Category Archives: Politics

Share buybacks: a question of framing within the rule of law

31 Thursday Oct 2019

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‘Banning’ buybacks won’t help, say the experts! Of course, it would, but you have to do it within the context of reversing shareholder profit maximization.

The SEC Rule 10b-18, which provided a ‘safe haven’ for share buybacks (they were never actually illegal), came into being in 1982. But the fertile ground of financialization and shareholder primacy thinking was already laid down in 1979. The theoretical ideas actually started fermenting even before, in 1932, with A. Berle’s and G. Means’ “The Modern Corporation and Private Property”, and culminated with “The Friedman doctrine” in 1970.

There is a huge misunderstanding about share buybacks before and after SEC Rule 10b-18. Buybacks were not ‘illegal’ before 1982, but the courts would generally be harsher on the interpretation of why they were conducted. Therefore, few companies attempted them. And it had all to do with the thinking behind ‘what is the purpose of a corporation’. For example, in the period 1900-1979, “courts were virtually silent on the idea of profit maximization”*. However, starting in the mid-1980s, this changed dramatically.

What followed was a spur of financialization, share buybacks and frantic M&A activity, all in line with finding innovative ways to reward shareholders. This resulted in a drastic decline in publicly traded US companies and the ‘oligopolization’ of US economy. Something which was undeniably good for shareholders became also questionably not so good for the economy and for everyone else, who is not a shareholder. In fact, the percentage of Americans who own shares in publicly traded companies has also declined in the process.

Shareholders primacy is often described as a ‘doctrine’, i.e. a mere belief system, when, in fact, it is much more than that. It is a “judge-made law” which means that “these varying levels of judicial embrace across many jurisdictions and over a long period have legal and jurisprudential significance.”*

This is important to understand. SEC Rule 10b-18 is not a law, but a rule within a complex maze of judicial proceedings and interpretations. Reversing that rule in isolation will do no good indeed as CEOs will find other way to return money to shareholders and they will be not only justified to do this by the corporate incentive system but also protected by the system of law. But reversing this rule in the context of questioning the point of shareholder profit maximization is a must.

And, just like in the early 1980s when it was first introduced, the fertile ground of reversing it has already been laid out a few years ago by the writings of people like William Lazonick, Lynn Stout and a few others. Having put this issue on Washington’s agenda, we may be indeed reaching an inflection point at next year’s presidential election.

*”A Legal Theory of Shareholder Primacy”, Robert J. Rhee

Negative interest rates may not be a temporary measure

29 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by in Debt, Monetary Policy, Politics

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In the current debt-backed system, the majority of money is still loaned into circulation at a positive interest rate. Even in Europe and Japan, where base interest rates and sovereign bond yields are negative, the majority of private debt still carries a positive interest rate. This structure inherently requires a constantly growing portion of the existing stock of money to be devoted to paying solely interest. Thus, the rate of growth of the money supply has to be equal to or greater than the rate of interest, otherwise more and more money would be devoted to paying interest than to economic activity.

The long-term average growth rate of US money supply is around 6%, which is only slightly higher than the average interest rate on US government debt but it is below both the average US corporate interest rate and US household debt. While I have used the UST 10yr yield as the average yield on US government debt (the average maturity of US debt is slightly less than that), the estimates for both US corporate debt and US household debt are very generous. For the former, I used the average yield on Aaa and Baa corporate bonds, and for the latter I used a weighted average interest rate between mortgage debt and auto loans (I have used 2/3 and 1/3 weights). I have not included the much higher yield on US corporate junk bonds which comprise a growing proportion of overall corporate debt. I have also not used credit card/consumer debt, which has a much higher interest rate than auto loans, and also student loan debt which carries approximately similar interest rate to auto loans. Just like for BBB and lower rated US corporates, credit card and student loan debt are a much higher proportion of total US household indebtedness compared to before the 2008 crisis.

I estimate the long-term average economy-wide interest rate as a weighted average of government, corporate and household debt – with the weights being their portions of the total stock of debt. That rate currently is about 7%, still higher than the average money supply growth rate since the early 1980s. Over the last four decades, US money supply has not only not grown enough, on average, to stimulate US economic growth, but has been, in fact even, below the overall interest rate in the economy. Needless to say, this is not an environment that could have persisted for a long time.

Indeed, if one calculates the above equivalent rates for the period 1980-2007, the situation would be even more extreme (see Chart below). In fact, until the late 1990s, money supply growth had been pretty much consistently below the economy-wide interest rate. Only after the dotcom crisis, but really after the 2008 crisis, money supply growth rate picked up and stayed on average above the economy-wide interest rate.

What is the situation now? The current money supply growth rate is just above the average economy-wide interest rate; respectively above the government and corporate interest rates but below the household interest rate (data is as of Q1’2019).

It is also still below the combined average private sector interest rate.

So, even at these low interest rate, US money supply is just about enough to cover interest payments on previously created money. And that is assuming equal distribution of money. Reality is that it is only enough to cover interest payment on public debt. And even in the private sector, money distribution is very skewed: corporates have record amount of cash but it is only in the treasuries of few corporates. The private sector, overall, can barely cover its interest payment, let alone invest in CAPEX, etc.

The deeper question is whether money creation should indeed be linked to debt at positive interest rate. In fact, we have already answered that question, and gone beyond, with some portion of money creation in Europe and Japan actually happening at negative interest rate. In effect, the market is trying to correct for all those decades when money creation substantially lagged interest payments: money there is starting to decay.

Demurrage money is not unusual in history. Early forms of commodity money, like grain and cattle, was indeed subject to decay. Even metallic money, later, on was subject to inherent ‘negative interest rates’. In the Middle Ages, in Europe, coins were periodically recoiled and then re-minted at a discount rate (in England, for example, this was done every 6 years, and for every four coins, only three were issued back). Money supply though, did not shrink, as the authorities (the king) would replenish the difference to find his own expenses. In 1906, Silvio Gesell proposed a system of demurrage money which he called Freigeld (free money), effectively placing a stamp on each paper note costing a fraction of the note’s value over a specific time period. During the Great Depression, Gesell’s idea was used in some parts of Europe (the wara and the Worgl) with the demurrage rate of 1% per month.

The idea behind demurrage money is to decouple two of the three attributes of money: store of value vs medium of exchange. These two cannot possibly co-exist and are in constant ‘conflict’ with each other: a medium of exchange needs to circulate to have any value, but a store of value, by default, ‘requires’ money to be kept out of circulation. Negative interest rates in effect split these two functions.

Seen from this point of view, negative interest rates may not be a temporary phenomenon just to spur lending. On the opposite, negative interest rates may be here to help reduce the overall debt stock in the economy and to escape the deflationary liquidity trap caused by the declining marginal efficiency of capital.

Pension fund crisis?*

24 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in Debt, Politics, Questions

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At presentations you will see the blue line below.

How many times have you seen the red line?

Pension funds unfunded liabilities have indeed been on the rise, especially after 1999. But so have pension funds assets. So much, that the ratio between the two has been declining (which is the natural, long-term trend) since 2008.

In fact, for the whole period between WW2 and 1984, unfunded liabilities were always bigger than funded liabilities. In 1999, unfunded liabilities hit an all time low of 25% of funded liabilities and even though that ratio has risen since then to 75%, it is still much closer to the bottom of the whole period since 1945.

So, is there a pension fund crisis?

Maybe, but it is not obvious to me that it is anything bigger than at any other point in history before the 1990s.

Could there be a pension fund crisis?

Of course. But you know what is going to happen (as long as the US is fully sovereign), the Treasury will bail out the pension fund industry just as it bailed out the fund management industry in 1988 following the Asian/Russia crisis, and the banking, insurance and auto industry following the 2008 financial crisis.

This, sadly, does not prevent that future pensioners might be exposed to some misguided government attempts to respond to this supposed pension fund crisis by extending the retirement age.

Bottom line is that 1) pension funds unfunded liabilities are not even close to being in a crisis and 2) any fully sovereign government is in a position to provide all the necessary resources to secure comfortable retirement to its people.

We have advanced as a society to such an extent that the only hurdle to a normal life to all at the moment is our antiquated rules of accounting, not our lack of resources.

*Betteridge’s law of headlines: “Any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

Repo squeeze and the Fed: two additional solutions

04 Friday Oct 2019

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Things the Fed can do to alleviate the potential repo squeeze (apart from the usual suspects already discussed in great detail by both saleside/buyside research and in Twittersphere):

1) hike the interest banks pay on TT&L ‘notes’ accounts from EFF-25bps to EFF, or to make it even simpler, equal to IOER. That could encourage funds to move from the TGA account back to TT&L accounts and ‘release’ reserves.

When the Fed started paying IOER, the opportunity cost for the Treasury to keep money on deposit in the banking system (TT&L accounts) rose. The Treasury thus started using the TGA at the Fed.

2) cut the fee on daily uncollateralized overdrafts from the current 50bps, adjust the net debt caps, decrease the penalty daily overdraft fee of 150bps. That could encourage better use of the existing Fed intraday liquidity option.

The Fed made major changes to its daily overdraft operations in 2011 spurred by some inexplicable desire to limit its credit exposure. This was probably on the back of political pressure from the legacy of the 2008 crisis during which the Fed indeed took massive credit risk.

Before 2011, the majority of the Fed’s daily overdrafts were uncollateralized. The new rules discouraged uncollateralized ‘repos’ by raising their fees and introducing collateralized overdrafts for free. After those changes, majority of the overdrafts became collateralized. The problem arose when during the most recent repo squeeze, the mechanics of obtaining collateral became complicated.

In any case, Fed’s action was strange given the fact that only a few months before that, in 2011, it had changed the accounting rules which pretty much ensured that the central bank can not go bankrupt (no negative equity) even in theory.

Should the Fed, actually, be providing free intraday liquidity with no collateral to eligible institutions? I think so. Because:

-that liquidity is needed for transaction (retail 24/7), not consumption or production purposes (Pfister 2018)

-the central bank can create money at zero cost, while the opportunity cost of holding money should be equal to the social cost of creating it (Friedman 1969)

-the central bank would be simply accommodating Basell III regulations

These two solutions are not groundbreaking: the Fed would be either going back to the way things were before 2007 (uncollateralized Fed daily overdrafts), or taking into account new developments (the emergence of IOER).

Fiscal policy is next but it’s also unlikely to work

03 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Monetary Policy, Politics, Uncategorized

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Simon Wren-Lewis wrote an interesting article yesterday The Interest Rate Lower Bound Trap and the ideas that keep us there

Unfortunately, the ideas that keep us plugging pointlessly at monetary policy are not that dissimilar to the ideas which will push us into trying fiscal policy: both of them are based on using the old industrial model of labor and capital income distribution which is much less suitable in the digital age where technology takes center stage.

What particularly caught my attention was the 3rd paragraph and this very relevant question: “If these countries really did have a zero output gap, then why is inflation below target?” Which gets to the core of the issue about how technology has possibly substantially increased potential output.

Yet, our models do not fully capture that. Perhaps that is because we continue to put too much weight on capital and labor in the production function when clearly technology has marginalized them both, the evidence being in zero rates and flat wages.

Let’s take capital.

1) there is a large corporate capital surplus;

2) digital technology does not require so much capital;

3) consumer debt is maxed out.

All three of the above lead to low demand for credit meaning low interest rates regardless/independent of monetary policy.

So, after years of zero/negative/low rates (decades in Japan) it is finally obvious that the monetary transmission mechanism is now clogged (see above). Naturally, despite all the opposition, we are probably just a recession away to switching to fiscal policy.

But as labor’s turn comes, there is no guarantee and zero evidence (see, again, Japan) that fiscal policy would work as its transmission mechanism is probably also clogged. And the reason can be found in the fact that it is easier for corporates to switch from labor to technology in automating production.

A diversion.

That’s where the debate about technological unemployment comes in. And here I am in the camp believing that this time things are different because technology is more advanced and is taking away ‘IQ’ jobs in addition to just ‘brawn’. ‘EQ” jobs are humans’ last call of resistance but maybe not for too long.

Sure, no evidence of this for now but that’s because in the initial stages, with aggregate demand low, companies will choose to focus on cost reduction by using cheaper labor (taking advantage of the threat of automation keeping a lid on wages), than higher output/higher productivity using technology.

We’ve had jobless recoveries before but post GFC’08, we’ve had a ‘wageless’ recovery – plenty of jobs but anaemic wages. Neither is particularly good for aggregate demand as individual purchasing power barely increases.

The situation is even worse now as consumer debt to disposable income keeps rising (people now need two jobs to survive).

In the short run, we could potentially see a rise in wages as the labor pool gets gradually depleted, but the switch to automation would also be faster which would push unemployment up/wages back down. In the long run, technology substitution becomes inevitable as both its cost continues to decline and its capabilities to rise.

And, by the way, we are not helping, as apparently we are also getting dumber (see “Were the Victorians cleverer than us?” by M. Woodley et all).

Diversion ends.

So, the most obvious fiscal policy stimulus is infrastructure spending. That’s much easier to get voted in given the state of our roads and bridges, etc., and the fact that there are probably already too many people shuffling papers on desk jobs working for the government.

Infrastructure spending could be the most economically beneficial option but could also contribute the least to aggregate demand if it bypasses labor due to automation: awarding a billion $ contract to a company to renovate a bridge using mostly automated machinery is hardly going to increase labor’s purchasing power.

My feeling is fiscal policy will indeed soon become the default option. Sadly, not necessarily because it would work better overall for increasing aggregate demand but simply because it has become plain obvious that monetary policy is powerless.

Instead, we need to think ‘beyond the Overton Window’. The income transmission mechanism which we have adopted since the first industrial revolution, Work->Job->Income is broken. Monetary and fiscal policy thus become redundant. We need a new model more suitable for the digital age.

Share buybacks must be seen through the shareholder primacy doctrine

12 Sunday Aug 2018

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  • Buybacks are a direct and natural response to the shift in corporate management structure in the late 1970s which ushered in the period of ‘shareholder primacy’. It was Rule 10B-18 in 1982 which legitimized them.
  • Banning share buybacks without also changing the focus away from maximizing shareholder value will accomplish little because companies will simply find other ways to reach that objective.
  • The 1970s were a tumultuous period for the global economy with the two oil crises leading to stagflation and to enormous pressure on corporate profits. But the ground was set already in 1970 when M. Friedman published “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits”.
  • In 1976 M. Jensen & W. Meckling published “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure” which explored the idea of equity-based compensation for professional managers.
  • Finally, six years later Rule 10B-18 provided safe haven for companies to buyback their shares, allowing them another option to reward shareholders, in addition to dividends. The results were explosive.
  • Equity-based compensation rose from 0% of the median executive’s pay in 1980s to at least 60% in the 2000s; just in 1983, the aggregate amount of cash spent on share buybacks tripled and by 1985 it was 5 times higher than the average in the period 1972-1982.
  • With the incentive structure thus created in the 1980s, companies NOT doing buybacks would not be fulfilling their objective of maximizing shareholder value, notwithstanding that managers are also large shareholders.
  • Thus, banning buybacks makes no sense as it goes against the shareholder primacy doctrine unless, of course there is solid evidence that buybacks erode long-term shareholder value. So, therefore, the issue is not with buybacks but with the corporate management structure which has emerged since the 1980s.
  • Profit maximization and focus on shareholders has created extremely efficient companies boosting aggregate supply(AS), in many cases at the expense of aggregate demand(AD) at home, thus forcing those same companies to shift sales increasingly abroad.
  • It has also contributed to the concentration of both companies and shareholders, the former leading to the monopolization of US industries, the latter to US inequality->continuing with the shareholder primacy thus could indeed be damaging to corporate profits long terms once AD dries off even in EM.
  • I think it is difficult if not impossible to gauge the size of the effect of share buybacks on stocks prices or EPS, but there is no doubt that there is one: JPM, for ex. thinks effect on EPS growth is less than 10%, UBS thinks it is more than 30%.
  • Fed’s Z1 Flow of Funds reports a break-down of the major equity buyers each quarter: since 2008 corporates buying back their shares is absolutely dominant; the second biggest ‘buyer’, ETF, is three times smaller; pension funds and households net sold equities during that period.
  • The stock price of profitable companies like Apple should be rising on its own merit , but that does not negate the possibility that buybacks ‘juice up’ stock prices even higher than ‘justified’. It goes the other way too: with 22 consecutive quarters of declining revenues the stock price of IBM probably should  be lower -where would IBM stock price be if not for buybacks?
  • If we are adjusting R&D to GDP, we might as well adjust share repurchases to GDP as well (and yes, they are also at record high). Tech companies raising their R&D – that’s great – but if they did not do any buybacks, could they have raised it even more?
  • The recapitalization argument (shifting from equity to debt refinancing) is probably the most logical argument in favor of buybacks, if it was not for the agency conflict of interest (managers are equity holders) and the fact that they could have also boosted dividends instead.
  • The argument that giving money back to shareholders could boost wages and investment somewhere else (therefore, where is the problem?) – yes, it could – but as far as I am aware there is not much evidence of this.

The anomaly of an European UK

13 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by in Politics

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The foundations of the EU were laid after WW2 in an effort to put a stop, once for all, to the endless wars ravaging Europe throughout its history. Thus, the EU was primarily a political project. UK joined mostly for economic reasons.  No one should be surprised that the UK decided to finally exit when the economic benefits of staying in were largely overtaken by politics and its equivalent economic costs. What is astonishing is that the EU ‘allowed’ the UK to join on such terms (and even improve upon them) in the first place.

  1. Peace was a relatively infrequent occurrence in Europe which was instead constantly ruined by ‘internal’ wars and foreign occupations. One way to achieve peace was by unification. In the past, Europe was ‘united’ by empires: Roman, Byzantine, French, English…
  2. For example, under Pax Britannica (1815-1914, in Latin “British Peace”) England was the dominant power which ‘assured’ that the Great Powers co-operated rather than fought with each other.
  3. After the devastating effects of WW1, the calls for European unification again became strong. In fact, in the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1818, tsar Alexander (Emperor of Russia) suggested a permanent European union.
  4. Nothing happened. We had to go through another world war after which Churchill finally called for a ‘United States of Europe’ (1946). Three years later the first pan-European organization, The Council of Europe, was established.
  5. Despite the immediate plan behind its founding treaty (Treaty of Paris, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, 1951), the EU was a political project first and economic second.
  6. UK eventually joined the European Economic Community in 1973 (after being rejected by Charles de Gaulle a decade earlier) mostly for economic reasons and never embraced fully the political angle.
  7. The election of Margaret Thatcher and the embrace of neo-liberal economic policies, which led to a resurgence of the UK economy, influenced the direction of European integration towards a more economic turn. The idea being that economics will eventually drive politics: “the invisible hand working, its wonders to perform”.
  8. UK was (reluctantly) ok with the free movement of labor (Treaty of Rome 1957) and welcomed the free movement of capital (Maastricht Treaty 1994). But, UK became increasingly unhappy with the free movement of people especially after the enlargement of 8 extra Eastern European countries (the Citizens’ Rights Directive, 2004)
  9. This discontent was exacerbated by the fact that UK decided to open its borders immediately to citizens of those countries, after the Directive came into force, while most other EU countries chose to implement a 7yr-grace period.
  10. The creation of the common currency, the EUR, in 1999 was a natural evolution of the political union but also a response to a number of currency crises, especially so the ERM II in 1992.
  11. The UK decided not to participate despite/because of the fact its currency suffered a lot during ERM II, confirming that it was in mostly for economic reasons. We can say in hindsight that this was the right choice given that the EU political process was far from complete.
  12. This became particularly obvious after the EU sovereign crisis (2012-13) when the continent suffered disproportionally due to its fiscal inflexibility, lack of common treasury and a proper re-distribution mechanism.
  13. While after the 2004 Directive, the UK was swamped by mostly Eastern Europe migrants (by its own choosing), after the EU crisis, migration increased also from the EU periphery and even from the core.
  14. It was at this time that UK media/government started a concentrated push to blame the EU for UK’s economic problems, again, notwithstanding that its own unnecessary austerity was causing most of it.
  15. It was a surreal situation: by choosing to keep its own currency, the UK was not subject to the fiscal straitjackets of the EU, yet it chose to do exactly that and blame the EU in the process.
  16. The Brexit vote came in light of these developments, and with the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) providing for the first time legally a way out of the EU, the procedure of UK exit has started.
  17. What is interesting is that there is a big disconnect between the UK’s position and the EU’s stand in the negotiations: economics vs politics->despite the UK joining for mostly economic reasons, it did, after all, ‘join’ a political union.
  18. What is astonishing here is the UK’s failure to see the political aspect of this (for ex. Northern Ireland issue) and focus primarily on trying to “buy itself out”. Equally, it will be EU’s give-in to strike an economic solution while disregarding the political message it sends.
  19. What is surprising is not that the UK has decided to leave the EU but that the EU has ‘allowed’ for this loophole to exist: if a country wants to enjoy the economic upside of a union shouldn’t also share the political responsibilities that come with it?
  20. In fact, after the 2015 deal between the UK and EU, the UK did acquire a special status within the union: something no other country had been able to achieve. Why did the EU let the UK in on mostly economic terms and why did it even improve on them later on?
  21. But can we blame the UK that it has gone in the Brexit negotiations process asking “to eat the cake and have it” given that this is exactly what the EU has allowed it to do for 40 years (single market, free trade, own currency, no EU fiscal straitjacket, no Schengen)?
  22. This should not distract from the fact that the political union is far from complete. However, economic commentators not only largely underestimate the political difficulties inherent in building its infrastructure…
  23. …but also disregard the history behind this whole project: the initial impetus for it, and the gradual process of adding, layer after layer, in some cases, unfortunately, only following a crisis.
  24. Brexit, however, is the first serious political crisis facing the EU. The future peace in Europe is dependent not on what UK does now, but on how Europe decides to proceed forward.
  25. The European ‘unions’ of the past (empires) were largely based on the idea of ‘colonialism’ – the center takes much more than it gives back. This could be the first European union which is based on common sharing.
  26. On the other hand, if history is any guide, the failure to complete this European integration can have drastically negative political consequences which will dwarf the economic difficulties present today.