First Principles

Well, it's been one heck of a week. With all of the insanity going on around us, sometimes it's best to take a step back and return to first principles. One of those is the Business Cycle - you know that thing that the Fed has supposedly abolished? The two questions that come to mind immediately are "why did the cycle exist?" and "how did the Fed get rid of it?"


The first one is easy. Economic cycles have existed throughout our history and always will exist as long as emotional humans are making economic decisions. The National Bureau of Economic Research has tracked US economic cycles going back to the mid-19th century. In the immediate postwar period, the cycles became more predictable as the Fed began to regulate them and induce the occasional recession to purge excesses before the market did it for them. During this period, it was discovered that the cycle could be manipulated though not controlled. The typical pattern was roughly three years of expansion, followed by a 12 month recession. The only major exception was the long expansion which lasted through most of the 1960s. The excesses from that one contributed to the really ugly decade that followed - and I'm not just talking about disco and afros for white guys either.

Unfortunately, other than Paul Volcker the Fed seemingly learned little from that experience. After Saint Paul imposed a painful but effective remedy for inflation, his successor Alan Greenspan embarked on a policy of continuous credit expansion. This has "worked" in the sense that economic growth was sustained over a long period, few setbacks were encountered and those were short and shallow. But the price was a crumbling economic foundation. Consumption became the dominant basis of the economy. Consumption growth was funded first with falling savings, then with growing debt. The major collapses in the savings rate came during the 1990s as it fell from 7% to 2% and again after 2002 when it went from 2% to negative.

We essentially outsourced the necessary but burdensome job of saving to Asia. Few economists seem to have drawn any connection between the outsourcing of manufacturing and of savings. Manufacturing requires investment and investment requires savings. It would seem reasonable that the nations which save and invest in the real economy (not just financial paper) would increase their manufacturing and that seems to be the case. The US is left with little savings, heavy debt, bad loans and a weakened manufacturing base. The cycle has not been abolished. It has simply been stretched and distorted beyond all recognition.

Fed Actions and Terrorist Attacks

We are beginning to see severe impairment of credit functions - the fruits of massive and long standing frauds that have recently come to light. By now, many of you are familiar with the 'mark to model' fraud, where the imaginary prices generated by a computer model are preferred over the actual prices which are being paid by actual people - especially when using the former allows firms to report gains rather than the losses they have suffered in reality. With some 'investment grade' paper trading at huge discounts to par, the rating services have a lot of explaining to do. The fee structures for structured finance create serious conflicts of interest.

"S&P, Moody's and Fitch have made more money from evaluating structured finance--which includes CDOs and asset-backed securities--than from rating anything else, including corporate and municipal bonds, according to their financial reports. The companies charge as much as three times more to rate CDOs than to analyze bonds, published cost listings show."

Then there are the garden-variety frauds that occur in every credit cycle and are endorsed or at least accepted by the accountants. Low losses in good times are assumed to be permanent and provisions for losses are small - inflating reported bank profits. This is often compounded by banks which drain their pre-existing reserves to inflate profits further. When combined with loose credit standards, nastiness is practically guaranteed to ensue since the low losses will be followed by very large losses once the weaker borrowers come under pressure. Financial 'innovation' simply adds to the problems since it is nearly always used to take on more risk, not reduce risk.

At the end of a massive credit cycle like the one we have just experienced, financial earnings are wildly overstated, assets are significantly overstated, credit quality is very bad and it is very difficult to distinguish the banks with some troubled assets from those that are insolvent. Under these conditions, it only makes sense to be very cautious when making loans.

Uber cautious lending is exactly what is happening today. Spreads on risky bonds have widened dramatically as investors demand to be compensated for risk again. New issuance of junk bonds has been virtually nil for eight weeks. More ominously, about half of the commercial paper (CP) market seems to be in the process of going away. There is almost no interest in asset-backed CP except at punitively high interest rates. In fact, this market judged the Fed's discount rate cut to be about as useful as a terrorist attack.

"Even the Fed's decision to cut the discount rate that it charges banks failed to revive demand. The rate for overnight borrowing in the asset-backed commercial paper market soared 0.39 percentage points to that price on Aug. 17, the biggest rise since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."

The bizarre rally in stocks is especially puzzling in light of the continued deterioration in credit quality and availability. This is way beyond 'whistling past the graveyard' by the equity markets; it's more like cramming fingers in their ears, kicking and screaming "lalalalalala I can't hear you!"