a reliable store of value, especially in challenging and uncertain times. It?s a hedge against inflation, since its price rises in sympathy with the general level of prices. It exists without the involvement of man-made constructs such as governments. And it?s desired and accepted all around the world (and always has been.) The supply of gold is finite. It can?t be created out of thin air. Thus it?s not subject to dilution or debasement, as is paper currency when governments decide to print more.
Open and Shut
Today some assets are fairly priced and others are high, but there are no bargains like those of 2008. Capital and nerve can?t hold the answers in such an environment. We?re no longer in a high-return, low-risk market, especially in light of the inability to know how today?s many macro uncertainties will be resolved. Instead of capital and nerve, then, the indispensable elements are now risk control, selectivity, discernment, discipline and patience.
Hemlines and Investment Styles
High quality, large cap stocks have good potential over a range of possible scenarios, and are more attractive than bonds, which will do well in periods of economic weakness or deflation but poorly during periods of market strength or inflation. Treasury bonds and other high grade bonds currently have all environmental factors in their favor, but are priced rich. For them to do well from here, with yields so low, everything has to work out the way the bond bulls hope. Given current yield spreads, high yield bonds should outperform high grade bonds in most foreseeable long-term environments.
It's Greek to Me
The current positives for investors include moderate valuations, rising corporate earnings and the likelihood we're already in a recovery. On the other hand, consumers are still too traumatized to resume spending strongly. Conservatism, austerity and increased savings are good for individuals but bad for a stagnant overall economy. Anyone who invests today in a pro-risk fashion out of belief in the recovery must be confident he'll be agile enough to take profits before the long-term realities set in.
Warning Flags
The fact that we don't know where trouble will come from shouldn't allow us to feel comfortable in times when prices are high. The higher prices are relative to intrinsic value, the more we should prepare for the unknown. Anecdotal evidence of rising risk tolerance does not mean entire markets have returned to dangerous levels. The door is open to transactions that wouldn't be possible if risk aversion were higher. The clear inference is that fear of loss has declined and fear of missed opportunity has come back to life.
I Would Rather Be Wrong
Washington politicians are proving themselves unable to solve - or even tackle - our financial problems. Both parties refuse to budge from positions that dramatically narrow the grounds for problem solving. The Republicans' conservative base demands adherence to a no-tax pledge, while liberal Democrats demand their representatives to prevent cuts in spending on domestic programs.
Results 51–94
of 94 found.
