Bubbles Always Pop
by Guy Haselmann
Scotiabank
January 2014

The world has been kept on life support mostly by government spending of trillions of dollars  and central bank printing of trillions more. Both have boosted asset prices and given the allure of economic progress. Over-zealous regulators, market rule changes, and aggressive policy stimulus have temporarily stabilized markets. Market vigilantes have been hibernating, because unclear investment rules and uncertainties around the ultimate magnitude of stimulus have prevented them from attacking bad policies or distorting asset price valuations.

It is difficult to know the extent that markets and the global economy have benefited from official policy stimulus; however, five years after the crash, economic growth and the labor recovery remain subpar. Strong growth should have been ignited by now.

Most economists still believe in the ‘official position’ that growth is edging sustainably higher and that interest rates will slowly rise to reflect it. They could be correct, but should it fail to unfold as expected, confidence in the efficacy of official policy will diminish and the social contract will break down further. Since markets require confidence, they will also react accordingly.

Some argue that economic benefits to stimulus have run its course, while the costs from looming unintended consequences have not yet been unleashed. Many believe (and I am one) that the risks and costs of current Fed policy outweigh the benefits.

* * *

The Fed’s asset purchase program (QE) and Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) are the foremost factors that have widened wealth inequalities. The richest few have benefited the most, simply because the 10% richest Americans own 80% of US stocks. The FOMC believe that its asset-price-inflation-trickle-down-policy leads to spending which ultimately leads to job creation, especially for the poor.

However, several FOMC members themselves have questioned Fed policies, citing that they have not worked as well as had been hoped, and pointing out that aggregate demand has been weak throughout the recovery. To his credit Fed Governor Jeremy Stein broached the subject of unintended consequences of Fed policies when he mentioned in his February paper, “A prolonged period of low interest rates, of the sort we are experiencing today, can create incentives for agents to take on greater duration or credit risk, or to employ additional financial leverage in an effort to ‘reach for yield’”.

Zero interest rates have incentivized corporations to issue debt in order to capitalize on the historically low interest rates; however, corporations have primarily used the money to pay greater dividends, buyback shares, or modernize plant and equipment. There is a strong case to be made that holding interest rates at zero for a prolonged period is actually counter-productive to the Fed’s efforts to achieve either of its dual mandates. This is because increasing productivity through modernization typically exposes redundancies: it allows firms to lay-off workers, while the improvement in competitiveness allows firms to drop prices.

Furthermore, and as I referenced in my 2013 paper, “Should the marginal propensity to consume of creditors exceed that of debtors, the net effect of redistribution could be to lower household spending rather than raise it. There are some conservative savers who have a predetermined goal in mind for the minimum amount of savings they wish to accumulate over time. Those investors may refuse to move out the risk curve in search of higher yields (likely widening the wealth divide). To them, lower interest rates simply mean a slower rate of accumulation, which likely will jeopardize their minimum goal. The only recourse for this investor is to save more, which is the exact opposite intention of the Fed’s policy. For example, if interest rates fall from 4% to
3%, an investor would have to increase savings by more than 20% each year to reach the same goal over 30 years.”

Another negative result of ZIRP is that banks and other lenders are discouraged from lending due to puny return levels; and, therefore, the Fed’s desire to expand lending is compromised. Are lower (or negative) interest rates supposed to increase the incentive to lend money? To assume such is absurd. Although somewhat counter-intuitive, if interest rates rose, then the supply of money willing to be lent would increase due to wider interest margins.

Policies are so unprecedented and unproven that it is possible that the Fed itself has now become a source of financial instability. This could be the case either through the potential fueling of asset bubbles, through its compromised ability to conduct future monetary policy (due to it  unwieldy $4 trillion balance sheet), or due to “unknown unknowns.”

* * *

In a low to zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) environment, investors desperately search for yield. This frequently chases investors into assets to which they are ill-suited and to which they will miscalculate liquidity and downside potential. Under ZIRP paradigms, riskier assets become the best-performing. Credit spreads collapse and equities soar.

Massive monetary ‘printing’ by global central banks has not just emboldened investors, but these actions have collectively changed their behavior and psychology. There is evidence that policies have led to mis-allocation of resources. Investors are emboldened to take what many critics believe is inappropriate or reckless levels of risk. The motto, “Don’t fight the Fed” has taken on added meaning. Moral hazard and a deep-seated bullish psychology have become rampant.

Extended Fed promises of lower rates and a continuation of asset purchases even as the economy heals, are conspiring to propel prices ever-upward. Investing today has become mostly about seeking relative yield, rather than assessing value or determining if the investment’s return is sufficient compensation for the risk.

Simply stated, investors and speculators receive ever-lower returns for ever-higher levels of risks. Over time, the ability of an investor to assess an asset’s fundamental value becomes ever-increasingly impaired. It should a warning sign to portfolio manager’s fiduciary responsibility to maximize return per unit of risk (see market liquidity section).

There have been persistent cycles of asset booms (bubbles) that eventually turned to ‘busts’. Very low or negative real rates (seen recently) always create economic distortions and the mispricing of risk, thereby creating asset bubbles. Each ‘boom’ had some differences, but the common factor has always been easy money which the Fed was too slow to withdraw. Providing liquidity is always easier than taking it away, which is one reason why the Fed has hit the “Zero Lower Bound” in the first place.

Eventually (un-manipulated) asset prices always return to their fundamental value, which is why bubbles always pop. The FOMC has backed itself into a corner. Current changes in policy are being designed around efforts to manage the unwind process seamlessly. Central bank (and government official’s) micro-management appears based on a belief that they can exert an all-encompassing central control over markets and peoples’ lives. Those in power have come to believe that policies have a precise effect that can be defined and managed. This is highly unlikely.

In ‘normal’ times there is a more discernable connection between cause and effect. However, the usual relationships particularly break down during periods of over-indebtedness, unprecedented regulatory changes, and official rates reaching the zero lower bound. Today, the world is far from ‘normal’. It is not difficult to imagine the looming fallout from policies that have promoted asset price inflation, and which have materially compromised market liquidity.

In the long run, policies that punish savers at the expense of helping risk-takers and speculators are bad long-run policies for any country. It would be better to transform the country into net savers, rather than to continue to promote policies where growth is reliant on overly-leveraged consumers or speculators, and is micro-managed by attempts of central-control.

On the home page of this website, we state : "In today's world, financial institutions, businesses and governments are inter-connected in ways that are often hard to ascertain much less measure, leverage through the use of debt has become extremely prevalent and volatility has been artificially suppressed by central bankers."

Debt has indeed reached unprecedented levels, rising over 9 times in size since 1989.  With debt comes obligations to pay interest on the debt.  Of course, these interest payments have increased in size right along with the increase in debt.  In fact, debt is being created just to pay the interest on existing debt.  This process is doubtless unsustainable and brings into sharp relief the necessity of central bankers to keep rates low; any rise in rates would spell catastrophe.

Will Mark Spitznagel’s Doomsday Bet Pan Out in 2014?
By David Graubard
Institutional Invester's Alpha
January 07, 2014  

The Universa Investments founder stands to gain if his predicted 40 percent market correction comes true. But so far, few others are sounding alarms.
       
The U.S. stock market finished 2013 with a nearly 30 percent gain, and many hedge fund managers think 2014 will probably be a pretty good year as well.

Mark Spitznagel, however, is not one of them. The founder and CIO of Santa Monica-based hedge fund firm Universa Investments recently sounded a dire warning that the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index will suffer a draconian 40 percent correction some time within the next three years, most likely within a year. (As it happens, stocks finished the first few trading days of the year with losses.)

Spitznagel has made something of a business out of such doomsday calls. He made similar predictions against the market in 1998, 2000 and in 2008, the last of which propelled him to fame. That’s because by that time, he had already founded Universa and was running a so-called tail-risk fund. These funds are designed to perform well in the worst market conditions, and like insurance policies, require investors to pay into a losing strategy until something bad happens.

It turned out that 2008, with the S&P 500’s bruising loss of 38.5 percent, was the perfect time to be running such a fund. Universa earned 120 percent that year, while the median hedge fundlost 6.85 percent, according to HedgeFund Intelligence Global Index. So why listen to Spitznagel this time? For one thing, his was the first tail-risk hedge fund to make a huge amount of money from a stock market crash. And while famed hedge fund managers like David Tepper of Appaloosa Management and Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors think fears of a major correction are overblown, Spitznagel is not the only famously smart person sounding the alarm on equity markets. Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller concurs that the market is near an unsustainable level, although he does not think it’s in for quite such a drastic decline as does Spitznagel.

Still, it’s probably worth bearing in mind that Spitznagel made his latest doomsday call at the same time that he released his first book. The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World is a 368-page tome blending the memoirs of a philosophic option trader with a heated critique of the Fed and an explanation of how Austrian economics applies to tail-risk hedging.

Spitznagel borders on the fanatical in his belief that the Federal Reserve is bringing the next market crash closer each day through what he calls monetary distortions, or the effect that its so-called quantitative easing measures, such as its monthly Treasury bond purchases, are having on the markets. One such distortion: inflated equity valuations fuelled by the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, Spitznagel argues. Also, the Fed’s habit of injecting liquidity into the financial system to solve problems creates asset bubbles that his fund benefits from when they eventually burst, he says. Spitznagel says he wrote his book in part to help investors understand, and then exploit, market crashes caused by these monetary distortions.

In writing a book, Spitznagel is following in the footsteps of Nassim Taleb, his former partner at Empirica Capital — the first tail-risk investment firm and a precursor to Universa — and the best-selling author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. “The two went down different paths. Taleb is an academic, and Spitznagel will always be a full-time trader,” says one investor close to the two friends. Taleb has no ownership or decision making role at Universa, although he serves as an advisor. The team speaks with him a few times each month, typically on research and marketing issues.
“Since I was a partner at Empirica, the first tail-risk hedge fund, one could say Universa is a continuation of that platform that ran between 1999 and 2005 that we founded,” Spitznagel explains. “But a lot has been learned and tweaked along the way.”

Spitznagel says that writing the book was “good introspection” for him and helped sharpen his ideas. “Also, I wanted to get out the message on how destructive the Fed is to people,” he adds. “The best way to protect ourselves is to understand that.”

The firm’s flagship Black Swan Protection Protocol equity tail-risk fund seeks to make an extraordinary amount of money in a stock market crash and lose nothing when the market does very well. By having such a hedge in place, Universa’s clients say they have the confidence to expand their equity allocations and stay invested through turbulent markets under the premise that they would reinvest a significant amount of cash into a discounted stock market from income generated by the BSPP fund in a crash.

A tail-risk hedge can act like a double-edged sword for some investors, however, as they lose money until a stock market crash occurs. “I don’t think there’s enough data available or standardization out there to say a tail-risk hedge is right for a portfolio,” says Damian Handzy, CEO of New York-based Investor Analytics, a risk management consulting firm.

There’s also an abnormally high behavioral risk that investors will pull out of the hedge too early. “An investment committee at some point will question what is this doing for us” as losses accumulate, adds Handzy. Another critique of tail-hedge strategies is that there is no way to know which of the various products in the growing market for these funds will hold up during the next systemic market crash.

For the many who aren’t ready for a tail-hedge, Spitznagel has a strategy for them too. “Investors should simply step aside in cash, and doing so in such distorted environments has historically beaten pretty much everyone long term, with far less risk,” says Spitznagel, who calls this his “mom-and-pop strategy” in his book. “Doing this, earning zero returns, is perhaps the most difficult investment to stomach today. Then the investor can buy after the rout that inevitably follows and be rewarded for having stepped aside.”