FHA Mortgages: Buckle Your Seatbelts For More Defaults

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Nick Timiraos wrote,


"Some 59% of new home buyers are using government-backed loans from the FHA and other agencies, according to a survey of home builders by John Burns Real Estate Consulting, an Irvine, Calif.-based consultancy. The FHA accounts for nearly half of all mortgages, while loans from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs account for another 10% of all loans for new homes.

The government’s share of the market rises even higher in certain areas. In Northern California, for example, builders said that the government accounted for 76% of all mortgages, while the government share stood at 65% in the Midwest and 62% in South Florida."


Further, FHA mortgages may be had with as little as a 3% downpayment!


Mind you, FHA was originally intended to be the government-backed housing finance program for lower-income Americans. How in the world did it morph into accounting for more than half of new home loans? With the VA coming in for another 10%?

A few days earlier, on last Friday, to be precise, Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute wrote a piece in the Journal entitled, "Barney Frank, Predatory Lender."

Wallison details Frank's push for governmental support of questionable mortgage lending, including requiring the GSEs to make 55% of their mortgage purchases "affordable," meaning lower-quality.

He notes, regarding the presumption that Wall Street firms cavalierly originated and securitized bad mortgages of their own volition,

"There was always a problem with this theory. Mortgage brokers had to be able to sell their mortgages to someone. They could only produce what those above them in the distribution chain wanted to buy. In other words, they could only respond to demand, not create it themselves. Who wanted these dicey loans? The data shows that the principal buyers were insured banks, government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the FHA- all government agencies or private companies forced to comply with government mandates about mortgage lending."

Wallison's last sentence is a clear warning about a rerun of the past few years' mortgage mess,

"If the financial crisis was caused by subprime mortgages and predatory lending, the government's own policies made it happen."

Buckle up!

Amazon's Kindle's Coming Competition

Yesterday I wrote a post concerning the coming, unanticipated and unintended consequences of high volumes of high-bandwidth multi-media wireless communications applications.

Along the same lines, the colleague with whom I discussed that topic has led me through the logic behind another coming unanticipated consequence of a recent technological development.

Amazon's Kindle ereader is on its second or third version by now. And other entities are hot on their heels with competing products. It's clearly another opportunity for an iPod and iTunes sort of system competition.

My colleague then observed that, now, about the least-used and simplest of iPhone applications is voice communication. The screen, fonts, and apps on the iPhone are all superior to other multi-media phones and communications appliances. In fact, it appears that Steve Jobs' relentless focus on special fonts for his products is bearing fruit on the current generation of small, hard-to-read screens.

But my colleague noted that, soon, all Apple has to do is put the iPhone on steroids and produce it as a tablet-sized reader.

When that arrives, Amazon's Kindle is toast. It will be a one-app device in a new, multi-app world.

How attractive will a Kindle be in a world in which an iPhone and its competitors, with rich communications applications, including voice, text, video store and messaging, cameras, all contain ereader apps, too?

My colleague showed me how reasonably clear the type and presentation of a current iPhone are. Apparently, the Kindle still has clarity issues. It's weak on actual readability, but alone, for now, in providing electronic access to material.

That is probably going to change in a few years.

Jeff Bezos might well be enjoying the halcyon years of his firm's ereader right now. Because once Apple arrives with a competitive product, I don't think Amazon's core skills will allow it to keep pace with the dominant US consumer technology firm.

Unanticipated Consequences of Wireless Multi-Media

I recently had a long talk with a colleague on the subject of the evolving world of wireless multi-media communications and devices.

Of particular interest to us was the relatively new wireless cellular modem card for use in laptops. Verizon has been advertising its MiFi service and gear relentlessly in past weeks.

Essentially, this device allows a user to take 4-5 users through one cellular router up to a cell system, bypassing an initial wireless step into a conventional WiFi hotspot router and onto the wired internet.

Instead, internet connectivity is totally wireless through the cellular carrier, until it accesses the internet backbone.

Pricing, of course, can quickly reach hefty levels if more than one person is using this in a full-blown multi-media mode. But the capability never the less now exists, practically, for several people located in the middle of nowhere, in terms of wired internet access, to have reasonably high-speed wireless access to the internet.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted iPhones and similar non-Apple devices being used for this sort of multi-media application, consuming huge amounts of wireless capacity. So much, it contended, that two local wireless slingbox users could effectively consume a neighborhood's total wireless bandwidth capacity.

Thus, pricing is probably going to move, rapidly, to a bandwidth-usage basis. After the initial pricing plans incenting large volumes of text messaging for fixed prices, the subsidizing of larger-bandwidth hogging video viewing is finally exhausting existing wireless system capacity.

The logical consequence is to move to usage-based pricing in order to both effectively ration bandwidth usage and fund further capacity increases in existing wireless systems.

Ironically, this might actually overshadow any similar move to wired internet usage pricing, as that begins to look like a comparative backwater.

As I'll mention in an imminent post about coming generations of wireless reader devices, this is just the tip of the iceberg for wireless usage, pricing and capacity issues. It's going to get much more interesting, as the Journal piece noted, for companies like Google.

In fact, the article observed how quickly Apple went from fighting Verizon's possible encroachment on applications on the iPhone to a partnership to make sure iPhones can work on the latter's network. Apple is evidently seeing that getting others to pay for the infrastructure that the iPhone requires is far cheaper than being forced, through a closed system, to pay for one itself. Thus, the article mused that Google, Yahoo and other non-network-owning content providers could soon find themselves in a difficult pricing situation.

They will be using large amounts of bandwidth to serve their customers, but won't own any pipes, and, thus, will be vulnerable to applications-based pricing from their servers.

This could get quite interesting in a hurry, causing some business models to become much less profitable almost overnight.

Jamie Dimon's Chase Increases Risk To Generate Earnings

After the celebrations over JPMorgan Chase's recent revenue and earnings announcements which exceeded "expectations," more sober analysts are noting the increased risks the bank took to generate those results.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal's Heard On The Street column called it "J.P. Morgan's Chilling Win."

The article detailed the decline in profitability of the bank's core businesses. Loan volume was down, while loan loss provisions went up, and credit card past-due volumes were up, as well.

According to the Journal, the bank's VAR measure rose as it relied on bond trading for its juiced-up profits.

But, wait!

Isn't excessive risk-taking in trading and non-core banking business precisely what Congress, the administration, regulators and the banks themselves all swore was what caused the recent financial meltdown? That such short-term, excessive risk was to be sworn off by our "too big to fail" financial titans?

Gee, that didn't last long, did it?

Here's a memo- short term fixed income trading isn't a core retail or wholesale commercial bank business. It's what investment banks and brokerages use to boost earnings, but not without accompanying increased risk.

Of course, this country no longer has any large investment banks. They either failed, or begged for commercial bank holding company licenses last year, the better to get access to the Fed borrowing window.

So Chase is basically following Goldman Sachs' lead in relying on risky trading to generate revenue and earnings surprises. Guess how long that's going to last?

So much for anyone having learned from last year's debacle. So much for regulators being serious about oversight and risk management.

Nothing essential has changed about the US financial services sector in the past year, other than a few badly-managed firms were left to fail, while a few others were kept on government-supplied life support.

Nor has anything changed about Jamie Dimon's lack of management skill. Those surprising earnings came courtesy of some fixed income traders and the risk they were allowed to take, not from core lending businesses.

But the Journal is correct. Chase isn't making its money on conventional commercial banking. It's taking extra risks by wagering its proprietary capital at the tables in that little casino we like to call the US fixed income markets.

The BofA Ken Lewis Succession Mess

By now, BofA's board must be lamenting the day its CEO, Ken Lewis, agreed to take federal funding. And agreed to buy Countrywide Financial. And agreed to buy Merrill Lynch. And agreed not to tell shareholders of the bonus payouts to Merrill employees prior to the sale's closing.

Now the administration's "pay czar" is refusing to agree to Lewis' compensation.

Isn't this all enough to prove why it's never a good thing for government to get in bed with private, publicly-held companies?

BofA probably should have just taken its lumps from the Countrywide purchase and soldiered on, rejecting federal "help."

It could have done what it liked with the Merrill purchase, including rescinding it for material changes. It could have paid its employees what it liked, and ignored Treasury's coercive behaviors.

Instead, the board has to scramble to replace its CEO, who is girding for an extended legal battle with the New York State. And has to submit its executive compensation to some nitwit in Washington.

Federal money was the root of all of this trouble for BofA.

They should have just said "no."

Mortgage Market Pablum from Barclay's Michelle Meyer

Another wacky segment which I caught yesterday afternoon featured a woman from Barclays named Michelle Meyer. Apparently she was a rising star at...ah..... Lehman. Now she's chief economist at Barclays Capital, having been absorbed along with some other remnants of Dick Fuld's failed investment bank.

The topic of interest to me was one on which I'm planning another post, as well- a return to poor lending standards and the abrogating of current mortgage contracts.

The various talking heads on the segment were discussing rising delinquencies and, ultimately, the foreclosures which will follow. One CNBC reporter noted the story of a realtor who simply stopped paying her family's home's mortgage because their loan is so deeply underwater. This was some nine months ago, so the story went, and she hasn't been contacted by her bank yet, effectively letting the family live mortgage payment-free in their own home.

As the CNBC on-air anchor introduced the topic of mortgage forgiveness and rewrites, she polled the discussion participants regarding how this treatment of investors will affect subsequent mortgage lending in years to come.

Meyer jumped in and missed the entire point with her comment. Instead, she blurted out something about the price bottom having been reached, so it's upwards from here for the market. Nothing in her comment indicated she understood in the least what the anchor's question implied.

I watched this, and Meyer, with curiosity. Meyer appears to be, at most, in her mid-30s. Most of her mortgage-related experience has thus been in one of the most bizarre, unusual markets of all time. Rates near historic lows, negligible down payments and easily-securitized liar loans, option-rate ARMS and other strange residential finance creatures. All in a surreal market of ultra-low rates.

By contrast, my friend and sometimes business partner, B, is a residential finance veteran of some thirty years. He built at least two mortgage businesses on Wall Street, and has consulted with several others. He and I have discussed how he has supervised and managed teams of twenty-something mortgage business personnel who were stymied when confronting recurring problems B had first seen, and solved, decades ago.

It struck me as disappointing that CNBC has sunk to basically having kids on their segments as experts.

Remember when Mary Meeker and Henry Blodgett were the queen and king of internet business analysis? That didn't end so well, did it? If I remember correctly, I think Blodgett signed a consent decree to refrain from being an analyst anymore.

Lehman wasn't exactly a successful, driving force in investment banking during its last incarnation. Color me sceptical (yes, note the blog's title), but the failed bank wouldn't be a place where I'd expect to find the sector's best economic analysis or talent.

Even Bear Stearns had, in its day, Larry Kudlow and David Malpass. Both economists of much greater depth and with longer experience than Meyer.

To appear on air and assure everyone that, despite mortgage loan covenants being torn up by government programs, future housing finance will be unaffected just seems ludicrous to me.

But that's what Meyer seemed to be saying with her rather irrelevant response to the question concerning how investors will now view the safety of mortgage-backed instruments.

Misplaced Hero Worship: Morgan Stanley's John Mack on CNBC

Yesterday afternoon I happened to catch Bill Griffeth's fawning, softball interview with Morgan Stanley retiring CEO John Mack.

I find myself unable to disguise my total disgust with CNBC's continued glorification of inept CEOs, including sympathizing over how, in this case, Mack struggled to avoid his firm's demise, while carefully avoiding any question over Mack's responsibility was in leading his firm to that brink of disaster.

In his questioning of Mack, all Griffeth could do was look on in reverence as Mack regaled him with tales of seeking Asian funding to avoid being closed down by the feds.

If you look at the nearby price chart of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and the S&P500 Index for the past five years, you can see that Mack had spent the better part of his tenure since mid-2005 mismanaging the investment bank onto an index-trailing path.

Much ink has been spilled over Mack's mistakes since his return to the firm at which Sears/Discover Card's Phil Purcell outmaneuvered him after the 1997 merger of the two firms.

If I recall correctly, Mack installed poor risk managers, then had the firm go for broke by diving into trading and underwriting mortgage-backed securities. Then held back in the last nine months while risk taking actually began to pay off again.

In contrast, better-led and -managed rival Goldman Sachs was performing far better even before the crisis of last fall.

So, instead of asking Mack questions about how he managed to lead his firm to the brink of insolvency and possible government takeover or enforced sale to a rival, Griffeth painted Mack as some sort of late-hour hero, beset by forces outside his control, desperately fending off Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner as he rescued Morgan Stanley with funding from new outside investors.

It makes me want to throw up when I see such shallow, gullible, misleading reportage. Much like Wall Street Journal veteran Peter Kann noted in an editorial on which I commented in this post, CNBC is rapidly heading down the road that led to the demise of printed newspapers.

Yesterday's interview of John Mack contained several aspects of that demise, e.g., shallow questions from Griffeth and a biased, flattering treatment of the subject, rather than hard-nosed questions that an intelligent, informed viewer would have posed.

Rather than champion capitalism and free markets, this sort of softball journalism at CNBC contributes to the weakening of our economic system. Griffeth breathlessly spoke about how narrowly Mack avoided Morgan Stanley going out of existence.

Guess what? Few financial service companies from thirty years ago are still around and independent. Poorly run investment banks and brokerages, such as Lehman- twice-, First Boston, Kidder Peabody and Salomon Brothers get taken over. Or perish.

Bill Griffeth needs to get a better sense of the reality of financial markets and the life-and-death cycle of those firms engaged in the rough-and-tumble world of securities underwriting and trading.

If a live televised interview on CNBC of the CEO of one of the less-well run investment banks doesn't feature questions about how Mack could have caused such massive, self-induced damage to Morgan Stanley, what will?

Holman Jenkins' Rare Mistake

I finally got around to reading Holman Jenkins' interview with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. The colleague who urged me to read it was correct- it's primarly a public relations piece by Blankfein to try to smooth over the bank's image prior to news that it will be again paying stratospheric bonuses after being rescued by the Fed and Treasury last fall.

Of course, now, Blankfein will have none of that, as conveyed in the interview. Note, for example, these passages,

"Then there's the matter of AIG, source of snarling recriminations even among Goldman's Wall Street brethren. If AIG, a huge player in all kinds of markets, had gone down, the impact on the economy would have been incalculable. Mr. Paulson and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke wouldn't risk it. They reversed course after Lehman and bailed out the insurance giant to a tune that now has reached $180 billion. To this day, charges fly that the AIG bailout was a backdoor bailout of Goldman.

AIG had been a big issuer of guarantees on subprime-backed paper; Goldman had been a big buyer of those guarantees. Nonetheless, when government officials rang up to ask what would be the potential impact of an AIG bankruptcy on Goldman, Mr. Blankfein says his answer was: "negligible." He did not, he says, ask Washington to save AIG: "It never occurred to me, having lived through Lehman Brothers weekend, that there was government money for anything. People wanted to know how we were going to do when AIG went down. I was telling them we were fine."

Mr. Blankfein points to what he calls a fundamental aspect of Goldman culture—its risk-management discipline. AIG had been regarded on Wall Street as a gold-plated client, not just a "Street" counterparty. But Goldman had nonetheless taken the usual step of requiring AIG to post collateral nightly against any deterioration in the market value of the guaranteed assets.

Mr. Blankfein placed some of the phone calls himself. "AIG was being beastly, difficult to deal with, not responding well to our calls for collateral. And I called them up and fought with them, and it was always because they were disagreeing with our 'marks.' They never said, and I never had reason to suspect, 'We're illiquid. We don't have the money.' It never occurred to me."

Goldman, in its rigor, reinsured any shortfall with other counterparties, who were also required to post collateral nightly. "We had one day of exposure with them. It doesn't mean I can't lose $300 million if they don't pay because that's how much a market can move in a day, but basically I'm not worried about it."

These estimates, of course, have a theoretical element. The underlying assets would certainly have collapsed even further in value if Wall Street firms and AIG began dropping like nine-pins. We'll never know. In the event, AIG was rescued—though that now meant that taxpayer money, in a sense, was being shipped to Goldman to meet AIG's collateral obligations.

Some say today the government should have spurned Goldman's collateral demands. Some say it should even have forced Goldman to settle the outstanding positions at a discount.

Realistically, though, AIG faced hundreds of counterparties; and short of bankruptcy, which Washington had ruled out for AIG, no obvious formula presented itself for rewriting thousands of AIG contracts without risking the market panic Washington was trying to forestall. For its part, Goldman would have been on thin ice with its own shareholders if it had voluntarily relinquished valuable contract rights to make nice with Washington."

There's just one problem with that last paragraph. Mr. Jenkins is wrong.

In an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal within a few months of the financial sector meltdown of last fall, one astute observer noted that there was, in fact, an existing process by which AIG's numerous counterparties could have been fairly and equally treated.

That option, of course, was bankruptcy. And it's rather curious to me that Jenkins glosses over this with a simple "Washington had ruled (that) out for AIG."

As that editorial writer noted several months ago in the Journal, putting AIG's swaps through bankruptcy, quickly, would have resulted in all counterparties taking a known, equal percentage haircut on the value of their positions. This is no different than learning that the value of your swap declined for some market reason. Swaps gain, and lose value all the time.

The source really is somewhat immaterial.

I'm surprised Jenkins gave Blankfein, Goldman and Washington all passes on this rather monumental corruption of capitalism.

AIG's takeover by the federal government is precisely the sort of unnecessary appropriation of private property, followed by draconian, confusing Congressional and administration rules impositions, that begs for more use of bankruptcy and less entanglement of Washington with private enterprise.

What We Haven't Learned From The Reagan Recovery

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured an editorial by economist Judy Shelton entitled "The Message of Dollar Disdain."

Quite by accident, since I had yet to turn to that page, I had a discussion with a business colleague over lunch about the same topic that Shelton mentioned at the end of her piece. I had told my friend about this recent post, based upon another Journal editorial, as well as a cross-post from my political blog featuring two video clips of Steve Wynn on fiscal policy. Both concerned the impact of proposed, costly social programs on a federal debt already bloated by roughly six decades of deficit spending.

Ms. Shelton wrote,

"Sadly, due to our fiscal quagmire, the Federal Reserve may be forced to raise interest rates as a sop to attract foreign capital even if it hurts our domestic economy. Unfortunately, that's the price of having already succumbed to symbiotic fiscal and monetary policy. If we could forge a genuine commitment to private-sector economic growth by reducing taxes, and at the same time significantly cut future spending, it might be possible to turn things around. Under President Reagan in the 1980s, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker slashed inflation and strengthened the dollar by dramatically tightening credit. Though it was a painful process, the economy ultimately boomed."

I mused to my friend about the same scenario. That is, I suggested that, if the long term effect of the weak dollar is, as David Malpass wrote in yet another Journal editorial, a fate much like Britain, the "hollowing out" of the US economy, then the solution is to raise interest rates on US Treasuries. Combined with more prudent fiscal policy, a la Wynn's observation that 'no government spending ever increased its country's standard of living,' in the form of restrained/reduced spending and lower taxes, genuine private economic activity would be resuscitated.

Such a move would, of course, sink various marginal business activity. But it would set off a chain reaction of virtuous consequences.

Banks would cut their lending to more viable projects which would clear hurdle rates of perhaps 3-5%, plus risk premium.

New capital would flow into the US to earn decent rates on fairly low-risk Treasuries.

That capital would flow to new business activity.

Money kept by taxpayers, instead of taken and spent by government, as well as not used to pay interest on higher deficits, would also seek investment returns, resulting in greater available capital for business activity.

As Ms. Shelton points out, this is precisely what occurred under the Reagan-Volcker regime.

The essential starting point is a commitment to the future, rather than the protection of past mistakes. In a word, an economy dedicated to Schumpeterian dynamics.

From this viewpoint, the mid-late Bush and certainly current administration's actions are exactly backwards. Rather than protecting existing, failed investments and propping up their value with taxpayer funds and borrowed capital from abroad, the more robust economic path would have been to let companies like GM, Chrysler, AIG, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup fail.

As Anna Schwartz noted in an interview she gave to the Journal last fall, on which I posted here. In that interview were the following passages,

"Ms. Schwartz won't say so, but this is the dirty little secret that led Secretary Paulson to shift from buying bank assets to recapitalizing them directly, as the Treasury did this week. But in doing so, he's shifted from trying to save the banking system to trying to save banks. These are not, Ms. Schwartz argues, the same thing. In fact, by keeping otherwise insolvent banks afloat, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have actually prolonged the crisis. "They should not be recapitalizing firms that should be shut down.

But perhaps this is actually Mr. Bernanke's biggest problem. Today's crisis isn't a replay of the problem in the 1930s, but our central bankers have responded by using the tools they should have used then. They are fighting the last war. The result, she argues, has been failure. "I don't see that they've achieved what they should have been trying to achieve. So my verdict on this present Fed leadership is that they have not really done their job." "

Ms. Schwartz noted that liquidity was never the issue last fall, or even two years ago, when Helicopter Ben began reducing rates in a panic. Rather, she observed, the problem has been guessing which institutions were still actually solvent, as asset values spiraled downwards.

Monetary and fiscal policy which seek to protect past actions of private capital investors, at the expense of future ones, are doomed to stultify and cement an economy in the past.

Ms. Shelton's focus, while slightly different than that of Malpass or Lawrence Kadish, is never the less chilling. Whereas Malpass focused on exchange rate consequences, and Kadish on mounting interest and rates on the national debt, Shelton concentrated her analysis on the companion measure of US debt/GDP. On that measure, she notes, we will have vaulted, on the basis of current government estimates, from 23rd last year to 7th in 2011. The result? Ms. Shelton writes,

"The U.S. is thus slated to enter the ranks of those countries—Zimbabwe, Japan, Lebanon, Singapore, Jamaica, Italy—with the highest government debt-to-GDP ratio (which measures the debt burden against a nation's capacity to generate sufficient wealth to repay its creditors)."

Economic loss brings pain somewhere in an economy. Schumpeter's genius was to identify that this is the natural order of a healthy, growing capitalist economic system. Our policymakers cannot allow themselves to be unduly affected by the plight of those in the rearward areas of economic decay.

Transfer payments for employees of yesterday's now-faded economic titans is one thing. Actually rushing to preserve those enterprises with taxpayer funds is quite another. Or, worse, with borrowed funds from abroad.

When you assemble the views of the recent Journal economics editorialists- Malpass, Kadish and Shelton- you get a truly chilling picture of US monetary and fiscal policy gone mad.

Perhaps for the same reason so few of us seem to recall the economic horrors of the Carter years, for which Reagan's and Volcker's solutions were so effective, few also realize the danger we are in today.

Or that there is a fairly simple, if painful, way out now, as well.

Design As An Essential Business Element

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal's book review section contained a nearly-hidden piece of interest. The book is entitled, "Change By Design," by Tim Brown. Mr. Brown is the CEO of IDEO, a design consultancy.

As early as perhaps four years ago, I began to take a stronger interest in the MFA degree than an MBA. There was, I believe, even an HBR article extolling the value of a Master of Fine Arts degree for its integration of design as an inherent value-adding component of products.

It is very much along this line that Mr. Brown's book is reviewed. Rather than treat product design as an afterthought, it is, with the aid of firms like IDEO, being used in the early stages of concept and product design to add features and functionality.

The review mentions a technique used by IDEO which is a direct implementation of a very old (c1975) marketing concept called Tauber's Problem Inventory Analysis. The consultancy shot video of a mock patient entering an ER facility to identify problems confronting the patient not currently addressed.

Often, breakthrough products and services are identified by this type of analysis where focus groups fail. Perhaps the most famous example of such a difference in approach is that of air travel.

It's a commonly-held tenet that air travel could never have been produced by focus groups, because it was a solution that simply did not yet exist in any form. But, as a problem analysis, the characteristics of air travel as a solution could easily be seen to fit various business problems.

As with many good management practices, the irony and disappointment is that they are the exception, rather than the norm. Otherwise, Mr. Brown wouldn't need to write a book about it, would he?

But, then, it's these type of exceptions that drive some companies to deliver consistently-superior total return performance, while most do not.

Steve Wynn On The Stimulus, Jobs & Tax Policy

I wrote this post on my companion blog today. Because of some of the political overtones and asides in Wynn's remarks, I originally put it in a political context.

But, on reviewing the clips, I think it deserves to be cross-posted here, as well.

Interest Expense of the US National Debt

I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by Lawrence Kadish that left me stunned.

Kadish uses CBO and Bureau of the Public Debt figures to sketch out a horrifying scenario.

At the end of last month, the US national indebtedness stood at nearly $12 trillion. Interest expense for this year on that amount will be $383B.

Kadish then uses CBO figures to derive this year's estimated personal income tax payments as around $904B. Dividing the interest expense for this year into personal income taxes, he derives the shocking rate of more roughly 40%.

True, one could use the estimated $2 trillion government receipts for 2009 instead, making the figure a more palatable 19%. But, in reality, taxes are always and ultimately borne by people. Institutions merely collect taxes indirectly for governments.

Kadish goes on to note that the US government has run deficits constantly, except for those few years of the elusive "peace dividend" following the USSR's breakup, for decades. So, predicting to the mean, or prior behavior, it probably will try to do so going forward, as well.

Now, due in part to the recent financial meltdown and global flooding of liquidity by central banks, interest rates on Treasuries are currently around 3%. But in the Carter years, it was as high as 15%.

Now add in OMB's projections of deficits amounting to some $9 trillion over the next decade, meaning a near-doubling.

You can see the awful mathematical conclusion, can't you? If rates move up, as they most certainly will as liquidity is drained globally, and too many dollars require ever-higher rates on US Treasuries, the current nearly $400B interest tab could easily swell by a factor of at least 5- twice for the larger debt level, and 2.5 times for the interest rate effect.

Will US per capita income rise by five-fold in a decade? Unlikely. Unless you mean purely through inflation. Real incomes certainly will not. If the US economy grew at a steady 3.5% each year and it was all due to productivity, meaning the entire gain went to increase personal incomes, they would only grow by about 40%.

Kadish goes on to state,

"Eventually, most of what we spend on Social Security, Medicare, education national defense and much more may have to come from new borrowing, if such funding can be obtained."

The options, Kadish writes, will become default or hyperinflation.

In prior decades, when our debt was widely held by western powers and investors, our appetite for social programs hadn't reached its current level. Longer ago, the US dollar was a prized, stable store of value in the post-WWII era.

Now, the world's major growth economies are no longer friends, e.g., China, Brazil, India. They won't necessarily even do us the favor of lending in dollars. If so, it will be at exorbitant rates.

Kadish's final point is to cite Steve Forbes as saying that the national debt is one issue which will motivate US voters to take action on Washington's profligacy.

I believe that. But on the way there, it's going to get very scary.

Imagine explaining to the average taxpayer that his annual tax liability is nearly half-consumed for just interest on our borrowing to pay for our lush social programs. And we're adding more, by the way.

And that, in a few more years, that figure will be easily more than half. So Washington will continue to try to borrow abroad to pay for promises it is increasingly unlikely to be able to keep to all parties- citizens, investors, and other countries.

Perhaps this is why I'm finding less to write about in the corporate world these days than in the world of Washington-centric business and financial dealings.

Brian Wesbury's Punt In Today's Wall Street Journal

Brian Wesbury wrote an almost schizophrenic economic editorial in today's edition of the Wall Street Journal, entitled "The Economic Recovery Is Well Underway." It's curious to me that he has been absent from the usual venues on which I've either seen or read him for about a year. For example, these posts, here and here, date from August and December of last year.

Wesbury states early in his editorial,

"Many fear a W-shaped economy, otherwise known as a double-dip recession. These fears are overblown. The only double-dip recession of recent decades happened in the early 1980s, when the country was in the grip of "stagflation" and the Federal Reserve ran a roller-coaster monetary policy."

I won't go into all the details Wesbury presents, but simply note his high points. First, he notes that the equity market's recovery dates from about the point at which 'mark to market' valuation was suspended/modified, thus setting a floor under many financial instrument and, by extension, financial entity valuations.

He argues that housing, manufacturing, consumer spending, imports and exports are all of their recession lows. Yes, he writes, even consumer spending, excluding automobiles, is up at a 3.9% annual rate. Wesbury converts all of the quarterly or less rates into annualized rates, so the numbers are pretty compelling, if only on that basis.

On the job losses front, Wesbury cites conventional wisdom that jobs data are always lagging recessionary indicators, but he takes heart that the monthly losses have declined from the 700,000 range early in the year to just below 200,000 recently.

As others have claimed, Wesbury, too, now believes that inventory rebuilding will bring about private sector economic growth and job creation.

So far, Wesbury has kept to conventional economic data and indicators, and on these bases, he's now an optimist. It seems odd to me that he is now completely silent on the hyper-inflation which so consumed him only last December. In fact, the editorial notes, after attributing the piece to Wesbury, that he will soon have a book published entitled "It's Not as Bad as You Think: Why Capitalism Trumps Fear and the Economy Will Thrive."

Perhaps the book has consumed Wesbury's time and efforts for most of the past twelve months.

However, he then turns schizophrenic in the editorial, writing,

"The two factors that could undermine growth in the long run are bad government policy combined with global competition."

He then cites something I mentioned to a colleague recently, i.e., most of the S&P500 have significant sales and operations outside the US. Just because their revenues and profits might benefit from global growth doesn't mean jobs will be created in the US. Wesbury then goes on to note the rise in the minimum wage, a possible temporary job creation tax credit, and probable higher tax rates as bad for the US economic recovery.

He concludes his piece with this passage,

"There is no free lunch. If you take a look at the U.S. economy since 1960, the larger the government share of GDP, the higher the unemployment rate. In other words, when it comes to jobs, government spending has a multiplier of less than one- government spending destroys jobs.

Whether or not this recovery continues depends on the course of government policy. If the U.S. passes a costly bill to nationalize the health-care system, a new tax system to reduce carbon emissions, and higher marginal income tax rates, a European sclerosis will settle in with permanently higher unemployment rates. This will not happen because capitalism failed, but because government gave up on it prematurely."

I am left feeling that Wesbury is trying to have it both ways. He forecasts a recovery on existing economic data, but clearly hedges by citing pending administration and Congressional plans to do all the things about which he warns in his last paragraph. I understand why he does this, and he is attempting to convey what he sees now.

That is, an economy that could be recovering, albeit slowly from a fairly deep drop in economic activity. Combined with federal fiscal policies that could cripple the once-vibrant US economy.

It's hardly a prescription for confidence in either fundamental economic performance or the equity markets for the next few months.

David Malpas On The Weak US Dollar

Former Bear Stearns economist David Malpass wrote a great editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal concerning the coming effects of a continued weak US dollar policy.

In brief, Mr. Malpass notes that while a country temporarily gains trading volume from a weak or weakening, depreciating currency, those illusory profits are more than offset by a global flight from the currency.

Thus, while the US goes about its merry way flooding its trading partners and global investors with dollars and liabilities which are steadily declining in value, fewer investors will continue to want to either hold US dollars or dollar-denominated assets. In time, there will be a shortage of capital inflows to the US, and, quite possibly, a net outflow, as sophisticated investors flee the dollar for hard assets or other currencies.

Malpass gives a very good, clear account of the fall of the British pound and the accompanying hollowing out of their economy.

He writes,

"At the end of empire, the giant sucking sound was from British capital and jobs moving offshore as the pound sank."

Sound familiar?

He continues by observing,

"Some weak-dollar advocates believe that American workers will eventually get cheap enough in foreign-currency terms to win manufacturing jobs back. In practice, however, capital outflows overwhelm the trade flows, causing more job losses than cheap real wages create.

No countries have devalued their way into prosperity, while many- Hong Kong, China, Australia today- have used stable money to invite capital and jobs.

There's been a clear demonstration this decade. The S&P nearly doubled from 2003 through 2007. Those who borrowed to buy won big-time. At the same time, the dollar's value was cut nearly in half versus the euro and other stable measures. Capital fled, undercutting job growth. Rent, gasoline and food prices rose more than wages.

Equity gains provide cold comfort when currencies crash. From the euro perspective, the S&P peaked at 1700 in 2000, finally reattained 1100 in the 2007 bubble, fell below 600 in March and now stands at 700. With most of the market capitalization of U.S. stocks held by Americans, the dollar devaluation has caused a massive decline in the U.S. share of global wealth."

Malpass doesn't explicitly address the reserve currency issue, as I did in this recent post. But he really doesn't have to. Everything he writes points to an implicit move away from the dollar as a stable, globally-preferred store of value and safety.

His recommendations for how to fix this problem are fuzzy and lack the ability to actually be implemented. Just calling for "jobs and wealth" policies isn't enough.

What Malpass avoids saying is the obvious, i.e., that the U.S. must rein in deficit spending, stop monetizing its own borrowings with Fed purchases, and begin to behave like a world leader in commerce and economics again. Something not done since, oh, the Reagan administration, and perhaps the Clinton years, as well.

American politicians may fool the country's residents into believing that simply running the printing presses overtime and issuing excessive debt, too, won't affect America's global economic standing or hamstring monetary policy in years to come.

But global investors and trading partners understand reality, and won't be so fooled.

Boeing's Problems Extend to The 747

I wouldn't have expected to be writing another post about Boeing so soon, after this one in August.

In that post, I commented on Boeing CEO Jim McNerney's apparent inability, during his 4-year tenure, to get the company running on all cylinders. Two months ago, the news was more delays in the Dreamliner project.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal reported that the company's troubles have now spread to its 747 redesign.

Apparently, the production problems with the Dreamliner have so sapped talent at the company that engineering skills shortages are now affecting the 747-8 program.

The chief of the commercial airplane division, Scott Carson, was eased out on September 1st, replaced by a Boeing military programs executive, James Albaugh. So much for bench strength in the formerly-premier Boeing commercial side of the business.

Apparently the delays on the 747-8 jet have become severe enough that the company announced a $1B charge and, like the Dreamliner, delayed the first flight of the redesigned wide-body until next year.

Meanwhile, economic conditions will probably delay both planes' profitability, as airline customers struggle with decreased demand. Cargo versions of the 747-8 are much more in demand than the passenger versions.

As the nearby 5-year price chart continues to show, as in August, McNerney's Boeing can't seem to outperform the S&P500 Index.

In fact, the company's slide from its price peak in early 2007 has been much more rapid than the index's. For the past 18 or so months, the company's equity price has pretty much tracked the index.

That doesn't say a lot for McNerney's management prowess. As I mentioned in the August post, for the sort of risk one takes in holding an indvidiual firm's equity, shareholders expect and demand a better return than simply tracking the equity markets.

I wonder how long it will be before Boeing's board concludes that McNerney just doesn't have the horsepower to move Boeing's performance up above the index for the long term, and eases him out.

On The Dollar Losing Reserve Currency Status

My business partner and I were both horrified that yesterday, on a day when there was so much news about secretive, joint talks between Arab oil producers, Russia and China on establishing a non-US dollar reserve currency basket, the S&P500 Index didn't plummet, but rose 1.4%!

What about this potential calamity don't investors understand?

Like many other business people, I've read warnings about the loss of reserve currency status for the US dollar for decades. It's usually the same song- large deficits, inflation debauching the value of dollar assets held by foreign governments, etc.

In the past, though, no other nation held out such hope for economic growth with fairly stable regimes and legal frameworks. Next to the US, other potential reserve currencies paled in comparison.

Now, however, the threat takes a slightly different, and more credible form.

First, Arabian oil producers are viewing US military hesitancy over Iran, and potential withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, with alarm.

Add to this an unprecedented flooding of the world with dollars and dollar liabilities. Despite what many talking heads my believe about current modest price deflation due to lower demand, there has never not been a relationship between excessive printing of money and subsequent hyper-inflation of said currency.

Finally, three other global powers or power blocs- Arab oil producers, Russia and China- each have a desire to see the US weakened. It's no secret that post-WWII US power has always implicitly rested on the dollar's reserve currency status.

When our own Treasury Secretary begins to talk up the use of SDRs to replace the dollar, and the US, as part of the G20, lends credibility to this move, the jig is nearly up.

This is, of course, idiocy on the part of the current US administration and its misguided new sense of multi-lateralism and global harmony.

With these forces as context, it becomes chillingly plausible that some major oil producers and a major consumer- Arabia, Russia and China- could indeed jointly agree on a basket of commodities and currencies with which oil may be purchased, none of which is the US dollar.

I'm quite familiar with what would be the counter-arguments to this development. In brief, it will be the repetition of what I, too, used to believe. That current holders of so many billions of US dollars and dollar-denominated liabilities won't dare precipitate the loss of value of their own substantial assets.

The question, now, is at what point these countries essentially choose to finally go cold turkey on the US dollar, reasoning that loss of wealth by a sudden switch to other stores of value is preferable to a few more decades of gradual erosion of value of the dollar.

Google the topic or relative currency values over time and choose any of the results you see. By many measures, be it purchasing power, other currencies, or gold, you'll see that the US dollar has fallen by at least a quarter in value in the past 8-9 years.

Now consider the massive issuance of dollar-denominated government debt in the past year, and the monetizing of that debt by our own Fed. And the coming huge inflationary spending on stimulus, health care and 'cap and trade' bills.

Any thinking person in the rest of the world is watching this and seeing a monetary train wreck ahead for the US dollar and its debt instruments.

On our current trajectory of government spending and legislation, it's not far-fetched to see a weakening of our economy, as we impose self-inflicted, crippling increases in energy prices and pollution costs, while spending money we don't have on living standards we will no longer be affording through economic growth.

Add to this the probably loss of global trade through over-priced products, again, thanks to increased energy prices and self-imposed faux pollution costs, and you come to a choice between two very bad options.

Either US tax rates will soar to previously inconceivable levels, depressing demand and wealth creation, or the crushing debt load and interest payments on said debt will result in the dollar's rapid decline in value.

All this near-term babbling about deflationary pressure on the CPI due to demand moderation misses the point.

When other major global resource players openly deny the secret talks that are obviously occurring, on the subject of replacing the dollar as oil's payment mechanism, it's finally very late in the reserve currency game for the US.

How this can possibly be seen by investors as a reason to bid up US equity prices is beyond me.

Further Thoughts On GE's Disposal Of Its Media Businesses

Over the weekend I wrote this brief post on GE's overdue admission that it needs to begin unraveling the underperforming, diversified conglomerate.

Perhaps my most succinct piece on the pointlessness of GE's current incarnation was this May, 2007 post. In it, I noted,

"Simply put, corporate diversification for cash flow smoothing has been a discredited management approach for creating consistently superior total returns for some time. My own proprietary research, which drives my equity portfolio selection of consistently superior large-cap companies, confirms this. Back some thirty or forty years ago, when trading equities was expensive and information and innovation were in shorter supply, it may have made sense for investors to hold shares of conglomerates. And, in the day, they existed- Gulf&Western, ITT, and Litton, to name just a few. But they are gone now. ITT still exists, but in nothing like the shape it had under Harold Geneen.

Today's large firms are usually focused on a particular product/market. Diversified conglomerates are pretty much a thing of the past. Mediocre analysts and fund managers might confuse large focused global firms, such as Intel, Cisco, or ExxonMobil, with yesteryear's broadly diversified giants. You should not. I don't think investors do, either. That's why GE's stock is in suspended animation. Everyone can diversify more cheaply today than they can by paying an enormous tax on operating earnings of GE's business units in order to keep them under one administrative regime.

What's ironic is how everyone seems to have forgotten GE's heritage of being subjected to wrenching change with each new CEO of the prior forty years, except for Immelt. He's the only one not to have actually made a big change in the firm, and it has stalled."

I've had a couple of conversations with business colleagues about GE's newly-disclosed decision that it's time to unload the media businesses. While I am not, of course, privy to the board's or senior managements' private discussions, it seems to me that one or more of the following may be reasons why Immelt has suddenly come clean that GE needs a "greater fool" to buy NBC/Universal, and that fool is Brian Roberts.

First, according to the Wall Street Journal articles about the GE media unit, NBC's network operations are finally, inexorably sliding in profitability terms. While the company doesn't break out results in any more detail than the major business units, somewhere down in the depths of the NBC/Universal unit is, we are told, a declining network income statement. With each passing month/year, these properties become bigger drags on GE profit growth and total return.

Next is the Universal studio property. This morning's Journal announced that the studio co-heads are being shot and tossed out. Apparently, this unit, too, has been suffering from poor performance. Taking the network and movie studio together, I find myself recalling an Immelt remark about how much fun it was sitting in meetings to decide on production slates for both units.

Guess Jeff's touch isn't so good. And other executives will pay the price.

Then we come to NBC's cable properties. The ones with which we are well-acquainted, CNBC and MSNBC, are fairly small in the larger cable world. CNBC may be a the premier business cable channel, but it's woefully small next to general cable news networks like Fox or CNN.

However, the company also owns Oxygen, SyFy and USA Network, in addition to which it recently bought The Weather Channel. However, this collection of entertainment channels isn't going to carry the underperforming assets of the remainder of the entire NBC/Universal business group.

So, just in terms of the arithmetic of assets, revenues and profits, GE's media group is finally beyond a tipping point in its effect on GE's overall performance.

Beyond financial performance, there's the issue of the media unit's growing prominence as a lapdog for the current administration. There's been much written about NBC's and related properties' leftward political tilt. It could be that Immelt and his minions are beginning to realize that it's becoming riskier, given the actions of the current administration, to be seen as apologizing and cheerleading for it.

There is also growing awareness that GE stands to benefit financially from a government-run health care system and the crackdown on CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases. This bargain with the devil in Washington may be just a touch too cozy when the company also owns a collection of media properties which trumpet those government programs.

Simply put, it borders on GE churning out propaganda for the government, in return for favored treatment in various new programs. That makes the company a target for lots of criticism.

My next point is one that, ideally, would be a subject on my companion political blog. But I feel it's necessary to mention it here, and will do so as non-partisanly as possible.

If Immelt and his board feel that current legislative difficulties are likely to increase the chances that this will be a one-term administration, then the risks of betting everything on Washington's initiatives, and broadcasting them, too, literally, becomes higher.

If GE didn't own a media business, it would avoid and evade quite a bit of criticism for conflicts of interest. And, later, could duck a lot of flak for having been tailoring news and opinion to please Washington. Being seen as the media stooge for a failed administration might add unwanted pressure to the already long-underperforming conglomerate.

Then there's the embarrassment of GE's having to have taken government funding handouts to stabilize its over-leveraged, ailing finance unit. It was a pretty bitter pill to swallow for Immelt to have to rely on federal help to avoid a serious funding crisis of his own.

How can a company with the federal life support needle in its arm appear to run an objective, credible media group? It can't.

This, too, might now be seen as a real point of vulnerability moving forward. Thus, another reason to dump the media businesses ASAP.

Finally, there's the old adage, "strike while the iron is hot."

Just when the financials and, perhaps, political winds are beginning to blow ill for GE's media business, someone came along with an interest in relieving the company of this headache.

If GE can successfully get Brian Roberts to buy out Viviendi's interest in the media group, and then take it off GE's balance sheet, leaving the Connecticut-based conglomerate with a minority interest, it will have managed to unload a problem child before the value in it really craters.

One trend that is afflicting both GE's networks, and cable properties, as well as Roberts' cable business, is the move by many consumers to direct viewing of entertainment and other video content on the internet, rather than through intermediaries such as cable channels.

Roberts thinks he can scoop up enough content to be a key player in even internet-based content, just in case his distribution pipes really do begin to empty.

Whether this makes sense would be the subject of another post focused on Comcast. For right now, it's enough to note that Robert believes in this strategy.

There's nobody else on the horizon capable of taking NBC/Universal off GE's hands like this. TimeWarner is so messed up it couldn't possibly consider it. And, anyway, even Bewkes might be wary of having so many old network properties dumped on his balance sheet. TimeWarner seems to be moving out of content, at least on the print side. It's far from clear it would suddenly try to move into video content, but not in a gigantic way.

No, Brian Roberts is probably the last, best hope for GE, short of an outright spin-off of the media group. Which, by itself, is not a bad idea. And one I've advocated for over two years.

Having now broached the notion that it should jettison its media businesses, it may be hard for GE to avoid the spin-off route, if the Comcast talks fall through.

Of course, deep in the background of all this negotiating is the unspoken but implicit judgement that Jack Welch probably messed up in buying NBC to begin with. If it was such a great, strategic move, why is it being uncoupled now?

In fact, you could argue that the media group, as a standalone unit, might have been more nimble, savvy, and successful at doing what was necessary to enhance performance long ago. But, as part of the larger GE conglomerate, it was hamstrung by a corporate parent's oversight, bureaucracy, and funding.

But, now, there are a legion of reasons for GE to do something to shed the businesses. And no time like the present. Because, frankly, the present is still way too late for this move.

An Important Detail On Unemployment Measures

Last week on CNBC there was a fascinating discussion by an economist on the mechanics of unemployment rate measurement.

I can't recall who was speaking, but his details called to mind similar comments by another economist last year on the network. The difference was, this time, the guest linked it to the allegation that rising unemployment lags an economic recovery.

The specific detail is this. When employment is surveyed, it's by telephone. The two key questions asked are:

1. Are you employed?
2. Are you looking for work?

The response to the first is pretty simple. If you answer "no," then, at that point in the survey, you are unemployed.

However, the second question is asked if the answer to the first was "no." If you answer "no" to this question, you suddenly become not unemployed, but simply not counted as either employed or unemployed. That's because if you say are not looking for work, you effectively reduce the denominator of people looking for work who are either working, or not.

From a purely arithmetic viewpoint, you can understand this logic. However, it has, as the CNBC guest noted, perverse consequences on the stated US unemployment rate.

For example, he said, during many months of no expansion whatsoever, people simply stop spending time and money looking for a job. Thus, by the survey's standards, they are not unemployed.

Then, one month, say, last month, the person hears of hiring activity somewhere in the economy, and decides to once again seek employment. The monthly phone survey now finds him "unemployed," because he's not working, but looking for work.

The guest pointed out that, in reality, nothing changed about the person's employment circumstance. What changed is the survey's treatment of this not-working person.

Because behavior like this tends to occur later in a recession, as some hiring begins to take place, the measured unemployment rate thus rises.

And that is why it appears that continued rising unemployment lags a recovery. It's an statistical measurement artifact, not a real phenomenon at the basic level of people who are, or are not employed.

Not only does this explain why unemployment appears to lag economic recoveries. It also sheds light into the probable underestimation of unemployment throughout a recession.

With the current unemployment rate standing at 9.8%, this suggests that you can bet the real rate of unemployment topped 10% a while ago. Perhaps in mid-summer. Nobody knows for sure.

Thanks to this pollution of the unemployment measure by removing those who once sought work, then did not, then did, again, what we have is consistent measure which we know is wrong.

Wouldn't it be better for the survey to be modified to track whether the respondent was looking for work, if not now, some months ago? Or ask how many months it has been since they last actively sought work?

Then several measurements of unemployment could be provided, with varying denominators, according to what one chose to measure.

As it is now, a supposedly "hard" number rests, in fact, on psychological influences upon the unemployed as to whether they will say they are actively seeking work.