Monday 31 July 2017

HSBC moving out of 78 SJS

The Azeri oil fund bought this building in 2012 for a 4.5% yield.

HSBC like most banks is under margin pressure so the UK Private Bank is moving elsewhere and Asset Management going to Canary Wharf.

They were apparently paying £81/ sq ft/ yr. Although the rent previously had been as high as £120 I believe, but got negotiated lower after 2008.

Assuming the owner finds another tenant is £70/ sq ft an unreasonable expectation? At that rent and a 6.5% yield its only worth £128m. At £60 its worth £110m. At £60 and an 8% yield its only worth £89m.

It was bought for £177m. If rents start to structurally fall the cap rates will plunge at current valuations.  

https://www.ft.com/content/19119b76-486a-11e2-a6b3-00144feab49a

http://www.jll.co.uk/united-kingdom/en-gb/case-studies/170/78-st-james-s-street

Friday 28 July 2017

US wages outpaced GDP in H1

In line with the trend and consistent with a slowish growing economy where many companies are reluctant to raise wages but some stronger ones are.

According to the BEA release today, wages in $ terms grew faster than GDP in H1. Pretty clear which corporate sectors are getting pounded (autos, mobiles, retail, some industrial sectors and oil in Q2), but aggregate corp margin number should also be down.

I know this is a horrendous chart but there cyclical factors also at play that make it noisy. My overall point is that between growing corp margins and growing govt spending wages as a percent of GDP have shrunk for a long time, and seem to have bottomed now. The brunt of the rise will be felt by bubble levels of corp profits. The BAT tax was also supposed to reduce imports, but that seems to have been scrapped for now. 


Swissie following the Greenbacks lead

It took Trump to turn the USD, now with even Greece regaining market access the Swiss Franc seems to be dropping from more or less all time high valuations.


A blow off top?

What does a blow off top look like? You have to wonder how much liquidity there is on the downside. The traditional dip buyers have been active funds, dealers and hedge funds, while hedge funds have high AuMs, the other two have shrunk a lot. On the other side apart from ETF/ active fund redemptions you have huge AuMs in risk premia with short VIX strategies and similar and risk parity which has to delever on vol spikes.

Tuesday 25 July 2017

Is it 1987 or 2017?

Liquidity crunches seem to happen every 10 years, so 87, 97, 07, and what of 2017?

The discussion around 14 minutes, they could be talking about it now.

http://documentaryvine.com/video/trader-the-documentary/

Password is view

The EZ illusion has become real

The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it, as Gordon Gekko once said. At 5% Europe is solvent again.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-25/greece-sells-%E2%82%AC3-billion-bonds-2x-oversubscribed-offering

Sunday 23 July 2017

PDVSA bonds plunge

Not a good week for the longs. 

I guess PDVSA offering PIK notes or similar, instead of cash, for the bonds maturing this year is not what PDVSA holders were hoping for. 

I would have thought a forced rescheduling would also be a cross default trigger, below are the 2021s.

I dont think they can be considered a buy at any price until the politics changes, and at the moment the politics is deteriorating. The nationalisation word has also been mentioned in some quarters. If the USA bans Vene crude imports, then they may as well nationalise PDVSA and sell their oil to the Chinese and similar. At which point I would guess the PDVSA curve could trade in the single digits. 




Thursday 20 July 2017

Spain and Italian deposit flight

Through May Italian and Spanish banks have lost about €110bn in deposits that have then been Target 2 funded. Question is which banks.



Monday 17 July 2017

The case for Senior Credit and Real Asset investing



  • We are late in the economic cycle in the US, China, UK, while Europe has large unaddressed internal imbalances
  • EM has gone through an adjustment 2011-2016 and the reforming countries have a positive outlook, while others deteriorate
  • The US/ UK credit super-cycle which started in the early 80s is coming to an end with Fed hikes, while the post WW2 institutional framework is increasingly irrelevant and the dysfunctionality is leading to reformist politicians taking power
  • The rebalancing/ reform period will likely be ushered in via a mild-US recession, and last 20-30 years
  • Main street will be favoured over wall street and wages will rise, squeezing corporate margins
  • Senior credit is protected from margin squeezes by the equity, while equity/ stressed debt opportunities prevail in post downturn areas as they start to recover
  • There are structural growth related opportunities in EM, excluding China which is yet to start its own rebalancing



Long term structural cycles
There are a number of long term structural cycle theories, whether Stauss-Howe generational cycle theory (4 generations per cycle of 85-100 years, with the current cycle having started in 1946 following the last crisis period of WW1 to WW2) or Kondratiev waves (e.g. 25 year booms followed by 25 year busts driven by economic change waves/ growth engines, the most recent one driven by the IT boom in 90's and noughties and China entering the global labour market in the early 90's).

Credit cycles
Similarly since we moved off the gold standard, effectively starting with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, it has allowed credit super cycles. The first derived from the Treaty of Versailles which switched most of the gold supply to the US (German war reparations and UK/ French war debt payment) and created the roaring 20's in the US and then 30's bust, while Europe went through instability from 1918 to the outbreak of war in '39. The end of WW2 saw a new institutional framework based around Bretton Woods for the west's monetary regime, which again allowed a US credit cycle which busted with Nixon closing the gold window in '71, the ensuing period of inflation eroded 90% of the value of the USD and which ended with Volcker hiking interest rates into the mid-teens to kill inflation. That credit cycle reset between '71 and the early 80s then allowed Alan Greenspan to foster the current 35 year global credit super-cycle; a super-cycle that busted in 2008 and saw a policy response designed to reflate it.

The post-2008 reflation efforts, mainly by the US and China via fiscal and monetary stimulus, initially lifted all assets, but sequentially the most peripheral assets have crashed and the crashes are getting closer to the core. With, in my view, the UK potentially as the next downturn area.

The most supported areas/ assets in this cycle up to now have been: US large company earnings, US real estate, US high yield, Chinese SoE's, Chinese fixed asset investment sectors and Chinese real estate.

Fed policy and the beginning of political reforms
The Fed has a legal mandate on Core PCE to achieve a 2% target and to support full employment. The Fed doesnt use a financial/ asset market model in its modelling.

There are two important points to consider.

With U3 below the NAIRU estimates, the Fed is under pressure to 'normalize' interest rate policy. The current weakness in Core PCE is temporary and driven by weakness in Autos, some areas of retail and industrial sectors that have been affected by EM export weakness, a strong USD and the bust in oil/ shale. After that weakness passes, the rest of the components are in the 2-3% range and underpinned by upwards wage pressures.

As such the Fed could end the year feeling as though they are behind the curve and need 2-3% Fed funds in 2018.

The second point is the political changes we are seeing, which are associated with the fourth tuning of the Strauss-Howe generational theory. Under the Strauss-Howe theory new political leaders emerge to deal with the crisis that unfolds and part of this is reforming the economic structure and the institutional framework. Both Trump and Corbyn are clear fourth turning crisis leaders, while the EU has its own set of internal dynamics to deal with.

Key aspects of this rebalancing include pushing up wages as a percent of GDP, monetizing/ inflating debt away, corporate margins falling and defaults rising.

Essentially a new set of economic winners will emerge, primarily wage earners but also companies and assets that can do well from the new framework. This is not a short term change, but rather a structural cycle, the fourth turning is predicted to last 20-30 years. If the Fed sticks to a -2% real 'neutral' interest rate policy, it will take a long time for inflation to erode the real value of debt.

In my opinion we are still in the third turning, although Neil Howe believes the fourth turning started in 2008. Listening to Howe's comments he primarily defines the turning points as being culturally and politically triggered, which a few years later leads to the financial/ market transition. We are seeing political and cultural changes associated with the fourth turning now as the political narrative has changed in the last year.

The unravelling, third turning, is where the post WW2 institutional framework becomes increasingly dysfunctional and increasingly desperate measures are used to support it. If this started in 1997 with the Asian credit bust and then the post-2000 bust, basically the start of Albert Edward's Ice Age theory, then we are currently 20 years into a 20-30 year third turning cycle. As such the third turning could give way to the fourth turning at any time. I would guess the next US recession or a Chinese monetary crisis could be the trigger for the new phase from an economic standpoint.

So the Fed is hiking to meet its dual mandate and its policies will be appropriate for 'main street', but negative for asset markets, although it will err on the side of caution and Yellen has increasingly suggested that the new neutral interest rate was nominal GDP -2%. Similarly the political impulse is for pro-wage policies that will squeeze both corporate margins, push up discount rates for asset markets and shrink the FIRE economy as a percent of GDP.

The US has similar debt dynamics as the UK and both are seeing debt grow 3-3.5x faster than GDP. As the rebalancing takes place the demand that credit creation put into the economy will disappear, which is recessionary in the short term, and in the long term will squeeze the prior structural winners.

From an economic sectoral balance standpoint, the US consumer and government have been running deficits, while corporates and the external sector have run surpluses; these will reverse with corporates squeezed and the US becoming a net exporter over the period. Policies such as BAT taxes will support this sectoral restructuring.



Economic summary
So it seems clear to me that we are in a period of change and the changes will take time, be done under economic and market stresses and you need a completely different asset allocation framework to benefit from the new opportunities.

Liquid markets
Trading strategies should benefit from the instability. Buy and hold will be a disaster. EM macro has been working, but DM macro, CTAs, long vol and dispersion should work well over the next 5-10 years. Some forms of active risk premia should work well, but selectivity and timing will be key.

Post downturn areas are attractive. The equity is attractive if there is growth and self help/ auto stabilizers, e.g. oil, shipping. Stressed debt with a pull to par is better if the recovery is slow and margins remain depressed, e.g. most stressed/ distressed opportunities in Europe. Examples recently include Greece, Argentina where the post default complications lasted for years and debt was the better asset class vs equity. The next stress/ distress candidates are Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and perhaps the UK if we have a recession now.

There are structural growth opportunities in EM, but EM is a case of the good, the bad and the ugly; so selectivity is key. China clearly has big internal economic distributional problems and has a debt bubble to work off, so I would generally avoid it and its second derivatives such as Hong Kong and Macau.

Private markets
Private Equity
Equity earnings are going to be squeezed in the west, so most private equity is unattractive, as is commercial real estate as a second derivative that also has other structural challenges.

Generally, after the bust that is coming, there will be opportunities to buy cheap, cash producing, asset backed equity in companies that have pricing power and finance it with negative real interest rate debt.

In the west you have to wait for the crash, however there are current opportunities in post downturn areas: Energy, Mining, Shipping, Greece and some Emerging Markets. If the UK goes into a recession due to a housing downturn, austerity, real wage squeeze and no offset in investment, then it should present many opportunities.

I think the hurdle risk/ reward is a minimum of a 2x return with limited downside for unleveraged private equity. More involved, risky or leveraged situations call for more return.


Private credit
You want to avoid primary high yield or speculative bridge loans in overheated areas. London property developers are a good example; developers borrowing money at 15% to redecorate a vastly overvalued house only works in a bull market and will have high default rates as the market turns down. Generic mid-market senior lending where yields are fairly low and credit quality has deteriorated should be avoided. These areas are swamped with capital and many of the underlying businesses will struggle from here.

Instead you want to pick off niche areas on an intelligent basis. I think CLOs are attractive, I think there are senior lending opportunities in shipping, energy, mining, clean energy/ clean technology lease finance, some senior bank debt restructurings in Greece. There are some infrastructure related opportunities.

There are many senior opportunities in emerging markets, including India, Moscow, I'm sure if you looked in Brazil or other large EMs you would similarly find opportunities. I would avoid China and Hong Kong/ Macau. As an indicator, some residential real estate prices in Singapore have fallen 45% since 2011, given the commodity bust in Australia and Indonesia.

You can hold the senior secured credit on a yield of up to L+9% or so for very low risk debt. You could leverage this 2-3x if you want equity like returns with senior credit underlying. Or you can do a higher loan to value or some bridge situations and get teen yields, unleveraged, in post downturn areas.

If US nominal GDP growth now is circa 4.5% and that rises to 5-6% with some moderate wage-inflation pressure and the Fed has to hike to 3-4% over the next two years, yields should also rise in private credit in areas not swamped by investor capital. A 3 year loan book should get on average a 1/3rd principal and 10% interest receipt per year, so you can manage the portfolio over time. Fed rates of 3-4% vs 2% real GDP growth with a lot of the inflation being wages squeezing corporate margins is not going to be great for equity or the valuations of equity. (corporate profit falls in Q1)

There is nowhere else in credit you will be able to beat 5-6% nominal GDP with a comfortable margin and low default risks, even if there is a moderate yield reset in high yield, its still low quality credit at a time of rising defaults.


Saturday 15 July 2017

Where in the cycle is US commercial real estate

I had previously suggested that due to various cyclical and structural reasons US core commercial real estate could halve in value. But I didnt provide any time frames. So question is are we near a peak? At what point may it start to roll over? What could be the catalyst?

A few charts:

Delinquencies are at a record low:


The Greenspan housing bubble is pretty obvious, but bank lending to the space has been somewhat subdued since the GFC, as you can imagine:


Yields are pretty low, and the Fed, in my view, is now hiking until there is a recession:

The developers are all fired up:


With lower residential building levels the combination of commercial and residential investment is not looking like a construction activity bubble, in aggregate, which comes back to valuations being squeezed higher and curtailed bank lending:


 Here is the killer, valuations are at cycle highs and even dipped in Q1, historically
valuations never really got that far ahead of the GDP growth.


So with overall high valuations, a large slew of supply coming, the Fed hiking and low growth, seems likely the timing is near. Hard to see a blow off top from here, these are boring bricks and mortar assets, hardly concept company unicorn territory.

Given the illiquidity of the asset class and the time and cost taken to get out, its probably already past the time to get out.

As we have seen with global super prime resi, it just took an administrative measure in China to freeze a set of wildly overvalued markets.

In US commercial real estate perhaps Fed hiking expectations are the trigger to freeze the market, perhaps its a few buildings delivered unrented, or perhaps its a few fire-sales, perhaps some downwards rent reviews.




Thursday 13 July 2017

IEA oil supply forecasts are based on what?

IEA have crude demand over 99mmbpd by year end, vs supply of under 97mmbpd, so roughly a 2mmbpd inventory draw, at least according to the June report, I dont subscribe to see the July report yet.

Most of these types of forecast are based on offshore production flatlining for several years into the future. But it looks like this year you are starting to see production falls vs 2016 in a number of non-OPEC producers, presumably as the capex cuts since 2014 start to have a lagged effect which will last for the next 5+ years. As such going into next year with demand still growing faster than US shale supply, the market will be tightening fast via large daily draws on inventory.

https://www.iea.org/media/omrreports/fullissues/2017-06-14.pdf



Assuming these reports are accurate there is basically no growth in supply outside of US shale. Is this plausible given the huge capex cut backs since 2014? Of course not, but equally no one seems to know how to forecast offshore production declines as production is very dependent on production management and workover capex.

 http://strategicmacro.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/what-heck-is-happening-in-oil-and-whats.html

Seems like this year some countries are seeing YoY declines though. Note how many countries below have range bound production for the last few years, but somehow the IEA forecasts production growth into the end of next year... on what capex?


Venezuela is a good leading example of what happens when you cut capex back after a few years of lagged effect:


Answer: production can fall 20% in 18 months in this case.

And what happens when supply goes down, demand goes up and elasticity of supply is near zero on a short term basis? Prices rise to the point demand growth is curtailed. In the last 15 years this has been oil prices over $100. This time round I think perhaps $80+ is enough to stimulate more shale supply and faster electrical car adoption, but thats just a hunch.

In the short term however the market is fixated on the idea shale supply is relentless and OPEC has lost control. Any growth scare or other shock could see crude plunge into the $35-40 range and currently it seems to be trading weakly.








How much oil and gas is left in the UK north sea/ continental shelf?

How much oil and gas is left in the UK north sea/ shelf? Up to 20 billion barrels of which 3bn are discovered but undeveloped so far. 

https://ogauthority.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=b790e9d7c0044e8dabbf0dbc565ebec7


Wednesday 12 July 2017

Varoufakis interview



Quite an interesting Varoufakis interview on the troika and more recent events.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGt82RFfg3U
 

Cohn as next fed chair?

So the New York Democrats are pushing for Gary Cohn, obviously, presumably Bannon is pushing for a reformist...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-05-05/kevin-warsh-says-fed-needs-fundamental-reform-video

ARM mortgages in Hong Kong?

Hmm... where have we seen Adjustable Rate Mortgages before?

http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/real-estate/hong-kongs-mortgage-lenders-doing-booming-business-in-the-shadows

Friday 7 July 2017

Are we in the third or fourth turning?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yfb2zQjKWE
Here is an interview with Neil Howe. He thinks the fourth turning started in 2008, Im not sure it has started yet I think we are in the unravelling third turning still which started, in my view in 1997. However we are seeing signs of the Fourth Turning with challenges to the institutional framework and new leaders such as Trump, Sanders etc rising to prominence.
So his four stage cycle theory in my view is:
1st, High, 1946-1971(?) 25yrs, exiting the last fourth turning (1914-1945), post war boom institutional framework was ended by Nixon closing gold window
2nd, Awakening, 1971-1997? 26yrs, cultural changes, ending cold var and Vietnam etc, transition from post war boom via a wage inflation cycle in the 70s and then reform in 80s. Ended with the 97 crisis since which we have had increasingly desperate central bank policies
3rd Unravelling, 97-08 or 97 to a few years from now, ie so far we are 20 years into the third turning. Central banks have been relied on to pump up asset bubbles to support structural imbalances. Entered into the major war predicted in the 4th turning, I think its the war on radical Islam. 2008 and policy response was part of the unravelling, Howe thinks the 2008 crisis was the start of the 4th turning. Given the imbalances are still growing I dont see how we are in the 4th turning yet, the entire policy response since 2008 was about pushing back the crisis, but in the last 12 months the reform leaders associated with the 4th turning have been getting elected. Overall I think the start of the 4th turning will be triggered by a US recession in turn probably triggered by Fed hiking cycle which is still in its early phases.
4th Crisis, the previous institutions breakdown in crisis and a new leader emerges to reform them and create new institutions. Howe argues we are already 9 years into the fourth turning since 2008.
 
The precursors of this are manifested by Brexit, Trump, Sanders, Le Pen, Grillo, Tsipras, Farage etc etc. The Fed is now hiking which will destabilise the debt bubble. I think the defeat of ISIS in the Levant will see them transplant themselves from a fairly small regional group into a pan continental group across the sahara region which will be the major, drawn out war that we are drawn into.

The 4th turning theory also has a lot more social and cultural predictions based around generation attitudes to society and culture.

Tuesday 4 July 2017

Multi-asset funds only worked under QE

A number of multi-asset/ absolute return funds, made money steadily from 2008 and raised a lot of money. Often marketed as vol controlled thematic macro, or strategic funds etc, the ones I reviewed are basically just long bonds and long credit risk; so a border line scam operation marketed via the usual consultant led distribution channels to naive institutional investors.

Then the Fed stopped QE3 in Oct 2014 and markets became jumpy culminating in the August 2015 flash crash. 

Since then a number of well known versions of this strategy have been flat/ slightly down/ slightly up. Eitherway they look broken to me. 

Now the Fed is looking to start withdraw stimulus. When the tide goes out, you see who is swimming naked. 


Sunday 2 July 2017

38% off the ask on a Hammersmith development

£3 mil/ 38% knocked off the ask within a week of starting to market this. Still asking 5m for a sub 3k sq ft apartment  though...

They have probably missed the window to sell to Chinese off plan, not sure who else would pay almost £2k/ sq ft for an apartment in Hammersmith, albeit it looks like a nice design and fit out.

At about 2800sq ft the direct build costs might be circa £500k, plus maybe £100-200k to nicely fitout and appoint the interior, furnished. The ~20% in social housing costs and ~25% for developer margin and 5-10% for some other costs. That gets you to £1.1m or £1.20m or something like that, add in some reasonable land value and you are talking £1.5-1.75m fair value, or £600-650/sq ft.

http://www.mouseprice.com/property-for-sale/ref-30633579/faulkner+house+fulham+reach+london+w6+