wall Street Archives - the patient investor

November 11, 2016

Why the establishment were clean-bowled by Trump

Forget private email servers and sex tapes. Forget men versus women. This election was decided on the following three issues:

1. Globalization.

Currency manipulation by emerging economies like China and consequent offshoring of blue-collar jobs has gutted the US manufacturing sector. Accumulation of $4 trillion of foreign reserves enabled China to suppress appreciation of the Yuan and maintain a competitive advantage against US manufacturers.

China Foreign Reserves ex-Gold

Container imports and exports at the Port of Los Angeles (FY 2016) highlight the problem. More than 57% of outbound containers are empty. Container shipping represents mainly manufactured goods, rather than bulk imports or exports, and the dearth of manufactured exports reflects the trade imbalance with Asia. Even the container statistic understates the problem as many outbound containers contained scrap metal and paper rather than manufactured goods, for processing in Asia.

Port of Los Angeles (FY 2016) Container Traffic

Manufacturing job losses were tolerated by the political establishment, I suspect, largely because corporate profits were boosted greatly by offshoring jobs and low-cost imports. And corporations are the biggest political donors. Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP almost doubled over the last two decades.

Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP

2. Immigration

This is a similar issue to that highlighted by the UK/Brexit vote. Blue collar workers, losing jobs to globalization, felt threatened by high levels of immigration which, among other problems, stepped up competition for increasingly-scarce jobs.

3. Wall Street

Wall Street bankers with their million-dollar bonuses were blamed for the global financial crisis and collapse of the housing market, the primary store of wealth for middle-class families. While there is no doubt Wall Street had their snouts in the trough, the seeds of the GFC were laid years earlier when Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act with backing from a Republican congress. Failure to prosecute or otherwise punish even the worst offenders of the sub-prime mortgage debacle was seen by the public as collusion.

The Democrats in 2015 recognized that Hillary had been damaged by the private email server controversy and did their best to maneuver the election into a Trump-Clinton stand-off. Their view was that Hillary would be beaten by either Rubio or Kasich. Even the reviled Ted Cruz was seen as a threat. Hillary was seen as having the best chance against a flawed Trump who would struggle to unite the Republican party behind him.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

Hillary Clinton was presented as the ‘safe’ candidate in the election, representing the status quo and stability. But that set her up for a fall as their strategy underestimated the anger of American voters and the risks they were prepared to take to bring about change.

While I am relieved that we can “close the history book on the Clintons”, to use Trump’s words, I viewed him as a lame-duck candidate, too flawed to hold the office of President. Fortunately there are many checks and balances in the US political system. It survived Nixon and should be able to survive this too. Especially if Trump takes a hands-off approach, along the lines of Reagan who was reputed to doze off in cabinet meetings. A lot will depend on his appointees and the next few months will be critical in setting the direction for his presidency. Expect financial markets to remain volatile until they have grown accustomed to the change. It could take a year or even longer.

November 11, 2013

Ending Too Big to Fail | The Big Picture

From an address by William C. Dudley, President of the NY Fed, to the Global Economic Policy Forum, November 8, 2013:

There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions. Whether this is due to size and complexity, bad incentives or some other issues is difficult to judge, but it is another critical problem that needs to be addressed. Tough enforcement and high penalties will certainly help focus management’s attention on this issue. But I am also hopeful that ending too big to fail and shifting the emphasis to longer-term sustainability will encourage the needed cultural shift necessary to restore public trust in the industry.

Dudley calls for increased capital requirements to reduce the risk of failure as well as more robust procedures to reduce the impact of a single large failure:

The major initiative here is the single point of entry framework for resolution proposed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Under this framework, if a financial firm is to be resolved under Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act, the FDIC will place the top tier bank holding company into receivership and its assets will be transferred to a bridge holding company. The equity holders will be wiped out and sufficient long-term unsecured debt will be converted into equity in the new bridge company to cover any remaining losses and to ensure that the new entity is well capitalized and deemed creditworthy. Subsidiaries would continue to operate, which should limit the incentives for customers to run. By assigning losses to shareholders and unsecured creditors of the holding company and transferring sound operating subsidiaries to a new solvent entity, such a “top-down” resolution strategy should ensure continuity with respect to any critical services performed by the firm’s subsidiaries and this should help limit the magnitude of any negative externalities.

May 28, 2013

Congress Still Puts Out For Wall Street | Robert Scheer – Truthdig

Robert Scheer quotes Democrat Jim Hines on the corrupt relationship between Wall Street and Capitol Hill:

“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut who supported the bankers’ recent bills and conveniently heads fundraising for House Democrats, conceded to the Times. Himes, who worked for Goldman Sachs before pretending to represent the people’s interest as an elected representative, is one of the top beneficiaries of Wall Street payoffs but claims to be distressed by the corruption that is his way of life. As he told the Times, “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”

May 4, 2013

The insufferable conceit | MacroBusiness

Sell on News at Macrobusiness observes:

Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs recently commented that the financial system is plagued by large scale fraud. He blamed it on a docile president, a docile White House and docile regulators……..

Sachs is right in his observations, of course. But I am not sure he is right to imply that it is new. I think Greed and Wall Street have been bedfellows as long as Wall Street has existed.

April 30, 2013

How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank | The Nation

Gary Rivlin gives us an insight into the machinations of Wall street lobbyists on Capitol Hill:

As he prepared to sign the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—the sweeping legislative package designed to prevent another spectacular financial collapse—into law, the president [Obama] first acknowledged the miracle of having a bill to sign at all. “Passing this…was no easy task,” he told the crowd of hundreds. “We had to overcome the furious lobbying of an array of powerful interest groups and a partisan minority determined to block change.”

Indeed, some 3,000 lobbyists had swarmed the Capitol in hopes of killing off pieces of the proposed bill……

That sense of victory barely lasted barely the morning. …..After Dodd-Frank’s passage, lobbyists for the big banks and industry trade groups divided themselves into eighteen working groups, each organized around a different element of the new law. “That’s when the real work began,” Talbott tells me……

April 28, 2013

Two Senators Try to Slam the Door on Bank Bailouts – NYTimes.com

This is a show-down between Wall Street and the voting public. Gretchen Morgenson at NY Times writes:

THERE’S a lot to like, if you’re a taxpayer, in the new bipartisan bill from two concerned senators hoping to end the peril of big bank bailouts. But if you’re a large and powerful financial institution that’s too big to fail, you won’t like this bill one bit.

The legislation, called the Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act, emerged last Wednesday; its co-sponsors are Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, and David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican. It is a smart, simple and tough piece of work that would protect taxpayers from costly rescues in the future.

This means that the bill will come under fierce attack from the big banks that almost wrecked our economy and stand to lose the most if it becomes law.

For starters, the bill would create an entirely new, transparent and ungameable set of capital rules for the nation’s banks — in other words, a meaningful rainy-day fund. Enormous institutions, like JPMorgan Chase and Citibank, would have to hold common stockholder equity of at least 15 percent of their consolidated assets to protect against large losses. That’s almost double the 8 percent of risk-weighted assets required under the capital rules established by Basel III, the latest version of the byzantine international system created by regulators and central bankers.

This change, by itself, would eliminate a raft of problems posed by the risk-weighted Basel approach……

The outcome is far from clear. The financial muscle of Wall Street can buy a lot of influence on the Hill. But my guess is that they are too smart to incense voters by meeting the bill head-on. Instead they will attempt to delay with amendments and eventually turn it into an unwieldy 1000-page unenforcable monstrosity that no one understands. Much as they did with Dodd-Frank.

If they win, the country as a whole will suffer. Maybe not today, but in the inevitable next financial crisis if this bill does not pass.

April 19, 2013

Fixing the Banking System for Good

I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep…. because the regulations and legal structures need reform. I meet a lot of these people [from] Wall street on a regular basis. I’m going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological…… I have never seen anything like it. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to ….counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive and feel absolutely out of control…… They have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. And they have a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies……

Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University speaking at the “Fixing the Banking System for Good” conference on April 17, 2013.

March 26, 2013

Conflict of interest: Will Wall Street put their interests ahead of their clients?

You bet they will. Here Cullen Roche explains why he quit Wall Street to become an independent advisor:

One of the reasons Roche transitioned to becoming an independent advisor was because of [the] perceived conflict of interest that exists at big Wall Street firms. “Those big firms are revenue-driven – they’re fee generators. They’re not able to do what’s in their clients’ best interest – a lot of the time the best interest of the client is to reduce fees,” he notes. According to Roche, the financial advisor model needs to change, with more and more advisors needing to act as independent consultants or fee-only advisors. “I think the conflict comes mostly from the big wirehouses: public companies that need to maximize profits – profits largely derived from generating fees from clients,” he concludes.