Tag: GDP

The year ahead: What have we learned from 2021? (Part 2)

Post author By admin
Post date January 4, 2022

Continuing the discussion with Patrick Perret-Green of PPG Macro. This second part focuses on China’s role globally and what it will look like in 2022, especially considering the real estate industry? With the US economy, why is Patrick so skeptical about it recovering and what does the stimulus have to do with that? And what about taper tantrum? Why does he believe it already happened?

Please watch Part 1 here, if you have not already.

PPG started in 1997 in research where he learned how bank balance sheets work. He also run the strategy for Citi for rates and effects in Asia and at one point worked out in Sydney. And in the past five years now, he’s been focused on the global macro environment.

📊 Forward-looking companies become more profitable with Complete Intelligence. The only fully automated and globally integrated AI platform for smarter cost and revenue planning. Book a demo here.

📈 Check out the CI Futures platform to forecast currencies, commodities, and equity indices

This QuickHit episode was recorded on December 16, 2021.

The views and opinions expressed in this The year ahead: What have we learned from 2021? (Part 2) Quickhit episode are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Complete Intelligence. Any contents provided by our guest are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any political party, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Show Notes

TN: When you look at what’s happening in China domestically, with the economy and with the political structure, I’m also curious about their outward political projection. And I do worry about Northeast Asia. Not just China, but Japan, Korea. And I’m curious, since you have such a historical background, I’m curious what you think about China in terms of political projection, say for 2022. Are you worried that they’re going to become aggressive in ’22?

PPG: Not ’22. You’ve got enough crap on your own doorstep at home without exacerbating the situation. And if you actually look through what’s going on, well, you can read what the Global Times says and things like the Wegar bill is clearly going to cause some short term aggravation. But overall, my sense is over the past few months, we’ve had a more of a nuanced approach that we need to just tone it down a bit, just dampen down the Wolf Warriors a little bit.

TN: They’re getting it.

PPG: You know what I mean? Down the line, ultimately. Clearly, Japan is arming significantly. Australia. We’ve got the whole quad or whatever you want to call it.

TN: Right.

PPG: One of the biggest problems, of course, has been the abject failure of US foreign policy over the past 20 years. So apart from Gulf War 2, worst disastrous war in history ever when we look at the consequences. Then the GFC.

So everyone they’re all focused on various different things. China’s love the vacuum and it’s been able to get away with loads of stuff, And Biden’s foreign policy towards China is not just China, obviously, but other places abject. Much as it irritates, so over here, I told people people, they love ranting about Trump.

Well, presentationally, he was awful. Foreign policy actually was the best foreign policy that came from the US in decades. Well, okay, assisted by people calling the establishment as well.

TN: But. The difference there is it was outcomes based foreign policy. Right. And I think what Americans have forgotten, particularly over the last 30 years, is it’s really been input space, foreign policy, values and other stuff, which is great. But we had, I think, through the probably 50s, a very pragmatic output based foreign policy. What are the outcomes? That’s the objective. And diplomacy school, my graduate work was in diplomacy, they’ve really focused on the other side of the equation with a fuzzy idea of the outcomes.

And I think what Trump brought, like him or hate him, what he brought was a focus on, a dogged focus on the outcomes of foreign policy. Right. A lot of people hate him. That’s fine. But it was a very pragmatic foreign policy environment in the US.

PPG: Yeah, going forward. And I think there’s a legacy of that now. The one thing the Congress, the only bypass is an issue on the hill is China. And Trump didn’t give a damn about human rights in Uighurs or Hong Kong. They veto proof majorities that he wasn’t going to go through the humiliation of being having a veto overturned. So he just had to roll with it. It actually was more of an inconvenience for him, I think. And then he’s people like Pompeo and military as well.

Overall, I think China, going back to the South China Morning Post article. They were saying that China could hit 5% growth with all the stimulus. Now, if you look at what will GDP activities now and the fixed asset investment. This year, forget about the year-on-year number because that’s the source, but it’s only grown. So I go through the data. I do a lot of data mining. I’m not particularly quantitative. I just sit there with some excel one plus times that times that times that.

TN: Sure.

PPG: Well, there’s only growth nominal terms, 1.6% year to date.

TN: Right. That’s a developed economy number. That’s not a growth economy number.

PPG: That’s a nominal number. Don’t forget. So given the fixed active effort uses lots of steel and cement and commodities which have all gone up in price. Actually, that number is a big fat, real negative. That’s sort of 49 year to date. I think the MBS came out year to date, that’s 49 trillion CNY. So pretty much still out there. That good 4 to 5% of GDP. Retail sales are only up 3.9%. That allows CPI at 1.6%. Either number is still like the lowest on record outside of the immediate pandemic shutdown.

So you sort of wonder where on Earth they come up with their growth numbers for the year? And for it, they’ve got a bit of boost to their exports from the trade surplus and a lack of collapse in tourism because Chinese is a big tourist. So the current account is being boosted. So that flatters the GDP. But even the Chinese next year expect net exports to come down. And if I’m right about the durable goods argument, then that’s even worse for the Chinese trade surface.

TN: Sure. I think you’re right.

PPG: So you’re left with what can they do?

TN: Can I ask you also something because you mentioned retail sales and consumer goods. I’m curious. With all of the real estate woes in China, how much of consumer debt in China is secured by real estate assets? Is that an issue? And how much of a crimp will that put on consumer spending?

PPG: That’s a tough one, because we know overall, the LTVs are very low. But we also know there’s 50 to 60 million vacant apartments. Chinese have a surreal concept about owning. They count as an investment property.

And if you rent it out, it sort of loses its original status. For what’s the description. But the problem is if you’re introducing these property taxes and you’re going in like that, well, then you are seeing second hand homes. I mean, the official home numbers are nonsense when we know full well that developers are sending stuff at big deep discounts.

TN: Right.

PPG: But by large, I think Chinese will just, it will affect sentiment. And some people are highly leveraged. So there are. Personal bankruptcy is still an infant industry in China. It’s not really established in the courts.

TN: There’s so much around it. It’s terrible.

PPG: It clearly is already dampening consumer confidence. And if the real estate is slowing in production, so we know that new sites, new land sales collapse. So that tells you going forward over the next two years, new construction activity is going to be much reduced. And if you’re not building homes, then you’re not going to be filling them with washing machines.

TN: Right.

PPG: I was actually looking at I think it was a big lift manufacturers like Otis and stuff like that. And you’re just going like, you look at the stock price and I think they’re up there and you’re going, like, well, Chinese real estate can’t go down there. You’re just thinking like, yeah, I mean, I basically have a big aversion to anything related or household good related book stock, but I’m not an equity man. I’m a bond man through and through. That’s what I do.

TN: It all makes sense. The logic is there. And given the direction we’re headed, all of this makes a huge amount of sense, especially for kind of ’22. I think 21 a lot of it’s behind us. And there are a lot of questions and a lot of I think, still skepticism around what we’ve heard globally in ’21 about the impact of spending and monetary policy.

But, Patrick, if you don’t mind, you had mentioned US foreign policy. So let’s focus on the US for a minute. And with the midterm elections in the US, and you seem to be skeptical about kind of positive momentum in the US economy, I’m really curious what your view on the US is for the year ahead?

PPG: Well, we got two things. One, we’ve got a big fiscal contraction. We shouldn’t underestimate how much the fiscal expansion has flattered the US economy because it was so large and that’s clearly massively in reverse.

One of the things, I don’t know the exact details of it, but something that US equity analyst convenience to ignore when it comes to earnings is if I ask the question, well, don’t you think 800 billion of PPP loans might have flattered your fingers as a whole? All the other loans to Airlines or stuff like that? US Airlines basically got extremely generously treated. UK Airlines haven’t. Like VA or Virgin Aircraft.

TN: All Americans are really unhappy about all the money the airlines got because the quality of service is terrible.

PPG: Yes. But, for example, the distortions, it’s really like they’re still echoing through. Like, I was talking about the monetary stimulus. It takes longer to pass through the economy. What’s the analogy? It’s like a python eating an elephant.

TN: Right.

PPG: It just takes longer to digest.

TN: Right.

PPG: Probably, extreme example. You get the point. When we look at all the fiscal front, we know that’s much less the hope for fiscal stimulus if you think where we were at the beginning of this year and everyone was going, oh, wow. It’s great. Biden’s going to push so much through. Well, we only just got the infrastructure bill through.

TN: Underwhelming infrastructure bill.

PPG: Yeah. And Build Back Better is still not through. And the fact the centrist Democrats are resisting not just Manchin, but overall, there’s much more of a realization that just look at Biden’s approval role. But the good thing is it’s supposed to be damping down the progressive, different word for them.

And then clearly Virginia shot the dams. And it’s basically long standing. Congresspeople are retiring in record numbers because they don’t want to have the humiliation of losing their district coming up. So let’s presume that the form book is correct. That basically Republicans probably take both houses. Certainly the House. Well, that stymies everything.

The administration has got a window doing stuff, plus dealing with inflation and stuff like that. And it’s always like, well, now you’ve got the administration going, well, we want to do this. But actually, Holy shit, the inflation has got out of control. We need the Fed to come in. And lo and behold, the Fed has just had, we’ve had a big move in short term rates pricing to the point when you’ve got 60 basis point increase in the dots, which we’ve never had before.

And if you said to someone a year ago, what do you think would happen if 60 basis points was added to the dots? Between what quarter? They say the dollar would surge. The curve was flattened. In fact, what we’re seeing is because so much is priced in that the curve is steepening and the dollar is softening. But there are other elements going on there as well.

And if the US economy in the great, you know, between the greatest economy ever couldn’t handle rates going back to two and a half percent and a minor reduction in the size of the balance sheets. And my view was that Fed should have probably stopped at one and three quarters rather than two and a half at most, because they forgot about the lags that they keep on telling us about. That the idea of the US economy with so much more debt, normally, it’s gone from 240%, 250% of GDP to 275 now.

TN: Right.

PPG: Basically, we’ll bring that down a little bit. But it’s gone up by 10% share GDP. So how sensitive is the US economy going to be to 150 basis points? Certainly. This is what the Fed is talking about now, by the end of 2023. Another 50 in ’24 plus balance sheet reduction as well. I just can’t see it getting there. So I’m skeptic that we’ll necessarily see Fed funds getting back to 1%.

TN: Two years is a long time.

PPG: Two years is a long time.

TN: I think, in general terms what I’m seeing. And I’m not sure if this is what you’re saying, but for the past two years, we’ve seen a private sector that’s been fixated on the public sector. Meaning the Covid regulations, the Covid stimulus, all this stuff. And it seems to me that with that stimulus disappearing and with the chaos in DC and at the state level, private sector will start focusing on the private sector and their customers instead of government. Does that sound fair?

PPG: Yeah. Although let’s not be too nice on the private sector. There’s large parts of the private sector that clearly gouged. The interesting one is, of course, global shipping. So if global shipping really disrupted and the costs have really gone up so much, how come is it that people like mask have made more money in the past year than they’ve made in the past 15 years combined? Because it’s clearly capitalized. Oligopoly is going on there, and they are gouging people. That will fade over time.

My biggest concern is actually what is the risk of a demand shock? So the Fed starts draining liquidity and we forget just how sensitive the US and the global economy is to the flow of the US money. And I think it’s the flows that is the thing. So it’s this whole point about there’s a sort of delicate tipping point in terms of if you think about it. I’m a big one for analogies. It’s been like an artery. How low does the blood flow have to get before you faint?

TN: So you’re saying that the flow will stop, but the stock will remain. Are they going to start selling off those balance sheet assets?

PPG: The Fed at some point. Sorry, the Fed.

TN: But not in ’22?

PPG: No, but I think they’ll see. But clearly the fact that they were already talking about this in terms of let’s reduce assets that. Well, fine. If we do the 75 basis points, we’re not going to wait until we get to one and a half, or as it did last time around. We’ll probably start reducing the balance sheet earlier because it’s a nice little tool. And actually, it’s quite a good tool if you want to crumble down on mortgages.

So what was noticeable in the last Redux was because the Fed was buying such a large share of them pretty much 100% of all mortgage where I stopped buying 100% all treasury issuance. But once they started reducing the mortgages, that was when mortgage spreads versus the 30 year mortgage versus the loan bonds actually really started to widen out.

TN: Right.

PPG: And then that mortgages are really the underlying credit of the credit market.

TN: Of course.

PPG: So everyone knows all the Treasuries, actually. And I think mortgages are a better reference than OAS or something. I’d rather look at a mortgage than bond against credit, and that filters through to the whole credit market. I’m never left with a situation where you have record shares of US business debt. If you look at the flow of funds reports, US business debt is a record share of GDP.

So I love the bullshit we get from the corporate. So again, the equity analysts who basically, I think should just should not be left in a room with any hard surfaces. So they go out and they say, oh, yeah, we got record amounts of cash on the balance sheet. So you had I think it was Viacom back, Wall Street Journal normal. Sort of. Yeah, on the corporate sector. Wonderful. Viacom CFO going, oh, yeah. We’ve got like 10.7 billion of liquid assets on a balance sheet. At the same time, Conveniently forget to mention that they had 170 billion of debt. Right? You don’t have any billion of debt. Things go wrong. Your ten or billion doesn’t go that far.

TN: I’ve heard over the past few months as talk of tapering has intensified. And I bring up the taper tantrum to people from 2015, and there seems to be a resistance that we’ll have a taper tantrum this time. And I kind of find that a little bit rose-tinted. There has to be a backlash.

PPG: Well, I think we’ve already had it. Quite honestly. I think we’ve already had it. If we look at some of the moves, if you’re a rate trader and you specialize in rates, we had some big swings. Look at the curve. So 530s in the bond curve before the tipping point was the minutes from the April meeting. So Powell being going on about we might be talking about paper. And then actually the minutes come out and said some participants said it’s time to maybe start discussing taper. And then the 530 was at 155. We’ve been down to 55 now. A 100 basis points with a big long. So there’s been a sort of subtle taper.

I also think you have to go back to the psychology of 2013, really, when we had the taper tantrum when rates exploded. We were still very much in a mindset. And central bankers were, too that we revert to normal, that rates would revert to where their previous level was. And it’s the educational experience. You think about all those Fed objections, all their dot points, and it took them to the the end of 2015 to do the first 25 basis point hike. It took them another year to do the second 25 basis point hike.

So I think we’re scarred by experience now. So there’s not the taper tantrum as of such at the same time, equities. It’s all fine, but they don’t realize how sensitive the economy is to the marginal changes in money.

TN: Very good. Patrick, thanks so much for your time. This is really a level of depth that I think everyone will appreciate. And I think the views are fascinating because it’s view of ’22 that I don’t think they’ll get anywhere else. So thank you very much for your time and just wish you all the best for ’22.

PPG: Yeah. Thank you. Happy Christmas. Happy holidays. And you have politically correct happy.

TN: Thank you, Sir.

QuickHit

The year ahead: What have we learned from 2021? (Part 1)

Post author By admin
Post date December 28, 2021

Patrick Perret-Green of PPG Macro joins us for a QuickHit episode to reflect what 2022 brings. Patrick got not only the Covid call, but a lot of inflation calls right through the pandemic. As we wrap up 2021, what does he think about right now and how does that set the stage for his view on 2022?

📊 Forward-looking companies become more profitable with Complete Intelligence. The only fully automated and globally integrated AI platform for smarter cost and revenue planning. Book a demo here.

📈 Check out the CI Futures platform to forecast currencies, commodities, and equity indices

This QuickHit episode was recorded on December 16, 2021.

The views and opinions expressed in this The year ahead: What have we learned from 2021? (Part 1) Quickhit episode are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Complete Intelligence. Any contents provided by our guest are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any political party, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Show Notes

TN: So, Patrick, you’ve got not only the Covid call, you’ve gotten a lot of inflation calls right through the pandemic. And as we wrap up 2021, I guess what I’d really like is, what are you thinking about right now and then how does that set the stage for your view on 2022?

PPG: Well, there’s a whole lot of multiple issues. So I was rewatching Powell’s Q&A this morning. And clearly there is the energy side of things. There is the good side of things, the demand for goods, and they are responsible for big chunks. And I was quite surprised by the ECB’s massive upward revision for inflation for 2022 in the press conference earlier on today. But base effects are very powerful. So we always knew we were going to get peak base effects. We’re going to come in around October, November time. Oil average WTI average below about 39 to $40 last October, November. And by January are up to, or early February, we were early 60s. That base effect will tumble out quite dramatically.

I also think that the durable goods effect is also going to tumble out dramatically. We’ve had record purchases, but I remember talking joking with people last year. It was about the middle of last year, and I was saying I was just as an experiment going on ebay and seeing what I could pick a Peloton up for. So everyone got their Peloton or they bought a flat screen TV. They did the house, they did the kitchen because everyone was at home.

And I think when you look at durable goods purchases in the US and this is chart I’ve posted many times on Twitter. They are off the charts and they’re off the charts relative to disposable income as well, which is now falling. Okay, due to inflation as well. But in the US, we’ve also got this remarkable thing that it’s very different to other countries.

So you look at the UK. We had the employees taken out the other day. We’ve now got more people on payrolls than we had prepandemic. Non-farm payrolls are still down 3.9%. And in Europe employment has been much better. So the great retirement, the great resignation seems to be a US phenomenon.

But I think next year the risks are that everyone that goods purchases collapse and pricing power similarly collapses with that. And even things like autos as well will pass. So we know for well that the auto manufacturers have got lots full of 95% completed cars, and the chip shortage is actually a thing. It’s not that the world has run out of chips. There’s some papers recently looking at chip supply.

So the supply chain disruptions are being true. Yes, there’s still log jams with ports in the US, but in Asia, around Singapore, they’ve largely cleared into chain. Yeah, we’ve still got subjects very pandemic risks of problems with changing over ship crews and things like that. But overall, I think that side of things will ease down.

Okay. The pandemic is of pain, but we all know that. And there’s a lot of we’ve got Omicron now, but there is some cause for hope. It’s incredibly infectious. But all the people I know have got it. I don’t know anybody who’s had it really bad. Whereas I know people who even had Delta and they were really late. I don’t know anybody hospitalized, really. But could this be, like a bit of a bushfire?

It goes through very quickly. But actually, then we have the benefit because it’s so infectious. So many people get it. That herd in unity becomes higher. And actually, by February we’re back and everyone not giving a damn.

TN: Which is what I love. I love it. I love it. Let it be. So I hope it happens.

PPG: But let us go. But let’s not forget the underlying reality. People seem to stare in sort of my a rose tinted glasses and look back and think like, oh, wasn’t it wonderful prepondemic? No, it wasn’t. The world central banks weren’t cutting rates in 2019 because we were in good shape and there wasn’t a load of excess capacity. My concern is now that actually we talk about capacity being built. So records for containerships is less.

However, the volume of global trade actually is not particularly higher. It’s more because of disruptions. An empty container has been trapped in places. So people are building more containers and they’re building more factory space. But once the supply chain disruptions come down, then you’re going to be left with even more excess capacity.

TN: Right. Well, it’s the other side of letting all those old containerships and book carriers retire in kind of 2011 to 15. Right?

PPG: I’m still left with an image of a world that, compared to 2019, has more debt, it’s older and the capacity hasn’t gone away. And then we’ve also got the geopolitics and the politics and all that sort of stuff as well.

Watching Powell last night, I was struck by how amazingly sort of confidently was about the outlook for the US economy. Two, how he seemed to have lost all recollection of the effect of the last tightening cycle on what was a much healthier economy. So here we’re talking about, we got a 150 basis points of tightening by the end of 2023.

Okay, tapers. We all knew that’s going to end quickly. It’s going to be done by middle of March, in 10 weeks time.

TN: Just words, Patrick. It’s just words.

PPG: And then they do Redux. And he admitted at the end towards the end that they had their first discussion about the balance sheet. So I think they’ll start balance sheet reduction much sooner. But the problem is if we go back to last time when debt was so much lower, the Fed overtightened.

My reckoning, was they should have only really gone to one of the records. They completely underestimated the impact of balance sheet reduction on liquidity. I did quite a lot of work on the plumbing, and the irony is that the Fed is in charge of a mandatory systems. They’re not a very good plumber. They seem to actually understand how their own system works properly. So you end up being like the repo crisis. No, it’s not QE. We’re just buying bills and then we’re buying coupons. But it’s not QE it’s just liquidity management.

All these various issues and the other aspects I think about inflation is, there’s a lot of similarities with what happened with China in 2008, 2009. China had this. It was only a $7 trillion economy. A trillion dollars of stimulus. M1 was up 40%, M2 was up 30%. And rather than normal lags of six to eight, nine months, M2 growth peaked at the end of 2009 or late 2009. But inflation didn’t peak until the end of 2010, early 2011. So such was the volume of stimulus that came through. It just reverberated along. You dropped a Boulder in a pond?

TN: Sure.

PPG: So the ripples effect just last for much longer. And I think that’s one of the things we’re seeing, but obviously, what we also are seeing is global money growth as a whole has slowed very dramatically. And even when I look at things like excess reserves or where we are now or currency and circulation within the US, the sort of three to six month annualized rates are backed down to rates that they were at pre crisis.

So the year on year base effects are all fading out. And ultimately, unfortunately, most central bankers aren’t monetarists. They seem to have banned monetary economics. Greens bank scrapped M3 in the US. He’s a great scenery as far as I’m concerned.

TN: So when do you see this stuff really taking hold? Is it kind of mid 22 or?

PPG: The second quarter it really picks it. And we got the other side of it. So we got a US that’s doing okay or brilliantly, as far as pounds and the Feds… Europe, that actually is doing all right as well I mean, everyone’s got perpetual downer in Europe. But I think Europe could be the surprise next year.

And we got China, which is everyone still gets on this sugar high. They’re doing stimulus. And I keep on trying to explain to people, it’s not stimulus. This is dialysis.

TN: That’s a great statement.

PPG: I had a long term view on China, and it really goes back to sort of 2014. Once Xi really took control, got rid of all the rivals, started centralizing the power.

And there’s a long term rationale behind that. So, yes, in terms of the Chinese are great at some long term thinking. In other ways, I describe them to people as like, yeah, China is like a linebacker. He’s like 250 pounds. He’s six foot six tall, but unfortunately, he’s got the brain of an 18-year-old.

TN: I think the latter is more accurate, actually. With that in mind, as we move from inflation to say another obvious kind of what’s ahead for 22? What do you see for China in 22? Do you see ongoing stimulus? Do you see a roaring Chinese economy? What does China look like for you in 2022?

PPG: Well, the interesting one is that we look at everything that’s come out of the recent Central Economic Forum, all the going. The whole emphasis is on stability. None of this grandiose stuff about we’re going to be strong. It’s about stability.

Think tank South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba, which is effectively controlled by the state nowadays. So there’s the G 40 Economic Council, whatever they are think tank. But it’s next PVoC governor or deputy governor on it as well. A big article. Nothing is said without less it’s approved.

So they were talking about monetary and fiscal stimulus next year and by that moderately lower interest rates. Central government stimulus because it can’t come from local governments because they’re bankrupt and they’re not getting the land sales revenue and they won’t because the collapse of the real estate.

TN: That’s an important point, though, if you don’t mind holding on the SCMP article for a second. I see people on social media say all the time, well, local governments will always come in with stimulus. But from where? I don’t understand this fallacy, that local governments can always come in with stimulus.

PPG: Well, no, they can’t, because I think even Goldman come out and say that local governments have got hidden debt of about 40 trillion CNY. And all their various financing vehicles. They’re screwed.

They don’t have the money. But over time over the past few years, we’ve probably seen this greater and greater central control. Come on them anyway. They’re more and more dependent on central government forward expenditure. And the rationale comes to this because I think the regime has always recognized that the debt or we’ll keep playing the game of Jenga is unsustainable.

TN: Right.

PPG: And therefore you have to get to a point where we’re going to take some pain. So if you look back at what Xi’s been talking about over the past few years, it’s all about struggle, the Long March. I mean, this is like really going in. That is the story of China. He conveniently forgets to mention, the Long March was actually really a long retreat and basically hardly anybody who started it survived. But that’s completely ignored.

But there is this centralization of power because they know that things have to be dealt with and there will be there’s a potential for trouble. So you become a super authoritarian super, you know, look at all the moves about data.

It’s all about the Chinese government having much more control, much more visibility, a greater ability to snuff out any sort of signs of opposition at the very earliest time.

TN: But my worry there is that China, actually, I think, is becoming fairly brittle. Meaning the Chinese government is becoming fairly brittle.

Under previous regimes, you had a fair bit of flexibility where you had the different levels, not with a lot of autonomy, but with a fair bit of autonomy. Now you have a huge amount of centralization and that creates a fairly brittle government, both economically and politically.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily going to break, but I do worry about what they’re creating.

PPG: Well, I agree with you. I’ve made sneak it past my then investment bank employees. When I came out 2014, I wrote about the stylinization of Chairman Xi.

So you have the centralization of power in one man. But then you also get that fear of slightly Tsar Russia. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. So you had African swine fever. Everyone covered it up. Which was one of my concerns about Covid, because, like you saw in Wuhan, local police shut up the doctors on the 1 January.

And similarly, so you have this culture of paralysis, even pre crisis, Xi comes out and says, oh, we need to reduce coal fire stations. So good party figures, party Chiefs, local party Chiefs. We shut it, shut it down. And then they realize, actually, we haven’t got anything to heat the homes or schools.

Oh, by the way, then we have to divide the energy from the gas from the aluminium shelters to actually do that. You got this sort of, whereas, if you look back to China and Zheng and other leaders, China sort of thrived on its basically Brown envelope culture. We just get it done. Ignore central government. Okay, but at the same time, we are putting loads of cadmium into the ground and killing ourselves. But so be it.

TN: When you look at what’s happening in China domestically, with the economy and with the political structure. I’m also curious about their outward political projection. And I do worry about Northeast Asia, not just China, but Japan, Korea, Taiwan.

And I’m curious, since you have such a historical background, I’m curious what you think about China in terms of political projection, say for 2022. Are you worried that they are going to become aggressive in ’22?

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QuickHit

Europe’s economic recovery: More like Japan, China or the US?

Post author By admin
Post date November 24, 2021

We have a first-time QuickHit guest for this episode, Daniel Lacalle, a well-respected economist, author and commentator. Daniel shares his expertise on the eurozone and European Union. What is happening there in terms of Covid recovery? How does the region compare to other economies like Japan, China, or the USA? Will the ECB follow what the BOJ did? Will there be talks of deflation or inflation in Europe? How about the quantitative easing especially with a possibility of a more conservative ECB chair? Also, will Europe suffer the same power crisis as China and will Europeans be able to absorb inflation?

Daniel Lacalle started his career in the energy business and then moved on to investment banking and asset management. Right now, he’s into consulting and also macroeconomic analysis and teaches in two business schools.

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This QuickHit episode was recorded on November 18, 2021.

The views and opinions expressed in this Europe’s economic recovery: More like Japan, China or the US? Quickhit episode are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Complete Intelligence. Any contents provided by our guest are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any political party, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Show Notes

TN: We spoke a few weeks ago on your podcast, and I’ve really been thinking about that since we spoke, and I wanted to circle back with you and talk about Europe. There’s a lot happening in Europe right now, and I think on some level, the US and China get a lot of the economic commentary. But really, Europe is where a lot of things are happening right now. And I’d like to generally talk about what is the near term future for Europe. But I guess more importantly, in the near term, what are some of Europe’s biggest economic impediments right now? I’m really curious about that. So what do you see as some of their biggest economic impediments.

DL: When we look at Europe, what we have to see from the positive side is that countries that have been at war with each other for centuries get along and they get along with lots of headlines. But they’re getting along sort of in a not too bad way. Good. Yeah, that’s agreed. But it is true that the eurozone is a very complex and a very unique proposition in terms of it’s, not the United States, and it’s not unified nation like China. It’s a group of countries that basically get together under the common denominator of a very strong welfare state. So unlike China or the United States, which were built from different perspectives. In the case of the eurozone, it’s all about the welfare state as the pillar.

DL: From there, obviously, productivity growth, job creation, enterprises, et cetera, are all, let’s say, second derivative of something that is a unique feature of the European Union. No, the European Union is about 20% of the world’s GDP, about 7% of the population, probably. And it’s about 55% of the social spending of the world. So that is the big driver, 7% of the population, 20% GDP, 55% of the government spending in social entitlements.

So that makes it a very different proposition economically than the United States or China. Where is the eurozone right now? The eurozone and the European Union in particular were not created for crisis. It’s a bull market concept. It’s a Bull market agreement. When things go swimmingly, there’s a lot of agreement. But we’ve lived now two crisis. And what we see is that the disparities between countries become wider when there is a crisis, because not everybody behaves in the same manner. Cultures are different. Fiscal views are different. So that is a big challenge. The situation now is a situation that is a bit of an experiment because the Euro has been an incredible success. When I started.

DL: When I started in the buy side, everybody said the Euro is not going to last. And there it is. And it’s the second world reserve currency in terms of utilization, significantly behind the United States. So it’s been a big success. But with that big success comes also a lot of hidden weaknesses. And the hidden weaknesses are fundamentally a very elevated level of debt, a very stubborn government spending environment that makes it very difficult for the European Union and the eurozone to grow as much as it probably could. And it also makes it very difficult to unify fiscal systems because we don’t have a federal system. We don’t have like the United States is.

The situation now is the eurozone is recovering. It’s recovering slowly. But some of those burdens to growth are obviously being very clear. Think about this. When Covid19 started, estimates from all global entities expected China to get out of the crisis first, the eurozone to get out of the crisis second, and the United States to be a distant third. It’s… the United States has surpassed its 2019 GDP levels. The eurozone is still behind. So it’s interesting to see how the expectations of recovery of the eurozone have been downgraded consistently all of the time. And therefore, what we find ourselves in is in a situation in which there’s almost a resignation to the fact that the eurozone in particular, but also the European Union. The eurozone is a small number of countries. The European Union is larger, for the people that are watching. It’s going to recover in a sort of almost L shape. It was going to recover with very low levels of growth, with much weaker levels of job creation and with a very significant and elevated level of debt. So that’s basically where we are right now.

Obviously, the positives remain. But it’s almost become custom to accept low growth, low job creation, low wage growth and low productivity.

TN: It seems to me that if we switch to say, looking at the ECB in that environment, how does the ECB deal with that in terms of higher inflation, lower growth, a weakening Euro? Now, I want to be careful about saying weakening Euro. I don’t necessarily think the bottom is going to fall out. I know there are people out there saying that’s going to happen. But we’ve seen over the past, particularly three weeks, we’ve seen some weakness in the Euro. What does that look like? Do we see kind of BOJ circuit 2012 type of activity happening? Or is there some other type of roadmap that the ECB has?

DL: It’s a very good comparison. The ECB is following the footsteps of the Bank of Japan. In my opinion, in an incorrect analysis of how the ECB the European Central Bank behaved in the 2008 crisis. There is a widespread of mainstream view that the ECB was too tight and too aggressive in its monetary policy. Aggressive in terms of hawkishness in the previous crisis. And if it had implemented the aggressive quantitative easing programs that the Federal Reserve implemented, everything would have gone much better. Unfortunately, I disagree. I completely disagree.

The problems of the eurozone have never been problems of liquidity and have never been problems of monetary policy. In fact, very loose monetary policy led to the crisis. Bringing interest rates from 5% to 1%. Massively increasing liquidity via the banking channel, but increasing liquidity nonetheless. And so the idea that a massive quantitative easing would have allowed the eurozone to get out of the crisis faster and better has been also denied by the reality of what has happened once quantitative easing has been implemented aggressively.

So now what the ECB is doing is pretty much what the Bank of Japan does, which is to monetize as much government debt as possible with a view that you need to have a little bit of inflation, but it cannot be high inflation because in the United States, with 4% unemployment, 4.6% unemployment, you may tolerate 6% inflation. For a while. But I can guarantee you that in the European Union, in the Eurozone with elevated levels of unemployment and with an aging population, very different from the United States. Very different in the European Union almost 20% of the population is going to be above 60 years of age pretty soon. Aging population and low wages with high unemployment or higher unemployment than in the United States. A very difficult combination for a very loose monetary policy.

The Bank of Japan can sort of get away with being massively doveish because it always has around 3% unemployment. So structural levels of unemployment. But that’s not the situation of the eurozone. So I think that the experiment that the ECB is undertaken right now is to be very aggressive despite the fact that the level of inflation is significantly higher than what European citizens are able to tolerate. Obviously, you say, well, it’s 4% inflation. That’s not that high. Well, 4% inflation means that electricity bills are up 20%, that gasoline bills are up another 20%, that food price are up 10% so we need to be careful about that.

So very dangerous experiment. We don’t know how it’s going to go. But they will continue to be extremely doveish with very low rates. That’s why the Euro is weaker, coming back to your point. Extremely dovish despite inflationary pressure.

TN: So it’s interesting central banks always act late and they always overcompensate because they act late. So do you think that maybe a year from now because of base effects, we’ll be talking about deflation instead of inflation like, is that plausible in Europe, in the US and other places, or is that just nonsensical?

DL: Well, we will not have deflation, but they will most certainly talk about the risk of deflation, because let’s start from the fact that the eurozone has had an average of 2% inflation. In any case, most of the time. There’s been a very small period of time in which there was sort of flat inflation. Right. So will they talk about the risk of deflation? Absolutely they will. I remember the first time I visited Japan. I remember talking to a Japanese asset manager and saying, “well, the problem of Japan is deflation, isn’t it?” And he said to me, you obviously don’t live in this country. So will they talk about deflationary pressures? Maybe. Yes.

Think about this. If you have 5% inflation in 2021 and you have 3% inflation in 2022, that is 8.1% inflation accumulative. But falling inflation.

TN: Right. Exactly. Yeah. And it could be a way to justify central banks continuing to ease and continuing to intervene. And so Japan’s found itself in a really awkward position after eight, nine years of really aggressive activity. It’s just really hard to get out once you stop, right? So I do worry, especially about the heritage of the ECB, with kind of the Dutch and German chairs being very conservative. This is a pretty dramatic change for them, right?

DL: Huge. Because you’ve mentioned the key part is that everybody says, well, the ECB will do this. The ECB will do that. But the problem is that the ECB cannot do most of what they would consider normalizing. Because Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, it would be an absolute train wreck if the ECB stops purchasing sovereign bonds of those countries. Because the ECB is… This is something that you don’t see in the United States. The ECB is purchasing 100% of net issuances of these countries.

So what’s the problem? Is that? Think about this. Who would buy Spanish or Portuguese government bonds at the current yields if the ECB wasn’t buying them? Nobody. Okay. Let’s think of where we would start to think of purchasing them. We would probably be thinking about a 300-400% increase in yields to start thinking whether we would purchase Portuguese, Greek, Italian, French bonds? Not just the Southern European, but also France, et cetera.

So I think that is a very dangerous situation for the ECB because it’s caught between a rock and a heart place. Very much so. On the one hand, if it normalizes policy, governments with huge deficit appetite are going to have very significant problems. And if it doesn’t normalize, sticky inflation in consumer goods and nonreplicable goods and services is going to generate because it already did in 2019, protests. Because we tend to forget that in 2018 and 2019, we had the gilets jaunes, you probably remember the Yellow Vests in France. You probably remember the protest in Germany about the rising cost of living. The protests in the north of Spain. So it’s not like everybody is living happily. It’s that there were already significant tensions.

TN: Right? Yeah. I think the pressure is, the inflationary pressures that say consumers are feeling here in the US and Europe and parts of Asia, definitely acute, and people are talking more and more about it.

If we move on to say specifically to energy, since that’s where you came out of, right? So we’re seeing some real energy issues globally and energy prices globally. But when we look at gas, natural gas, specifically in Europe, do you expect to see a crisis in Europe like we’ve seen in China over the last three months where there are power outages, brownouts, hurling blackouts, that sort of thing? Or do you think there’ll be a continuity of power across Europe?

DL: In my opinion, what has happened in China is very specific to China because it’s not just a problem of outages because of lack of supply. Most of the lack of supply problem comes from a shortage of dollars. So many companies in China have been unable to purchase the quantities of coal that they required in a rising demand environment because they had price controls and therefore they were losing money.

They would have to purchase at higher prices and generate at a loss. That is not the case in Europe. In Europe, the problem of gas prices is a problem of price definitely, obviously. It’s very high and it’s also feeding to our prices because of the merit order. But it’s not a problem of supply in the sense that getting into an agreement with Russia to increase 40% their supplies of natural gas into the European Union was extremely quick. From the 1st November to beginning of this week, gas form has increased exports to Europe by 40%.

Problem? Prices have not fallen as much as they went up before. For the south of Europe, it’s a problem fundamentally, of access to ships because LNG obviously is very tight. Vessels are not available as they used to be. There might be a certain tightness in terms of supplies, but I find it very difficult to see, let’s say, a Chinese type of shortage of supply because it’s a matter of price. Will we have to pay significantly more for natural gas and significantly more for power, but not necessarily feel the problem that the Chinese did because they had lost making generation in coal.

TN: Great. Okay, that’s very good. That’s what I’d hoped you say, but it’s great to hear that. Let’s switch just a little bit and talk about kind of European companies because we talked about rising prices, like energy. We talked about inflation and consumers say bearing inflationary pressures.

In European companies, we’ve seen that American companies have been able to raise prices in America quite a lot, actually. And consumers have borne that. Chinese companies haven’t really been able to do that. Their margins are really compressed because consumers there haven’t been able to bear the price rises. What are you seeing in Europe, and how do you think that impacts in general European companies, their ability to absorb price rises or pass them on to consumers? And how long can they continue to bear that?

DL: Yeah. One of the things that is very distinct about Europe is the concept of the so called, horrible name, “National Champions.” In power, in telecommunications, in banking, in oil and gas, etc. Etc. We tend to have each country a couple of dinosaurs, most of them, that are so called National Champions. These cannot pass increases of inputs to final prices because they receive a call from the red phone from the Minister in the country. And no my friend, the prices are not going up as they probably should.

So the automotive sector? Very difficult because there’s a lot of over capacity and at the same time, tremendous cost pressure that you cannot pass because of the lack of demand as well, or the lack of demand relative to supply. The airline sector? Cannot pass the entire increase of cost to consumers. The power sector? Very difficult, big companies, very close to governments. They’re suffering immensely from regulatory risk. So very difficult. So you have those.

However you would say, okay, so that sort of shields inflationary pressures out of consumers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t because those are very large companies, but they’re very small in terms of how much they mean, for example, the prices of food or the prices of delivered natural gas. Even though you purchase natural gas, there’s a strict pass through in those, for example. You might not increase your margins. You might lose a little bit, but the pass through happens. It goes with a delay. In the United States, everything happens quickly. In the United States, shut down the economy, unemployment goes to the roof, then it comes down dramatically like V shape, opposite V shape. In the Eurozone, things happen slower. And that’s why it’s a bigger risk, because the domino effect, instead of being very quick and painful and quickly absorbed is very slow.

TN: Interesting. Okay. Very good. Well, Daniel, thank you for your time. Before we go, I’d like to ask everyone watching. If you don’t mind, please follow us on our YouTube channel. That helps us a lot in terms of adding features to our podcast.

Daniel, thank you. As always, this has been fantastic, and I hope we can come back and speak to you sometime in the future. It will be a great pleasure. Always a fantastic chat. Thank you very much.

DL: Thank you very much.

News Articles

China’s Belt And Road Has Failed. TONY NASH In Conversation With Daniel Lacalle

Post author By admin
Post date November 4, 2021

Tony Nash joins Daniel Lacalle in a discussion on the rise of the machines in a form of AI and machine learning and how Complete Intelligence helps clients automate budgeting with better accuracy using newer technologies like now casts. How GDP predictions are actually very erroneous yet nobody gets fired? And how about China’s GDP as well, and why it’s different from other economies? All these and so much more in markets in this fun discussion.

The video above is published by Daniel Lacalle – In English.

Show Notes

DL: Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast. It is a great pleasure to have somebody that you should actually follow in social media on Twitter, Tony Nash. He is somebody that you definitely need to need to look for because it has very very interesting ideas. Tony, how are you?

TN: Great, thanks Daniel. Thanks so much for having me today.

DL: It’s a tremendous pleasure as I said I was very much looking forward to to have a chat with you. Please introduce a little bit yourself. A little bit to our audience and let us know what is it that you do.

TN: Sure, thanks Daniel. My name is Tony Nash. I live in Houston, Texas. I’ve spent actually most of my life outside of the U.S. I spent most of my 20s in Europe, North Europe, the UK, Southern Europe and from my 30s to almost the end of my 40s I was in Asia. And so you know being in the U.S., Europe and Asia has really given me personally an interesting view on things like trade economics markets and so on and so forth.

During that time I was the global head of research for the economist out of London, I was based in Singapore at the time. Led the global research business. I moved from there to lead Asia consulting for a firm called IHS Markit which is owned by S&P now.

And after that I started my current firm Complete Intelligence which is a machine learning platform. We do global markets currencies, commodities, equity indices, economic concepts. We also do corporate revenue and expense forecasting so we’ll automate budgeting for large multinational firms.

DL: Wow! amazing. Truly amazing. You probably have a very interesting viewpoint on something that a lot of the people that follow us have probably diverging views. Know the situation about the impact of algorithms in the market the impact of high frequency trading and machines in markets.

We had a chat a few months ago with a professor at the London School of Economics that he used to invite me to his year-end lectures to to give a master class. And he mentioned that he was extremely concerned about the almost the rise of the machines. What is your view on this?

TN: I think so an Algo is not an Algo, right? I mean, I think a lot of the firms that are using Algo’s to trade are using extremely short-term algorithmic trading say horizons. Okay? So they’re looking at very short-term momentum and so on and so forth. And that stuff has been around for 10 plus years, it continues to improve. That’s not at all what we do we do monthly interval forecasts, Okay?

Now, when you talk to say an economist they’re looking at traditional say univariate and multivariate statistical approaches, which are kind of long-term trendy stuff. It’s not necessarily exclusively regression, it gets more sophisticated than that.

When we talk to people about machine learning, they assume we’re using exclusively those kind of algorithms. It’s not the case. There’s a mix we run what’s called an ensemble approach. We have some very short-term approaches. We have some longer-term traditional say econometric approaches. And then we use a configuration of which approach works best for that asset or that revenue line in a company or that cost line or whatever for that time.

So we don’t have let’s say, a fixed Algo for gold, Okay? Our algorithm for the gold price is continually changing based upon what’s happening in the market. Markets are not static, right? Trade flows economics, you know, money flows whatever they’re not static. So we’re taking all of that context data in. We’re using all of that to understand what’s happening in currencies, commodities and so on, as well as how that’s impacting company sales. Down to say the department or sub department level.

So what we can do with machine learning now. And this is you know when you mentioned should we fear the rise of the machines. We have a very large client right now who has hundreds of people involved in their budgeting process and it takes them three to four months to do their budgeting process. We’ve automated that process it now takes them 72 hours to run their annual budgeting process, okay? So it was millions of dollars of time and resources and that sort of thing. We’ve taken them now to do a continuous budgeting process to where we churn it out every month. So the CFO, the Head of FP&A and the rest of the say business leadership, see a refresh forecast every month.

Here’s the difference with what we do, compared to what a lot of traditional forecasters and machine learning people do, we track our error, okay? So we will as of next month have our error rates for everything we forecast on our platform. You want to know the error for our gold price forecast, it’ll be on there. You’ll know the error for our Corn, Crude, you know, JPY whatever, it’s on there. So many of our clients use our data for their kind of medium term trades so they have to know how to hedge that trade, right? And so if we have our one, three month error rates on there, something like that it really helps them understand the risk for the time horizon around which they’re trading. And so we do the same for enterprises. We let them know down to a very detailed level to error rates in our forecast because they’re taking the risk on what’s happening, right? So we want them to know the error associated with what they’re doing with what we’re doing.

So coming out of my past at the economist and and IHS and so on and so forth. I don’t know of anybody else who is being transparent enough to disclose their error rates to the public on a regular basis. So my hope is that the bigger guys take a cue from what we’re doing. That customers demand it from what we’re doing. And demand that the larger firms disclose their error rates because I think what the people who use information services will find is that the error rates for the large firms are pretty terrible. We know that they’re three to seven times our error rates in many cases but we can’t talk about that.

DL: But it’s an important thing. What you’ve just mentioned is an important thing because one of the things that is repeated over and over in social media and amongst the people that follow us is well, all these predictions from the IMF, from the different international bodies not to the IMF. Actually the IMF is probably one of the one that makes smaller mistakes but all of these predictions end up being so aggressively revised and that it’s very difficult for people to trust those, particularly the predictions.

TN: Right. That’s right.

DL: And one of the things that, for example when we do now casts in our firm or when with your clients. That’s one of the things that very few people talk about, is the margin of error is what has been the mistake that we have made in the in that previous prediction. And what have we done to correct it because one might probably you may want to expand on this. Why do you think that the models that are driving these now cast predictions from investment banks in some cases from international bodies and others? Are very rarely revised to improve the prediction and the predictability of the of the figures and the data that is being used in the model.

TN: It’s because the forecasters are not accountable to the traders, okay? One of the things I love about traders is they are accountable every single day for their PNO.

DL: Yeah, right.

TN: Every single day, every minute of every day they’re accountable for their PNO. Forecasters are not accountable to a PNO so they put together some really interesting sophisticated model that may not actually work in the real world, right? And you look at the forward curves or something like that, I mean all that stuff is great but that’s not a forecast, okay? So I love traders. I love talking to traders because they are accountable every single day. They make public mistakes. And again this is part of what I love about social media is traders will put their hypothesis out there and if they’re wrong people will somewhat respectfully make fun of them, okay?

DL: Not necessarily respectfully but they will.

TN: In some cases different but this is great and you know what economists and industry forecasts, commodity forecasters these guys have to be accountable as well. I would love it if traders would put forecasters up to the same level of criticism that they do other traders but they don’t.

DL: Don’t you find it interesting? I mean one of the things that I find more intellectually dishonest sometimes is to hear some of the forecasters say, well we’ve only made a downgrade of one point of one percentage point of GDP only.

TN: Only, right. It’s okay.

DL: So that is that we’ve grown accustomed to this idea that you start the year with a prediction of say, I don’t know three percent growth, which goes down to below two. And that doesn’t get anybody fired, it’s sort of like pretty much average but I think it’s very important because one of the things. And I want to gather your thoughts about this. One of the things that we get from this is that there is absolutely no analysis of the impact of stimulus packages for example, when you have somebody is announcing a trillion dollar stimulus package that’s going to generate one percent increase in trendline GDP growth it doesn’t. And everybody forgets about it but the trillion dollars are gone. What is your thoughts on this?

TN: Well, I think those are related in as much as… let’s say somebody downgraded GDP by one percent. What they’re not accounting for, What I think they’re not accounting for is let’s say the economic impact kind of multiplier. And I say that in quotes for that government spending, right? So in the old days you would have a government spending of say you know 500 billion dollars and let’s say that was on infrastructure. Traditionally you have a 1.6 multiplier for infrastructure spend so over the next say five years that seeps into the economy in a 1.6 times outs. So you get a double bang right you get the government spending say one-to-one impact on the economy. Then you get a point six times that in other industries but what’s actually happened.

And Michael Nicoletos does some really good analysis on this for China, for example. He says that for every unit of say debt that’s taken out in China, which is government debt. It takes eight something like eight units of debt to create one unit of GDP. So in China for example you don’t have an economic multiplier you have an economic divisor, right?

DL: Exactly.

TN: So the more the Chinese government spends actually the less GDP growth which is weird, right? But it tells me that China is an economy that is begging for a market. A real market, okay? Rather than kind of central planning and you and Europe. I’m sure you’re very familiar with the Soviet Union. I studied a lot of that in my undergrad days very familiar with the impact of central planning. China there’s this illusion that there is no central planning in China but we’re seeing with the kind of blow-ups in the financial sector that there is actually central planning in China.

And if you look at the steel sector you look at commodity consumption, these sorts of things it’s a big factor of china still, right? So but it’s incredibly inefficient spending. It’s an incredibly inefficient way and again it’s a market that is begging for an open economy because they could really grow if they were open but they’re not. They have a captive currency they have central planning and so on and so forth.

Now I know some of the people watching, you’re going to say you’ve never been to China, you don’t understand. Actually I have spent a lot of time in China, okay? I actually advise China’s Economic Planners for about a year and a half, almost two years on the belt and road initiative. So I’ve been inside the bureaucracy not at the high levels where they throw nice dinners. I’ve been in the offices of middle managers for a long time within the Chinese Central Government so I understand how it works and I understand the impact on the economy.

DL: Don’t you think it’s interesting though that despite the evidence of what you just mentioned. And how brutal it has been because it’s multiplied by 10. How many units of debt are required to generate one unit of GDP in a little bit more than a decade? Don’t you find it frustrating to read and hear that what for example the United States needs is some sort of central planning like the Chinese one. And that in fact the the developed economies would be much better off if they had the type of intervention from from the government that China has?

TN: Sure, well it’s it’s kind of the fair complete that central bankers bring to the table. I have a solution. We need to use this solution to bring fill in the blank on desired outcome, okay? And so when central bankers come to the table they have there’s an inevitability to the solution that they’re going to bring. And the more we rely on central bankers the more we rely on centralized planning. And so I’ve had so many questions over the last several years, should the us put forward a program like China’s belt and road program, okay?

We know the US, Europe, the G20 nobody needs that, okay? Why? Because Europe has an open market and great companies that build great infrastructure. The US has an open market and although European infrastructure companies are better. The US has some pretty good companies that build infrastructure in an open market. So why do we need a belt and road program? Why do we need central planning around that? And we can go into a lot of detail about what’s wrong with the belton road and why it’s not real, okay? But that type of central planning typically comes with money as the as kind of the bait to get people to move things. And so we’re already doing that with the FED and we’re already doing that with treasure with money from the treasury, right?

And if you look at Europe you’re doing it with the ECB. You’re doing it with money from finance ministries. The next question is, does the government start actually taking over industries again? And you know maybe not and effectively in some ways they kind of are in some cases. And the real question is what are the results and I would argue the results are not a multiplier result they are a divisor result.

DL: Absolutely. Absolutely it is we saw it for example. I think it’s, I mean painfully evident in the junk plan in Europe or the growth and jobs plan of 2009 that destroyed four and a half million jobs. It’s not easy to to achieve this.

TN: You have to try to do that.

DL: You have to really really try it, really try.

I think that you mentioned a very important factor which is that central banking brings central planning because central banks present a program of monetary easing of monetary policy. And they say well we don’t do fiscal policy but they’re basically telling you what fiscal policy has to be implemented to the point that their excuse for the lack of results of monetary policy tends to be that the that the transmission mechanism of monetary policy is not working as it should. Therefore because the demand for credit is not as much as the supply of money that have invented. They say, well how do we fill in the blank? Oh it has to be government spending. It has to be for planning. It has to be so-called infrastructure spending from government.

You just mentioned a very important point there is absolutely no problem to invest in infrastructure. There’s never been more demand for a good quality infrastructure projects from private equity, from businesses. But I come back to the point of of central banks and a little bit about your view. How does prolonging easing measures and maintaining extremely low rates affect these trends in growth and in these trends in in productivity?

TN: Well, okay, so what you brought up about central banks and the government as the transmission mechanism is really important. So low interest rates Zerp and Nerp really bring about an environment where central banks have forced private sector banks to fail as the transmission mechanism. Central banks make money on holding money overnight, that’s it. They’re not making money necessarily or they’re not doing it to successfully to impact economies. They’re not successfully lending out loans because they say it’s less risky buying bonds. It’s less risky having our money sit with the Fed. It’s less risky to do this stuff than it is to loan out money. Of course it’s less risky, right? That’s goes without saying.

So you know I think where we need to go with that is getting central banks out of that cycle is going to hurt. We cannot it… cannot hurt, well I would say baby boomers in the West and and in Northeast Asia which has a huge baby boomer cohort. Until those guys are retired and until their incomes are set central banks cannot take their foot off the gas because at least in the west those folks are voters. And if you take away from the income of that large cohort of voters then you’ll have, I guess I think from their perspective you’ll have chaos for years.

So you know we need to wait until something happens with baby boomers. You tell central banks and finance ministries or treasuries will kind of get religion and what will happen is behind baby boomers is a small cohort generally, okay? So it’s that small cohort who will suffer. It’s not Baby Boomers who will suffer. It’s that small cohort who will suffer. It’s the wealth of that next generation that Gen x that will suffer when central banks and finance ministries get religion.

So we’re probably looking at ten more years five more years of this and then you’ll see kind of… you remember what a rousing success Jeff Sax’s shock therapy was, right?

DL: Yeah.

TN: So of course it wasn’t and it’s you know but it’s gonna hurt and it’s gonna hurt in developed countries in a way that it hasn’t hurt for a long time. So that kind of brings to the discussion things like soundness of the dollar, status of the Euro that sort of thing. I think there are a lot of people out there who have this thesis. I think they’re a little early on it.

DL: Yeah, I agree.

TN: So economists you know these insurance people see it from a macro perspective but often they come to the conclusion too early. So I think it’s a generational type of change that’ll happen and then we start to see if the US wants the dollar to remain preeminent. They’re going to have to get religion at the central bank level. They’re going to have to get religion at the fiscal level and really start ratcheting down some of the kind of free spending disciplines they’ve had in the past.

DL: Yeah, it’s almost inevitable that you’re in a society that is aging. The net prison value of bad decisions for the future is too positive for the voters that are right now with the middle age, in a certain uh bracket of of age. Me, I tried the other day my students I see you more as the guys that are going to pay my pension than my students. So yeah…

TN: But it’s you and me who will be in that age bracket who will pay for it. It’s the people who are 60 plus right now who will not pay for it. So they’ll go through their lives as they have with governments catering to their every need, where it’s our age that will end up paying for it. So people our age we need to have hard assets.

DL: Absolutely.

TN: You know when the time comes we have to have hard assets because it’s going to be…

DL: That is one of one of the mistakes that a lot of the people that follow us around. They they feel that so many of the valuations are so elevated that maybe it’s a good time to cash in and simply get rid of hard assets, I say absolutely the opposite because you’ve mentioned a very important thing which is this religious aspect that we’ve that we’ve gotten into. And I for just for clarity would you care to explain for people what that means because…

TN: I say get religion? I mean to become disciplined.

DL: I know like you because that is an important thing.

TN: Yes, sorry I mean if anybody but to become disciplined about the financial environment and about the monetary environment.

DL: Absolutely because one of the things that people tend to believe when you talk about religion and the the state planners religion and and central bank’s religion is actually the opposite. So I wanted to write for you to very make it very clear. That what you’re talking about is discipline you’re not talking about the idea of going full-blown MMT and that kind of thing.

TN: No. I think if there is if there is kind of an MMT period, I think it’s a I don’t think it’s an extended period. I think it’s an experiment that a couple of countries undertake. I think it’s problematic for them. And I think they try to find a way to come back but…

DL: How do you come back from that because one of the problems that I find when people bring the idea of well, why not try. I always, I’m very aware and very concerned about that thought process because you know I’ve been very involved in analyzing and in helping businesses in Argentina, in Hawaii, in Brazil and it’s very difficult to come back. I had a discussion yesterday with the ex-minister of economy of Uruguay and Ignacio was telling me we started with a 133 percent inflation. And we were successful in bringing it down to 40 and that was nine years.

TN: Right. So, yeah I get how do you come back from it look at Argentina. look at Zimbabwe. I think of course they’re not the Fed. They’re not you know the EU but they are very interesting experiments when people said we’re going to get unhinged with our spending. And we’re going to completely disregard fundamentals. Which I would say I would argue we are on some level disregarding fundamentals today but it’s completely you know divorced from reality. And if you take a large economy like the US and go MMT it would take a very long time to come back.

DL: Absolutely.

TN: So let’s let’s look at a place like China, okay? So has China gone MMT? Actually, not really but their bank lending is has grown five times faster than the US, okay? So these guys are not lending on anything near fundamentals. Sorry when I say five times faster what I mean is this it grew five times larger than the bank lending in the US, okay? So China is a smaller economy and banks have balance sheets that are five times larger than banks in the US. And that is that should be distressing followers.

DL: Everybody say that the example of China doesn’t work because more debt because it’s growing faster what you’ve just said is absolutely critical for for some of our followers.

TN: Right, the other part about China is they don’t have a convertible currency. So they can do whatever they want to control their currency value while they grow their bank balance sheets. And it’s just wonderland, it’s not reality so if that were to happen there are guys out there like Mike Green and others who look at a severe devaluation of CNY. And I think that’s more likely than not.

DL: Yeah, obviously as well. I think that the the Chinese government is trying to postpone as much as it can the devaluation of the currency based on a view that the imbalances of the economy can be sort of managed through central planning but what ends up happening is that you’re basically just postponing the inevitable. And getting a situation in which the actual devaluation when it happens is much larger. It reminds me very much. I come back to the point of Argentina with the fake peg of the peso to the dollar that prolonging it created a devastation from which they have not returned yet.

TN: Right. And if you look at China right now they need commodities desperately, okay? Metals, they need energy desperately and so on and so forth. So they’ve known this for months. So they’ve had CNY at about six three, six four to the dollar which is very strong. And it was trading a year ago around seven or something like that. So they’ve appreciated it dramatically and the longer they keep it at this level. The more difficult it’s going to be on the other side. And they know it these are not stupid people but they understand that that buying commodities is more important for their economy today because if people in China are cold this winter and they don’t have enough nat gas and coal then it’s going to be a very difficult time in the spring for the government.

DL: And when you and coming back to that point there’s a double-edged sword. On the one side you have a currency that is out to free sheet are artificially appreciated. On the other side you also have price controls because coal prices are limited by the government. And therefore you’re creating on the one hand a very big monetary hole and on the other hand a very big financial hole in the companies that are selling at a loss.

TN: That’s true but I would say one slight adjustment to that things like electricity prices are controls. When power generators buy coal, they buy that in a spot market, okay? So coal prices have been rising where electricity prices are highly regulated by the government this is why we’ve seen blackouts and brownouts and power outages in China. And why it’s impacted their manufacturing base because they’re buying coal in a spot market and then they’re having to sell it at a much lower price in the retail market.

And so again this is the problem with central planning this is the problem with kind of partial liberalization of markets. You liberalize the coal price but you keep the electricity price regulated and if you don’t have the central government supporting those power plants they just blow up all over the place. And we’ve seen the power generators in the UK go bankrupt. We saw some here in Texas go bankrupt a couple years ago because of disparities like that and those power generators in the UK going bankrupt that’s the market working, right? So we need to see that in China as well.

DL: Yeah, it’s a very very fascinating conversation because on the other hand for example in Europe right now with the energy shortage we’re seeing that a few countries Spain, France, etc. are actually trying to convince the European Union, the European Commission to try to get into a sort of intervened market price in the in the generation business. Which would be just like you’ve mentioned an absolute atrocity very very dangerous.

TN: This creates a huge liability for the government.

DL: It creates a massive liability for the government. This is a key point that people fail to understand the debate in the European union is that, oh it’s a great idea because France has this massive utility company that is public. And therefore there’s no risk it had to be bailed out twice by the taxpayers. People tend to forget that you’re paying for that.

TN: But again this is what’s that block of voters who doesn’t really care about the impact 10 or 20 years down the road. That’s the problem. There’s a huge block of voters who don’t really care what the cost is because the government’s going to borrow money long-term debt. And it’s going to be paid back in 10 or 20 years and the biggest beneficiaries of this and the people on fixed incomes they actually don’t care what the cost is.

DL: Yeah, yeah exactly, exactly. There’s this fantastic perverse incentive to pass the bill to the next generation. And that obviously is where we are right now. Coming back to the point of the infrastructure plans and the belt and road plan. What in your view are the the lessons that we must have learned or that we should be learning from the Belgian road initiative?

TN: So here’s a problem with the Belton road and I had a very candid discussion with a senior official within China’s NDRC in probably 2015 which was early on, okay? And this person told me the following they said the Belgian road was designed to be a debt financed plan. What’s happening now, and again this was six or seven years ago, very early on in the in the belts and road dates. They said the beneficiary countries are pushing back and forcing us to take equity in this infrastructure, okay?

Now why does that matter well the initial build out of infrastructure is about five percent of the lifetime cost of that asset, okay? So if you’re if China is only involved in the initial build out they’re taking their five percent, it’s a loan and they get out. If they’re equity holders in that let’s say they’re 49 equity holders in an Indonesian high-speed rail then they become accountable for part of that build-out. And then they have to maintain the other 95 of the cost for the next 30 to 50 years. So they thought they were going to be one and done in and out. We do this infrastructure we get out they owe us money and it’s really clean what’s happened is they’ve had to get involved in the equity of those assets.

And so I’ve since had some uh government officials from say Africa ask me what do we do with the Belton road with china? Very simple answer force them to convert the debt to equity, okay? They become long-term involved on a long-term basis. They become involved in those assets and then they’re have a different level of interest in them in the quality maintenance and everything else but they’re also on the long-term basis accountable for the costs.

So they don’t just build a pretty airport that and I’m not saying this necessarily happens but they don’t just build a pretty airport that falls apart in five years, okay? They then have to think about the long-term impacts and long-term maintenance costs of that airport, right? And so but you know the original design of the Belton road was debt financing. Mobilizing workers and so on and so forth what it’s become is a mix of debt and equity financing. And that’s not what the Chinese government has wanted.

So I’ve been telling people for three or four years the Belton road is dead, okay? And people push back me and say no it’s not, you know think tank people or whatever. But they don’t understand the fundamental fact of how the Belton road was designed it was designed as a one-and-done debt financed infrastructure build out it’s become a long-term investment all around the world. So it’s a different program. It’s failed, okay?

They’re not going to make the money they thought yes they’ll keep some workers busy but they’re not going to make the money they thought. All of those assets, almost all those assets are financed in US dollars, okay? So they’re not getting their currency out. It’s not becoming an international unit like they had hoped. They’re it’s not they’re not clean transactions and so on and so forth. So this is what’s happened with the Belgian road. So the lesson learned is they should have planned better. And they should have had a better answer to you become an equity owner. And uh

I think you know if any western governments want to have kind of a belt and road type of initiative. They’re going to have to contend with the demand from some of these countries that they become equity owners. And I think that’s a bad idea for western governments to be equity owners in infrastructure assets so you know this is this is the problem.

Japanese have taken a little bit different because of where the Yen is and because of where interest rates are in Japan. Japanese have basically had kind of zero interest or close to zero interest on the infrastructure they’ve built out. And so they haven’t gone after it as aggressively as China has. They’ve had a much cleaner um structure to those agreements. And so they’ve been, I think pretty successful in staying out of the equity game and staying more focused on the debt financing for their infrastructure initiatives.

DL: Oh, absolutely big lesson, big lesson there because the we see now that the vast majority of those projects are impossible to the debt is impossible to be repaid. There’s about 600 billion dollars of unpayable debt out there. And we also have the example from from the internationalization of the French, Spanish, Italian companies into Latin America that they fell into the same trap. They started with a with a debt-financed infrastructure build type of clean slate program that ended up owning equity. And in some cases with nationalizations hopefully that will not…

TN: And watch for debt to equity conversions in these things. It’s good. There’s going to be huge pressure because the Chinese say the exit bank the CDB. A lot of these organizations are going to be forced to convert that debt to equity and then unload it on operating companies in China. They’re not going to want to do it but we’re going to start to see more and more pressure there over the next couple of years.

DL: Great! Well I’m absolutely convinced that will happen. Tony, we’ve run out of time so it’s been an incredible conversation lots of things that are very very interesting for our followers. We will give all the details to follow you and to get more information about your company in the details of the of the video. And thank you so much for your time. I hope that that we will be able to talk again in a not too distant future.

TN: Thank you Daniel. Anytime. Thank you so much.

QuickHit

EM Meltdown: China, Turkey & Russia (Part 2)

Post author By admin
Post date October 26, 2021

In this second part, emerging markets expert Michael Nicoletos discussed Turkey and Russia. What are the major issues that Turkey is facing, specially around its FX reserves? They have an energy problem as well, and will soon need to choose between the US and Russia. And how about Russia’s love-hate relationship with Europe? How does Nicoletos see it will end up?

Please watch Part 1 first, if you have not already. Michael talked about China’s household debt and how much is that? Can they ever recover from the Evergrande disaster? And how they got into it in the first place? Is CNY still valuable? How do the Chinese get dollars now with their very limited FX reserve? Should you use the digital Yuan? How much is China spending right now to up its GDP?

Michael Nicoletos have spent most of his life around markets, and I used to run a hedge fund for more than 10 years on emerging markets. He shut it down in 2019 to take a sabbatical and Covid 19 hit the world. Now, he is doing a lot of research on emerging markets and trying to see what the next steps will be in terms of the investment world. But in the meantime, he is also advising a few firms on their investment.

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This QuickHit episode was recorded on October 20, 2021.

The views and opinions expressed in this EM Meltdown: China, Turkey and Russia (Part 1) Quickhit episode are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Complete Intelligence. Any contents provided by our guest are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any political party, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Show Notes

TN: Talking about EMs, and we talked about reserves, and you mentioned Turkey. Let’s talk about Turkey for a minute because you’ve made some really interesting statements about Turkey, and I’d like to really understand your perspective.

MN: Turkey faces some other issues. Turkey faces high inflation. More than 20% rates are around 19% of negative yields. The Lira has fallen more than 50% in the past few years. So you might see nominal GDP in Turkish Lira going up. But if you put it in dollar terms, it’s actually flat for the last ten years. It’s not flat, it’s flat-ish. So in Turkish Lira, the last ten years, the Turkish GDP has gone up 350%, which is a wow. But if you put it in dollars, it’s not flat, but it’s not something meaningful.

Now, if you look at Turkey and the devaluation, the President of Turkey, Tayyip Erdoğan, has tried to stop the Lira from falling. Right now, it’s I think at its all-time lows around 920 versus a dollar. But if you look at the FX reserve, which is very tricky and this is very interesting for Turkey, you’ll see that, okay, the number is ambiguous because depending on what source you see, you’re going to see another number. But let’s say it’s around $18 billion. Now, this is the gross number. If we deduct gold and all the other stuff and we also deduct the swap lines, and I will explain what the swap line is, this number falls around to $20 billion. And this could be negative according to some sources because the dollars are not there.

What has Turkey done? Instead of using its dollars to protect the Lira from falling, I’m not an advocate that you should do that, but that’s what they’ve been doing. They went to the banks and did swap lines with the banks. And the banks are using depositors dollars to buy back the Lira. So depositors right now don’t actually have those dollars in their account.

MN: Because the Turkish banks have made agreements with the central bank with swap lines, which okay, when your central bank gives you a swap line, it’s a guarantee if you’re a bank. And instead of, if you go and you see the headline number of the Turkey central bank, you won’t see it falling. But if you understand that they’ve been using depositors’ dollars to cover for it, you need to subtract that. So the number could be close to 20, maybe there are some allegations that it could even be negative. So if it’s negative, imagine. FX reserves in Turkey are pretty horrible.

You have, let’s say, $18 billion of gross FX reserve, and you have $130 billion of short term liabilities, within the next twelve months, Turkey has 130 billion of foreign claims. So again, this metric is not really good. Now, Turkey is estimated to grow around 8 or 9% this year. Again in Turkish Lira.

MN: If we take the Lira is down 25% this year. So this is an issue. Another issue is in Turkey, 60% of its current account is energy. They don’t have domestic energy, so they need to import energy and we know what’s been going on with the energy crisis and natural gas and oil going higher. So all these are main problems for Turkey right now, which I think will be forced to find a drastic way to… They don’t want to go to the IMF or the World Bank, but I think at some point they’ll have to go. And again here geopolitics come to play why they say geopolitics is because Turkey is in NATO. It’s the second biggest force in NATO. The US wants to keep it in NATO because wherever US doesn’t send military, Turkey does. Not many NATO allies send military forces wherever they go.

So Turkey is trying to play both sides right now. Trying to be the good guy with Russia, good guy with NATO. Trying to get the most out of both sides. But I think time is ticking and they will be forced to take some form of decision on what they want to do in the future because they’re running out of time in terms of their FX reserves.

TN: Yeah, it sounds like it’s pretty short time. Wow. Okay. So looking at the energy issues, not just what Turkey faces, but that Europe faces, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the Russia-Europe relationship and what you’re seeing there. Will Russia provide sufficient gas to Europe this winter? And, from a financial perspective, how much will Russia benefit from that? Just generally.

MN: Yeah. Okay. But the thing is here the following: Europe trying to transition to a more green related economy. The planning was pretty horrible. I would say they wanted to do it fast and they wanted to say “blackmail” corporations to go to more green energy. What did they do then? They created the CO2 emissions credits. So if you were polluting above a level, you were forced to buy CO2 credits in order to cover for that. And that was like an indirect tax, making it less efficient for corporations to use that form of energy so they would be forced to go to other forms of energy.

Now, from going to coal to, let’s say, totally green. It takes some time to create the wind turbines and the sun. And actually Germany shut down all its nuclear reactors because of Fukushima.

TN: They have a lot of low-end Taiwanese fabs transition to photovoltaics with all of the incentives they were providing. I mean, for a long time, low-end fabs across Asia were just doing a very quick transition to a PV, and it was just a kind of back up the truck moment where they were just taking all the dollars they earned or Euros or whatever currency they could because Germany and all these other places were incentivizing them to do it. And they were low-end PVs. They weren’t high-end. They were just bog standard photovoltaics.

MN: No, no. Okay, but besides that, what did the European Commission do? There are auctions every now and then of CO2 credits. But the auctions are arbitrary. So the Commission, whenever it wanted the prices to go up, they did not do the auctions. So then the supply of credits was less and less. CO2 credit emissions went through the roof. So suddenly, if you use natural gas as an energy, it went even higher. And this created the viscious loop, creating the natural gas prices to go even higher.

In the meantime, Europe was negotiating with Russia about Nordstream, too. So Russia, which is a pretty good strategic and geopolitical player, realized that Europe was going back as being back in the corner and said, unless you sign whatever I want, let me put it in layman’s terms. I’m not going to pump anymore natural gas. Europe says, no, we have to sit down. We have to discuss. Okay, I’m not pumping. So one brings to another. And every time that Europe trying to play hardball, Russia says, okay, there’s no such a problem. I’m not going to be pumping and prices go higher and higher.

So I guess that at some point Europe will need to sign anything Russia wants at this moment. And will try to negotiate some form of an agreement which will be obviously not, it won’t be good. But it will be much better than the current prices that we’re seeing now. And because of the energy prices going higher, Russia is benefiting on a macro level, benefiting on a geopolitical level, and it’s gaining a lot of strength in the region.

TN: Hugely. Yeah. Hugely.

MN: So the two are interconnected. It’s not one or the other. So the energy crisis has helped Russia, and Russia has exploited Europe’s inability to act smoothly and fast.

TN: It’s very interesting. Okay. Just to close this out because I know we’ve been going on for a while. I’m just curious about Russia’s position with Europe, say, over the medium term. Do you see Russia and Europe growing closer? Do you see that relationship becoming tighter, or do you see that eventually becoming an antagonistic relationship? Are there substitutional energy sources that Europe can utilize and that eventually becomes an antagonistic relationship again? Just in general terms. I don’t necessarily political specifics. But how do you think that plays out?

MN: Well, I’ll use Henry Kissinger’s famous quote that was back, like 40 years ago. He said, “When I called Europe, who do I call?” So right now, you have, in Germany you just had elections. They haven’t formed the government. It might take months before they form a government.

In France, there are elections in April. It seems that the right could be a threat to Macron. And we don’t know what the “right’ means in France. It could be Le Pen or it could be someone else, but it could be anything right now. So right now, I don’t see a leader. If Macron wins, he could be the next leader of Europe. But right now, there’s a leadership problem within Europe.

So as long as there’s a leadership problem within Europe, in my view, there’s a vacuum. And I think Russia will exploit it to gate as much influence as it can. And I cannot foresee the future. But in the next six to eight months, I think Russia will try and get as much influence as it can and try to exploit that vacuum.

TN: I think you’re right. They’re very smart. They’re very smart political players.

QuickHit

EM Meltdown: China, Turkey & Russia (Part 1)

Post author By admin
Post date October 25, 2021

The emerging markets expert Michael Nicoletos shares his insights into the Chinese economy and why it’s in a very big trouble?

This is the first part of the discussion. Subscribe to our channel to get notified when Part 2 is out.

In this first part, Michael talked about China’s household debt and how much is that? Can they ever recover from the Evergrande disaster? And how they got into it in the first place? Is CNY still valuable? How do the Chinese get dollars now with their very limited FX reserve? Should you use the digital Yuan? How much is China spending right now to up its GDP?

Tony Nash met Michael at a Real Vision event in 2019, when he was giving a presentation on China, and he had a chart in there that was actually Michael’s chart. They had a conversation after that and have stayed in touch occasionally since then.

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This QuickHit episode was recorded on October 20, 2021.

Show Notes

TN: So on China. Michael, I wanted to ask you, you sent out a tweet. I think it was last week talking about China’s household debt and it’s on the screen now. So it’s talking about how China’s household debt is at $10 trillion and looking at the ratio of China’s household debt to say, Hong Kong and the US. So can you talk to us a little bit about China’s household debt loads and what that really means for the Chinese economy?

MN: Well, as we all know, it’s been in the news lately. The Evergrande imminent. I don’t know if it’s going to be a default because there are some discussions right now to find a solution. But either way, it’s very hard for it to be repaid at its face value.

Now, the problem here is twofold. One problem is that China is highly levered as a whole, approximately more than 270% of GDP. The other thing is that real estate is approximately 62 trillion, I’d say the property market, which includes also home prices and everything. It’s about 62 trillion, of which around 10 trillion around sold properties. So it’s a very big backlog. The real estate crisis has started with Evergrande, and we’ve seen actually bond yield spiking in China real estate bond prices. And the big issue here is that banks are the ones who lend obviously to the real estates. So right now, banking assets in China are around 400% of GDP. And in Hong Kong, which is a proxy to China is around 900% of GDP. Just to put it in perspective.

In 2007, the relevant numbers for the US was 230%. And Ireland where the crisis started was like 700%. So we’re past both those levels. So we see that there’s a very big debt problem within China. Now, because China has capital controls in place, money cannot leave the country. So the bubble grows, grows, grows. But the money stays in the system.

So people now are starting to be afraid. And it’s the first month after six years that retail prices started falling in China. So this is creating a vicious loop. That fear that the contractor will not deliver your house. It means that you’re not going to purchase a new house. So you’re afraid. People in China have stopped buying, which creates a negative, vicious look.

So China has tried to avert this at least three or four times in the past ten years. Every time China is trying to stem back from giving you debt, we see such a small crisis, and then China is forced to reverse immediately because it cannot afford. It’s too big of an economy. Real estate is approximately 29% of China’s GDP. So you understand that something like that is very hard to control.

Now, China has been a rock in a hard place because I’ve been trying to shift from an investment, let’s say, investment intensive economy to a more consumption driven economy.

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TN: This has been a 20-year transition, right? It’s not something they started two years ago. They’ve been trying to do this for, like, 20 years, right?

MN: They’ve been trying to do this, say ten years. But let’s see, consumption as a percentage of GDP is around 38%. When in the US, it’s around 70%. It’s very hard to get that number higher. And given that all the wealth or most of the wealth by Chinese people, is linked directly or indirectly to real estate, you understand that this is a chicken and egg problem. If you try to stop one problem, you’ll create the other problem.

TN: Sure.

MN: So there are these problems right now in China. I think China will be forced to reverse course again. I don’t think you can afford to create a real estate crisis. I don’t think there would be a world contagion, by the way. But I think it could create a spillover effect with other real estate entities. Evergrande, the size was around 300 billion. It’s actually the biggest one. So we’ve seen the biggest one. And the thing is this could spill over to the whole industry.

Now, what’s the problem here, besides that? The problem is that China has been trying to convince banks and actually all the regions to stop giving loans, which are unproductive. Now, because GDP in China is an input number and not an output number like it’s in the Western countries, whatever the number the government sets, that’s what everyone tries to achieve and they can achieve it by giving more money.

TN: I just want to stop you there because I don’t think that point is well understood. When you say GDP is an input number in China and it’s an output number everywhere else. I’ve been trying to make this point for years to people, and you say… Help me understand, when you say it’s an input number. What do you mean in simple terms?

MN: In simple terms is the government wants 7% growth, so everyone will do the best they can to achieve that 7% growth, no matter what. So it means if I’m a bank or if I’m a region in China and I need to do more, I need to produce more growth. I’ll give out loans, which could be unproductive.

What do I mean? If I build a bridge, this is the most common example. If I build a bridge, when I build a bridge, this is counted in the GDP growth. Now, if I destroy the bridge, that is not deducted by the GDP. Right? If I rebuild the bridge, it’s added again. So in theory, you could make one bridge, build it, destroy it, build it, destroy it. And you would only have growth. So when China wants an input number, it will create bridges. The bridges could be, as we say, the usual “bridges to nowhere.” The famous quote. Or it could be bridges, which are useful. So all these unproductive debt went mostly to properties. And that’s why we see all these vacancies and all these ghost towns around China which actually were built and this was added in the GDP growth numbers. But then no one went to live there and the towns are there, and now they have to bring them down.

TN: Right. Now, you’re famous for kind of calculating for every say CNY spent by the Chinese government, it results in X amount of GDP, right? There used to be a multiplier effect to CNY spent and GDP. But you started seeing as that was diluted. So when you last calculated that, what was that number? For every say Chinese Yuan spent how much GDP was created?

MN: So your viewers can understand because it’s a bit technical. So let’s assume you’re an economy and you create debt. You want that debt to create more GDP than the debt you’re giving. So if you’re giving one unit of debt, you want that one unit of debt to create one point, something of GDP.

So in theory, you would want it to be two, three, four. Okay, that’s not very easy. But if it’s a plus, it means that your debt was accredited. So it helped the economy. The problem here is, since 2008, China from using approximately let’s say, two units of debt to create one unit of GDP. So we’re already negative, because when you have two units of debt to create one unit of GDP, it means that that one unit will end up as a bad debt at some point. It’s not imminent, but at some point it will add up. So we went from 1 to 2.2 units of debt to create one unit of GDP. And right now we’re approximately between eight and nine units of debt to create that same one unit of GDP. So China needs more and more debt to sustain the same rate of growth.

TN: Right. So instead of a multiplier effect, which is what kind of economic impacts people usually talk about, there’s almost a divisor effect in China.

MN: You could say that. But because it’s a closed economy, that money can’t leave the system. So in theory, if you had a free account or if you had an open capital account, the Chinese will say, oh, my God, my currency is overvalued. Or let me take some money out of China and make a dollar. Now, this is not possible because Chinese have, I think, a quota of $50,000 a year they can take out? Something like that. Now, obviously, there are ways to take money out, but it’s not the easiest thing, and it’s not for everyone.

TN: I guess. It’s jewelry and watches the latest.

MN: Right. Okay. It was also Bitcoin. They try to be creative. Well, there’s a good ratio here, which is pretty interesting, and people forget. Now, if you devise the M2, the FX reserves to M2, why do I do that? Because let’s assume money is the money supply within the system. The ratio goes to 9%. Now, the Tiger countries in the Asia crisis in ’97 had the same ratio of approximately 25% to 30%. When it dropped below the 25%, you had the big devaluation.

Now, China doesn’t have a big external debt. So since it doesn’t have a big external debt, there is no trigger from that side of the equation for China to be forced to liquidate that fixed reserves to cover for it. But even though they have approximately $3.2 trillion of FX reserves and maybe another trillion from the banks and everything. I’d say 4 trillion. The M2 is approximately around $36 trillion right now. So these numbers… Imagine a hot balloon that you put air. At some point it’s going to blow. We don’t know what that level is. Okay. It could be like ten years before that happened. Or we could see, in my view, the Japan-like model where for ten years, you have an anemic growth. But you don’t see anything really, not a substantial bust. Because one thing.

TN: You also just destroyed the idea of China becoming a global currency, of the CNY becoming a global currency. Right. Because if they do have to trade on an open basis, then it’s way overvalued. Right. It’s like monopoly money.

MN: Well, China tried or is trying, at least. And it appears through Alipay and WeChat to create a digital Yuan. Why does he want to create a digital Yuan. It’s pretty simple. If the world is using a digital Yuan outside China, it means that the CNY or Yuan or Renminbi or whatever you want to call it, will be used abroad. So this means that it’s usage outside China will increase.

We’ve seen, however, that during the last two years, and I’m sure you have the guests, which are better to talk about this, know this subject a bit better than me. The dollar usage has gone up. The dollar is around 87% of global transactions. It actually went up. So there’s a discussion where everyone says the dollar is dying. The dollar is dying, the dollar is dying. Okay. And I understand where it’s coming from because of the policies. But monetary policies are relative. They’re not absolute. Maybe US is doing something bad, but the rest of the world is not doing something better.

So right now, the US dollar dominance increases. Now. I’m pretty sure I understand that this cannot stay at current levels. But going from 87% to being to 5%, it’s not something that’s going to happen in the next 2 years.

TN: I think the dollar had been down to like 82% six to seven years ago. And seeing it go up to 87%, that’s not a small amount. But the Fed does not want to be the World Central Bank. The US Treasury does not want to be the world’s treasury. So there’s this belief that the US wants to be the dominant global currency. I don’t necessarily believe that’s true. I think there are advantages to having a large portion of global currency usage, but I think 87% is just way too much. It’s way too much concentration of risk, actually, for the Fed and for US monetary officials. Go ahead. Sorry.

MN: No, you’re absolutely right. I think you’re right. However, the US, I think would like to remain the number one. Now, I don’t know what the percentage, the optimal percentage would be. But I’m pretty sure they prefer being the dominant than not being the dominant.

TN: Oh, yeah, absolutely. They want to say number one, but 87% is just too much.

MN: Since we’re talking about the dollar. The important thing about the dollar is that if the dollar strengthens, okay. And I don’t have a strong view here, I think it’s going to strengthen, but I understand if it doesn’t. If the dollar strengthened, this puts the pressure on emerging markets as a whole, because usually emerging markets tend to borrow in foreign currency because the foreign currency interest rate is much lower than the local currency.

For example, in Turkey, it’s 20%. The dollar is 0%. So if there’s a Turkish corporate wants to launch a bond, it will borrow on dollars at five 6% instead of borrowing at 20%. So they try to do that.

Now, as the dollar strengthens, especially for emerging markets, this puts pressure to repay the debt and it becomes harder and harder. So if the dollar were to strengthen, that would create a very, very big problem. I think the Goldman Sachs issued a report where it showed that the growth divergence between emerging markets and developed markets is at its lowest point. If you look at the cycles and it leaves that it could expand and right now, I think it discounts like a 4% growth for EM as a total.

So if the dollar strengthens, I don’t think we’ll see these numbers. I think you’ll see pressure on EM. Huge.

TN: Talking about EMs, and we talked about reserves and you mention Turkey. Let’s talk about Turkey Turkey for a minute because you’ve made some really interesting statements about Turkey. And I’d like to really understand your perspective.

QuickHit

Sentiment has soured: How will governments and companies respond? (Part 2)

Post author By admin
Post date August 26, 2021

In this second part, Sam and Marko discussed possible tapering, what can the government do to help private companies, how the consumer sentiment is looking right now, what should you do with your investment in this Delta variant scare? Are vaccines really effective? And what is this thing that the Biden administration needs to do right or they’ll be dead?

Please go here for the first part.

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This QuickHit episode was recorded on August 19, 2021.

The views and opinions expressed in this Sentiment has soured: How will governments and companies respond? (Part 1) QuickHit episode are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Complete Intelligence. Any contents provided by our guest are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any political party, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Show Notes

TN: Sounds like both of you agree that China is going to do more stimulus. I think they’re late. I think they should have started five or six months ago. But better now than never. Right. So it sounds to me like you believe that there will be the beginning of a taper, maybe a small beginning of a taper late this year. Is that fair to say?

SR: Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that there will be some form of taper. Okay. I don’t know, even if it’s just rhetoric, as we move into 2022, at least with what we know right now, I don’t think they should. But what I think they should do and what they’re likely to do are two wildly different things.

TN: So even if it say 10 billion a month, which is nothing compared to the entire kind of stimulus, monetary stimulus are doing right now, that would have a dramatic sentimental chain. Is that your view?

SR: Yes. So it’s all about that incremental change in Cinnamon. It’s not about the incremental change in the addition to the portfolio.

TN: Right. Marko, are you the same? Do you think there’s a change in the sentiment of the Fed and there’s going to be a move toward tapering late in the year?

MP: I mean, I think tapering happened in June at the FRC meeting. And so that’s… Because that’s when the Fed incrementally turned hawkish. The DXY dropped quite significantly after the meeting. So I think that the risk in your view is that a lot of the things that we’re talking about right now have been slowly priced in over a period of time. And while oil prices and S&P 500 haven’t really corrected to this view reality. You know, so S&P 500 is reaching a new high, except for the last two days. Oil prices have started to come down finally.

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Now the 10-year has actually been pretty stable through the last couple of weeks worth of volatility. And that tells me a couple of things. I think the bottom market price, a lot of the things we’re talking about already. The second issue is that fiscal policy is really tricky when we talk about it.

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And here’s what I mean. 1953 we had a fiscal cliff recession after the Korean War. But that’s because the fiscal cliff was very clean, very simple. We spend a lot of money on bullet casings and tanks and airplanes during the Korean War, and then that fiscal spend stayed on the Korean Peninsula. We couldn’t take it back with us in 1953. In other words, we got a fiscal cliff recession.

This time around, the 1.9 trillion, you know, fiscal stimulus we had earlier this year, that actually, in a curial mathematical terms, shows up as a huge fiscal cliff next year. But that actually lives on on household balance sheets. And so that’s where I would say that like, let’s see how the Delta variant issue resolves itself, because in one month, here’s what I know.

I know the savings rate in the United States, the personal savings rate is still elevated at 9.6%. I know that revolving credit is going through the roof, and the households are re-leveraging themselves in a way that they have it for ten years. The US consumer is acting in the ways they acted in the 90s and 2000s.

If you look at household debt, percent of GDP, you got this long period of deleveraging for the past ten years. And now it’s coming back up. And so to me, that’s where I think the fiscal cliff of next year is overstated. And the reason that even a ten year fiscal package matters is because you’re talking about a ten-year bond. If I’m going to hold a ten-year bond, that on the back end of that 10-year, there is Trump tax cut level of unnecessary fiscal stimulus.

Let me say that again, what this fiscal spend right now is going to produce a similar procyclical fiscal thrust that we had during the Trump administrations in the last two years, through doc cuts, this time through infrastructure spending. That’s going to create a modest fiscal thrust, positive fiscal thrust for the duration of the asset that you’re holding. And I think that the market will still have to respond to that, even though next year there’s no way to avoid mathematical fiscal flip.

TN: Interesting. So. All of these things together, just going back to the reason I initially contacted you guys. I was hearing companies telling me that their Q3 revenues were really, they were downgrading them, and they’re really worried about their performance in Q3. And I think we’ve seen that or I’ve seen it anecdotally.

We saw tourism not necessarily be what we thought it would be. We’ve seen a lot of things happen that we didn’t really think would happen over the summer or not happen that we thought would happen. So how are you seeing these policies or how do you expect these policies to manifest at the company level? And when do you expect them to help companies to move forward?

MP: Well, I don’t think any policies will help companies. I think what will help companies is once Covid cases go down, and people kind of stop being afraid of the Delta wave.

Right now, if you look at hotel stocks. Hotel stocks are back through, like November 20th level, like they’re back to pre-Pfizer result levels. And I think that that’s a great investment opportunity. I would be long COVID place right now because, you know, the data from Israel, the data from Iceland, the data from a lot of different places that are fully, almost fully vaccinated are pretty clear, which is that vaccinated people can absolutely get Covid, and very few of them have adverse effects. The efficiency is actually at very high levels. A lot of people misinterpret, a lot of people… Sorry, the media is misinterpreting the data. And once you account for age disparities and so on, the efficiency here is like in the 90s.

TN: So it’s amazing.

MP: Yeah. Look, it’s a simple fact. Now that’s going to take some time as Sam said, I think that’s going to be articulating the data for the next month. I think that you have a great entry point into the Covid place right now. And I don’t think that any of the policies we’re really talking about are going to have much of an effect on earnings over the next quarter.

TN: I’ll give you a data point that I was looking at earlier today. Texas right now has the same number of cases that it had in Feb of ’21. Okay. But the daily fatalities are 60% lower than they were in Feb. Okay. So the case counts are just as high, but the fatalities are dramatically lower. And that’s good news, right.

MP: Look, Tony, I would study really the case of Israel, because if you study the overall numbers in Israel, you come up with a figure. I think it’s 60% effectiveness for Pfizer, which is lower than advertising, but that’s actually a mathematical concept called a Sisyphus paradox.

And what’s happening is that we need to segregate the different age cohorts not just average them together.

TN: That’s right.

MP: You know, because the elderly tends to be more vaccinated. You have a larger pool of older people who tend to have received a vaccine. They also tend to go to a hospital more often with a respiratory disease, even though they’re vaccinated.

So you can’t just average everyone together. The actual vaccine efficacy is in the 90s for all cohorts. Except in the 80s for some of the much older, over 80. It’s, like, about 80% effective. And so, yeah, I think a lot of this is… You know where I want to compare Covid to? And I think Sam will appreciate this. I compared it to the Euro area crisis.

You could have made a call in 2010 that this thing was over. Like once Germany like bit the bullet and bailed out Greece the first time? Like it was over, guys. But every time a new country showed up, he was like, Whoa. Here goes Portugal. Oh, my God! The world’s gonna end! And it’s like, similarly COVID, like, we know where we’re headed. Like, every wave is gonna cause sentiment issues and so on. But I would just bet against those.

TN: That’s a good call. I like that. I like the optimism there, and I like the perspective there. I think that’s really interesting. Sam, what do you think?

SR: I think there’s a combination of two things. One, I think Marco is 100%, right? That this is an awful lot like the Euro area crisis. Every single time, like Greece was the first big bang. Then you had the ripple effect to Portugal. Then it was Spain. And everybody was wondering what the next set of fall was and had the correction of 2011. That was fun. You had these longer term kind of ripples.

I think there’s going to continue to be ripples this time around. And the question is in my mind, it’s really difficult to predict what people sentiment around those ripples are going to be. I think we can look through them for the next five to ten years and say it’s all going to be fine. This is the way it’s going to play out.

The real question is, how does the American consumer mindset, how does that actually grasp this ripple to move through it? And how does China react? How does Europe react? Right. There’s a number of factors that play in here, but I think the really difficult and maybe not as priced in as they should be. To Marco’s point. I think this is a really long term, very strange kind of predicament that we’re in where vaccines are really good. They work really, really well.

How do people’s minds begin to grasp it? And do they begin to look through? We get the higher vaccine rates? Do we really power through this in a meaningful way, very, very quickly, or does it continue to be highly volatile on the consumer sentiment front? Because if consumer sentiment continues to fall, it’s going to be a big problem for the back half of this year. And that I mean. It’s kind of…

TN: We’re right there at the back there in the back half of the year, right? That. This is a terrible time for consumer sentiment to fall because we’re at the precipice of kind of holiday season buying. Not quite there yet, but if it stays for two more months, it gets pretty bad.

SR: It does get pretty bad. But I think this is also one of those points that I think could really be a tailwind to Marko’s earlier comments about fiscal stimulus and fiscal stimulus being higher than anticipated. You continue to have consumer sentiment fall. You continue to have people fearful of Delta, you have a couple of bad job prints, and all of a sudden you’re going to have much higher fiscal spend. You’re going to have a very dovish Fed.

TN: Right.

SR: I think that’s the risk to call it “the market.” That’s the risk to kind of my side of Marko and I’s bet is if all of a sudden this fear actually really ingrains itself within individuals, it’s going to be a huge, huge issue as we move into the Christmas buying season for companies, Christmas buying season for consumers, and you’re going to get big checks written out of Washington, regardless of the geopolitical situation, regardless of whether or not people want to say Biden might be lame duck because of Afghanistan, etc.

All of a sudden you’re going to have a Fed that’s very concerned, thinking it was a ripping economy with incredible inflation that wasn’t going anywhere. You’re going to have them reverse very, very quickly. You’re going to have senators on both sides of the aisle very concerned that they just, they might get blamed for a recession.

It’s going to be a really interesting queue for.

TN: It is.

MP: That’s why it’s a dynamic environment. Right. And and what I would say is like, look, I have certainty on the Delta wave. Certainty. Every wave we’ve had has crested, other than in emerging markets because their testing is poor. So it’s actually a mega wave that we constantly think is over, but it isn’t.

In the US we know how the story plays up. We know it. It’s a four to six week wave. The challenge here Tony, is that we’re talking in the middle of this wave. We have probably another two to three weeks of upswing, and then we’re going to have a down swing in cases. And by the way, I know this with a science, like, a hundred percent certainty because we had waves collapse even before we had vaccines.

So this is a really important point, because if the Fed reacts to something that is extremely impermanent, something that’s over in three weeks, if the Fed at Jacksonhole and subsequently in September waivers, you know, I mean, that will just set, I think the market alight, in my view. I think that will collapse the dollar and they will sell the bond, because it will have been using this, you know, temporary blip in sentiments to justify a changing course.

The other thing I would say is, like, so Sam mention Afghanistan. I think he’s right to mention it. I think it’s really significant, and it’s significant because of this. I think… I’ve always expected that during the summer, the fiscal policy would get much more challenging. And now, because of the Republicans, I think moderate Democrats in the Senate versus progressive Democrats in the House were always going to try to eat each other alive.

But now, with this utter failure in Afghanistan, that looks really, really bad, they are going to circle the wagons on fiscal calls because the last remaining, the last remaining lever of the Biden administration is this fiscal package. If they don’t get it through, guys. Yeah. The Biden administration is done. And I mean, I’m not talking about midterms either. So they have to do something on fiscal. Right.

So this is why the stakes have now become much higher. They’re gonna pay Mansion. They’re gonna pay Cinema. They’re gonna get deep water ports in Arizona and West Virginia to get their compliant with a fiscal deal. You know what I mean? Like, there’s gonna be so much more. I wish I was living in West Virginia. I mean, they’re gonna have ice rinks in every little town. It’s gonna be amazing.

And so this is something to keep in mind, I think on that front, too. So I agree with Sam. I think it’s a really good point of how these things are very dynamic and they reinforce each other. And I just think that the political pack of lease resistance in every single issue we’re talking about here leads to more profligacy.

TN: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think at least for the near term, that’s the bias, is exactly in that direction.

Okay. Guys. Thank you so much. Again, I think we could go on for hours with this, and I love this discussion, but I really appreciate your time.

For everyone who’s watching. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we need a few more subscribers to bring you a few more capabilities on our channel. If you don’t mind, please subscribe.

And Sam and Marko. Really appreciate your time. Thanks very much.

MP: Thank you. Thank you.

TN: Let’s do it again, and I want to come back in January and see who wins.

MP: Yeah, sure. We should definitely do that. We didn’t tell people when we been into, but it’s like a really nice steak dinner, I think was the… If the 10-year is at like between one point 49 and one point 51, I think we just…

QuickHit

Sentiment has soured: How will governments and companies respond? (Part 1)

Post author By admin
Post date August 24, 2021

Companies are saying that the Q3 revenues will be down a bit. What’s really happening and how long will this last? Chief Economist for Avalon Advisors, Sam Rines, and a returning guest answers that with our first-time guest Marko Papic, the chief strategist for Clocktower Group.

In addition, both the Michigan Consumer Sentiment and the NY Manufacturing survey down as well. Watch what the experts are seeing and what they think might happen early in 2022.

Watch Part 2 here.

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This QuickHit episode was recorded on August 19, 2021.

Show Notes

TN: So I guess we’ve started to see some negative news come in with the Michigan Consumer Sentiment with the New York Manufacturing Survey and other things. Most recently, we had some of the housing sentiment information come in. And I’ve heard companies talk about their revenues for Q3 will be down a bit. And so I wanted to talk to you guys to say, are we at a turning point? What’s really happening and how long do you expect it to last? Marko, why don’t you let us know what your observation is, kind of what you’re seeing?

MP: Well, I think that, you know, the bull market has been telling us that we were going to have an intra cyclical blip, hiccup, interregnum, however you want to call it since really March. And there’s, like, really three reasons for this. One, the expectations of fiscal policy peaked in March. Since then, the market has been pricing it less and less expansion of fiscal deficits. Two Chinese have been engaged in deleveraging, really, since the end of Q4 last year, and that started showing up in the data also on March, April, May.

And then the final issue is that the big topic right now is something we’ve been focused on for a while, too, which is this handover from goods to services, which is really problematic for the economy. We had the surge of spending on goods, and now we all expected a YOLO summer where everybody got to YOLO. It really happened.

I mean, it kind of did. Things were okay but, that handoff from good services was always gonna be complicated, anyways. And so I’m going to stop there because then I can tell you where I stand and going forward. But I think that’s what’s happening now and what I would be worried about. And I really want to know what Sam thinks about this is that the bull market been telling you this since March. There’s some assets that were kind of front load. The one asset that hasn’t really is S&P 500, as kind of ignored these issues.

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TN: Right. Sam, what are you seeing and what do you think?

SR: Yeah, I’ll jump in on the third point that Marko made, which is that handoff from services or from goods to services. That did not go as smoothly as was planned or as thought by many. And I don’t think it’s going to get a whole lot better here. You have two things kind of smacking you in the face at the moment. That is University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment and the expectations. Neither of those came in fantastically. Today isn’t great. Tomorrow isn’t expected to be great.

Part of that is probably the Delta variant, depending on what part of the country you’re in, that is really beginning to become an issue. Not necessarily, I mean, it’s nowhere near as big of an issue as COVID was for death and mortality in call it 2020. But it’s a significant hit to the consumer’s mindset. Right?

And I think that’s the part, what really matters is how people are thinking about it. And if people are thinking about it in a fear mode, that is going to constrain their switch from goods to services and the switch from goods to services over time is necessary for the economy to begin growing again at a place that is both sustainable and is somewhat elevated. But at this point, it’s really difficult to see exactly where that catalyst is going to come come from, how it’s going to actually materialize in a way that we can get somewhat excited about and begin to actually become a driver of employment. We do need that hand off to services to drive employment numbers higher.

And what we really need is a combination of employment numbers going higher, GDP being sustainably elevated to get bond rates higher. So I think Marko’s point on what the treasury market is telling us should not be discounted in any way whatsoever.

The treasury market is telling us we’re not exactly going to a 4% growth rate with elevated inflation.

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TN: Right.

SR: It’s telling us we’re going to something between Japan and Germany at this point.

TN: Yeah. That’s what I’m a bit worried about. And with the consumer sentiment especially, I’m a bit worried about sticky sentiment where we have this Delta variant or other expectations, and they remain on the downside, even if there are good things happening.

Do you guys share those worries, or do you think maybe the Michigan survey was a blip?

SR: Oh, I’ll just jump in for 1 minute. I don’t think it was a blip at all. I think what people should be very concerned about at this point is what the next reading is. That reading did not include the collapse of Afghanistan. It did not include any sort of significant geopolitical risk that is going to be significant for a number of Americans.

Again, it’s kind of like Covid. It might not affect the economy much. It’s going to affect the psyche of America significantly as we move forward. And if consumer sentiment were to pick up in the face of what we’ve seen over the last few days, I would be pretty shocked.

TN: It would be remarkable. Marko, what do you think about that?

MP: So I’m going to take the other side of this because I have a bet on with Sam, and the bet is, by the end of the year, I’m betting the 10-year is going to be closer to 2%. He’s betting it’s going to be closer to 1%. So he’s been winning for a long time, but we settled the bet January 1, 2022.

Here’s why I think I would take the other side of a lot of the things, like when we think about where we’re headed. So first, I think there’s three things I’m looking at. There’s really four things. But the fourth is the Fed. And I’m going to like Sam talk about that because he knows a lot more than I do. The first three things I’m looking at is, as I said, there are reasons that the bond market has rallied. And I think a lot of these reasons were baked in the cake for the past six months, or at least since March.

The first and foremost is China. And China is no longer deleveraged. The July 30th Politburo meeting clearly had a policy shift, but I would argue that that been the case since April 30. They’ve been telling us they are going to step off the break. And, quite frankly, I don’t need them to search infrastructure spending a lot. I don’t need them to do a lot of LGFB. I just need them to stop the leverage. And so they’re doing that.

And the reason they’re doing that is fundamentally the same reason they crack down on tech. And it has to do with the fact that Xi Jinping has to win an election next year. Yeah. And an election. It’s not a clear cut deal. He’s going to extend his term for another five years. CCP, The Chinese Communist Party is a multi sort of variant entity, and he has to sell his peers in the communist party that the economy is going to be stable.

And so we expect there to be a significant policy shift in China. So one of the sort of bond bullish economic bearish variables is shifting. The second is fiscal policy. Remember I mentioned that in March, investors basically started, like the expectations of further deficit increases, basically whittle down. This was also expected.

The summer period was also going to be one during which the negotiations over the next fiscal package were going to get very difficult. I would use the analog of 2017. Throughout the summer of 2017, everybody lost faith in tax cuts by the Trump administration. And that’s because fundamentally, investors are very poor at forecasting fiscal policy. And I think it has to do with the fact that we’re overly focused on monetary policy. We’re very comfortable with the way that monetary policy uses forward guidance.

I mean, think about it. Central bankers bend over backwards to tell us what you’re going to do in 2023. Fiscal policy is a product of game theory, its product of backstabbing, its product of using the media to increase the cost of collaboration, of cooperation. And so I think that by the end of the year, we will get more physical spending. I think the net deficit contribution will be about $2 trillion, the net contribution to deficit, which is on the high end. If you look at Wall Street, most people think 500 billion to a trillion, I would take double of that.

And then the final issue is the Delta. Delta is going to be like any other wave that we’ve had is going to dissipate in a couple of weeks. And also on top of that, the data is very, very robust. If you’re vaccinated, you’re good. Now, I agree with everything Sam has said. Delta has been relevant. It has, you know, made it difficult to transition from goods to services, but it will dissipate. Vaccines work. People with just behavior. So.

TN: Let me go back to the first thing you mentioned, Marko, is you mentioned China will have a new policy environment. What does that look like to you?

MP: There’s going to be more monetary policy support, for sure. So they’ve already, the PBOC has basically already told us they’re going to do an interest rate cut and another RRR cut by the end of the year. Also, they are going to make it easier for infrastructure spending to happen. Only about 20-30% of all bonds, local government bonds have been issued relative to where we should be in the year. I don’t think we’re going to get to 100%. But they could very well double what they issued thus far in eight months over the next four months.

So does this mean that you should necessarily be like long copper? No, I don’t think so. They’re not going to stimulate like crazy. The analogy I’m using is that the Chinese policy makers have been pressing on a break, really, since the recovery of Covid in second half of 2020. They’ve been pressing on the breaks for a number of reasons, political, leverage reasons, blah, blah, blah. They’re not going to ease off of that break. That’s an important condition for global economy to stabilize.

Thus far, China has actually been a head wind to global growth. They’ve been benefiting from exports, you know, because we’ve been basically buying too many goods. They know the handoff from goods to services is going to happen. Goods consumption is going to go down. That’s going to hurt their exports. On top of that, they have this political catalyst where Xi Jinping wants to ease into next year with economy stable.

Plus, they’ve just cracked down on their tech sector. They’re doing regulatory policy. They have problems in the infrastructure and real estate sectors. And so we expect that they will stimulate the economy. Think about it that way. Much more actively than they have thus far.

TN: Great. Okay. That’s good news. It’s very good news. Sam?

SR: Yeah. So the only push back that I would give to Marko and it’s not really pushback, given his assessment, because I agree with 99% of what he’s saying. But the one place that I think is being overlooked is, one thing is the fiscal policy with 2 trillion is great, but that’s probably spread over five to ten years, and therefore it’s cool. But it’s not that big of a deal when it comes to the treasury market or to the economic growth rate on a one-year basis. It’s not going to move the needle as much as the middle of COVID.

TN: Let me ask. Sorry to interrupt you. But when you say that’s going to take five to ten years, when we think about things like the PPP program isn’t even fully utilized. A lot of this fiscal that’s been approved over the last year isn’t fully utilized. So when these things pass and you say it’s going to take five to ten years, there’s the sentiment of the bill passing. But then there’s the reality of the spend. Right. And so you just take a random infrastructure multiplier of 1.6 and apply it.

There’s an expectation that that three and a half trillion or whatever number happens, two trillion, whatever will materialize in the next year. But it’s not. It’s a partial of it over the next, say, at least half a decade. Is that fair to say?

SR: Correct? Yeah. Which is great. It’s better than nothing in terms of a catalyst to the economy. The key for me is it’s not being borrowed all at once. It’s not being spent all at once. Right.

If it was a $2 trillion infrastructure package to be spent in 2022, I would lose my bet to Marko in a heartbeat. It would be a huge lose for me, and I would just pay up. But I would caution to a certain degree, it’s $200 billion a year isn’t that big of a deal to the US economy, right. That’s a very de minimis. Sounds like a big number, but it’s rather de minimis to the overall scale of what the US economy is.

And you incorporate that on top of a Federal Reserve that’s likely to begin pulling back, or at least intimate heavily that they’re going to begin pulling back incremental stimulus or incremental stimulus by the end of 2021 and 2022. And all of a sudden you have a pretty hawkish kind of outlook for the US economy as we enter that 2022 phase. And it’s difficult for me, at least, to see the longer term, short term rates, I think, could move higher, particularly that call it one to three year frame. But the ten to 30-year frame, for me is very difficult to see those rates moving higher. With that type of hawkish policy in coming to fruition, it’s kind of a push and pull to me. So I’m not obviously, I don’t disagree with the view that China is going to stimulate and begin to actually accelerate growth there. I just don’t know how much that’s actually going to push back on America and begin to push rates higher here.

I think we’ve had max dovishness. And strictly Max dovishness is when you see max rates and when you begin to have incremental hawkishness on the monetary policy side and fiscal side. And 2 trillion would be slightly hawkish versus 2020 and early 2021. When you begin to have that pivot, that it’s hard for me to see longer term interest rates moving materially higher for longer than call it a month or two.

TN: Okay, so a couple of things that you said, it sounds like both you agree that China is going to do more stimulus. I think they’re late. I think they should have started five or six months ago, but better now than never. Right. So it sounds to me like you believe that there will be the beginning of a taper, maybe a small beginning of a taper late this year. Is that fair to say.

QuickHit

QuickHit Cage Match: Time to Taper?

Post author By admin
Post date August 17, 2021

This is a special QuickHit Cage Match edition with returning guest Albert Marko, and joining us for the very first time Andreas Steno Larsen to talk about tapering. Will the Fed taper this year? If yes, when, how, and why? If no, why not? Also discussed are the housing market, China GDP, and corporate earnings.

Andreas is the chief global strategist at Nordea Bank, which is mostly a Nordic bank, but has a presence in large parts of Europe, but also in the US. He speaks on behalf of the bank on topics surrounding global markets and in particular bond markets.

Albert Marko is a consultant for financial firms and high net worth individuals trying to navigate Washington, DC and what the Fed and Congress are up to.

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This QuickHit episode was recorded on August 16, 2021.

The views and opinions expressed in this QuickHit Cage Match: Time to Taper? QuickHit episode are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Complete Intelligence. Any contents provided by our guest are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any political party, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Show Notes

TN: So Andreas, I noticed you guys, you and Albert kind of in a Twitter fight last week about tapering, and that’s what really drew me to this discussion. I wanted to give you guys a platform to talk through this. So help me understand, you know. So what is your position? Why do you think it’s going to happen? When do you think it’s going to happen?

ASL: Well, I think tapering is right around the corner, and the basic reason is that I expect marked sequential improvements in the labor market in the US over the coming two or three quarters. If you look at it, very simply speaking, right now, there are more job openings than unemployed in the US. I know I disagree with Albert on this as well. But in the old world, that would at least have let the Fed to turn very, very hawkish when they can see such a rate between job openings and unemployed as we have right now.

I basically have a case that once these extraordinary benefits, they will end across the US during September. Then we will have an explosion in a positive sense in the US Labor market. And that is exactly what is needed to convince the Fed of tapering.

So my base case is a decision taken in September and then an implementation starting already in December this year. And I expect them to be done already during the first half of next year with the tapering process. So it’s fairly aggressive compared to the scenarios I’ve seen painted by by other analysts.

TN: That’s really interesting. I just want to clarify one thing. When you say explosion the labor market, you mean more people coming into the market?

ASL: Yeah. And they come into the market and fill these job openings right now, we have a low labor market mobility due to a lot of temporary factors. And once they’re gone, then we should expect employment to be almost running at full speed before New Years.

TN: Okay. Okay. Very interesting. Albert, take it away. Help me understand what you’re thinking.

AM: Well, I mean, I would agree with him in the old days. Right. But we are in a situation where these tapering assumptions are based on Fed rhetoric and the public comments that they’ve been making specifically addressing his unemployment, unemployment boost or surge.

You know, we still have COVID lockdown patchwork across the world happening at the moment. Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and most importantly, China, because no one’s looking right now in China, but China’s GDP looks like it’s not going to surpass two or 3% for the next four or five quarters. With that in mind, where the United States going to get inventory for the holiday season and have this boost in employment surge that we usually get on holiday season.

It’s just, to me, there’s so many negatives, so many variables with negative connotations towards it. I can’t see the Fed tapering and just absolutely obliterating the market right before mid term season coming up in 2022. It’s just for me, it’s just inconceivable for them to do such a thing like that.

TN: Okay. Understood. So, Andreas, what do you think? Let’s say it doesn’t happen in September. What is the Fed thinking through and what mechanisms do they have to use, say, instead of a taper? Are there other things they can do aside from taper that will basically bring about the same intended outcome?

ASL: Well, I want to first of all, address what Albert said on China. I perfectly agree with the view on China right now. China is slowing massively. But I actually find it very interesting that the Federal Reserve is now even more behind the curve when it comes to its reaction function compared to earlier cycles, given that they want to see realized progress in labor markets and not forecasted progress.

And we know that labor markets, they lack the actual economic development. So it’s almost a given in my view, that we have a surge in employment over the coming couple of quarters as a consequence of what happened during the first half of the year. So that’s one thing.

And the second thing is that what we see right now in China is another wave of restrictions that will lead to renewed supply chains disruptions across the globe. And again, we will have a wave of supply side inflation, which is the exact kind of inflation that we are faced with right now. And given how the Fed communicated just three months back, you have to be amazed by how scared they are of the supply side inflation, even though it’s not the kind of inflation that they like.

So I still think that they will react to this, even though it’s supply side driven. What they have in sort of the toolbox ahead of September is obviously that they could hint that the interest rate path further out could be hiked. But otherwise, I think the most obvious tool is to look at the purchases of mortgages. Since we currently have a situation where most US consumers, they are very worried or even scared of buying a house. Timing wise right now, as a consequence of the rapid rise we’ve seen in the house prices. And I guess that’s directly linked to what the Fed is done on mortgages.

TN: Yeah. I can tell you just from my observation here in Texas where we have a lot of people moving in. House prices have taken a pause for probably the last two or three months where things even two, three months ago wouldn’t stay on the market for, like, three days. We’ve started to see things on the market for longer.

And so, I’m seeing what you’re saying, Andreas, about the housing market. And the question is, can that stuff pick up again, and is it justified? Albert, what’s your response to Andreas statement?

AM: The best comparison that we have is the 2013 economy to today’s economy. No one can sit there and argue that today’s economy is stronger than 2013. And look what Tapering Tantrum did to 2013 market. It was an absolute debacle. Yellen was so put off by Bernanke’s Tapering that she refused to do it in 2015. And in 2017, when they even mentioned it again, the market took a leg down. So, with that, right? And especially with Andres mentioning the word inflation, which is an absolute bad word to talk about in DC, tapering would have to have the Fed admit wrongdoing on sticking inflation.

When have we ever seen the US Federal Reserve ever take blame for something that’s negative in the markets? They just simply don’t do that. In fact, what I think they’re going to end up doing is allowing a market correction late into the fall and then unleash another $3 trillion of QE with Yellen and Powell to support the markets. So which would be completely opposite of tapering.

TN: Yeah, that’s interesting. You have completely opposite views. And what’s your view on the possibility of QE? I mean, is it possible?

ASL: Well, I don’t think Albert and I disagree a whole lot on the structural view or outlook, since that QE is a permanent instrument and it’s needed to fund the debt load of the US Treasury. There is no doubt about it. The point being here that the Federal Reserve needs a positive excuse to start tapering. I agree with that as well. And that exact positive excuse will be another couple of very strong labor market reports.

That’s exactly what they’ve been telling us. That they want to see between 800K and 1 million jobs created a month would be enough for them to launch a Tapering decision in September. Whether they will succeed with the entire tapering process is whole different question, but I’m looking for that decision in September. And then I guess Albert and I will agree a lot on the market takeaways if they take such a decision.

AM: Let me ask you a question Andreas. What would happen if the United States Congress refuses to deal with the debt ceiling and have no fiscal at that point? What would happen then?

ASL: Well, in such case, there is a whole lot of issues that you need to take care of as a Fed Reserve. So first of all, I’m not too scared of that scenario. I consider very low probability. I’m interested if you have another opinion.

AM: I personally don’t think it happens until at the very earliest November.

ASL: Yeah, but, I mean, obviously, every time there’s a debt ceiling deadline, we know that the true deadline is not the suspension deadline, its the deadline when the US Treasury is not able to run on fuels any longer, right? And that would be sometime during late October, there about I agree with you on that. So we basically have a window right now without a whole lot of issuance due to the debt ceiling being in place. And I actually think that’s a decent window for the Federal Reserve to utilize if they want to start tapering, since there is a smaller issuance for the private sector to swallow in such case.

TN: Interesting. Okay. What are you guys seeing on the corporate side? Are you seeing strength on the corporate side? I know we just had earnings season and they were very strong, but are you seeing a justifiably strong corporate position to start to taper?

AM: Right now, I really don’t. I mean, the University of Michigan Consumer Confidence had collapse. I think today, New York’s Manufacturer Index came in at 18.3, which was an astounding collapses in itself. You know, I personally deal with a couple of hedge funds, and they have been well behind the curve in returns right now.

I think the best ones are sub 10% for the year, so they’re gonna have to move back into cyclicals, and they’re gonna have to move back into small caps to make up the difference before the year end. Simply just even discussing that option, it makes tapering, you know, even less of a likely outcome just because it would ruin the market.

ASL: Obviously, if you go long small caps right now into a tapering scenario, you will end up losing. I agree with that. That would be kind of the worst. Yeah, exactly. But otherwise, I have to agree that the corporate sector is more doubtful, I would say, than the US Treasury in terms of a tapering decision. I’m much more scared of the corporate debt load than I am of the US Treasury debt load.

The State’s currency issue is they can always get rid of such a scenario. But the corporate sector is bigger trouble than the US Treasury into this scenario that I depict.

AM: Yeah. I completely agree with that one.

TN: Wow. We end on agreement. Guys. Thank you so much for this. Thanks so much for your time. I really look forward to it. Andreas, I look forward to having you back. Albert, of course, we look forward to having you back. Have a great week ahead, guys. Thank you very much.

And for all you guys watching. Thanks for taking the time. Please subscribe to our channel. And we’ll see you next time. Thanks very much.

QuickHit

The Death of Growth: Old & rich vs young & poor in 2030 & beyond (Part 2)

Post author By admin
Post date June 29, 2021

The world’s birth rate is changing. Clint Laurent from Global Demographics shares surprising discoveries that he believes will happen in the next 10 years and how this will shape the world?

This is the second part of this discussion. Go here for part one.

Clint started Global Demographics in 1996 and cover 117 countries throughout the world and China. They do that right down to county level of 2,248 counties. Clint believes that demographics are better than financial data from the point of view of forecasting because they tend to be stable trends.

Global Demographics is able to come up with reliable forecasts at least 15 years out. After 15 years, reliability goes down and they are typically never more plus or minus 5% error in our long-term forecast. Their clients are mainly consumer goods companies, infrastructure backbones and things like that.

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This QuickHit episode was recorded on June 17, 2021.

The views and opinions expressed in this QuickHit Clint Demographics Part 2 QuickHit episode are those of the guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Complete Intelligence. Any contents provided by our guest are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any political party, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Show Notes

TN: So Indonesia, India, Brazil and so on, so capital formation, capital investment is the real weakness there and it seems to me that’s a function of largely education. Is that fair to say?

CL: That’s exactly what it is. I mean, they you know, as they get the education right and, you know, they’re working on it, most of these countries that have been quite responsible in that area. And as they get that right, so the investment comes in, so the consumer gets more affluent and becomes a virtuous circle.

TN: OK, well, what timescale are we talking about for that consumption to come in a really notable way, for example, to take the place of, say, the under 40 Chinese consumption or the under 40, say, Western Europe or American consumption?

CL: Well, that’s the bad news. I mean, when you take India at least 15 years to get there. Because the education is only just coming right. And again to pick on India. India’s urbanization, 10 years ago, it was 30% of the population. Today, it’s 33% of the population.

TN: OK. So it’s not happening nearly fast enough.

CL: No. When you’re an uneducated girl in a village, why would you go to a slum somewhere of a big city? Your lifestyle would be actually worse, not better. And so they hadn’t been able to get that China effect of moving people from the low productivity agriculture into high productivity urban type of work.

TN: Yeah, but I think a lot of the, particularly the Westerners who are watching this would say, yeah, but I’ve been to Gurgaon and I’ve, you know, I’ve been to that kind of tech hubs in India. And I see, you know, a lot of women coming up in those hubs or have come up in those hubs over the last 10 or 20 years. But is not just such a small percentage that it matters, but it’s not making a huge difference?

CL: Exactly. It’s a small percentage. I mean, remember India is just behind China in terms of total population now. And by 2045, there’s 1.5 billion people. Because they’ve got the birthrate right under control as well. It’s dropping. But again, they’ve got an inertia of more women of childbearing age coming through. So total births keep going up. So they’ve got this problem of just too many people looking for jobs, which keeps the wage rates down. And that. And that’s what’s frustrating the education system, too, is they have to keep growing the number of school places to stand still, let alone expand. But they’re getting that right. So I don’t want to sound negative about that. All these countries are doing quite nicely on that, some positive.

And so but one important point to make is the demographic dividend hasn’t been collected. There’s was a lot of talk about India having a demographic dividend because there are always young people entering working age. But the trouble is they weren’t well enough educated, so they didn’t find jobs. In 2010, the propensity of a working age person to be in work was 58%. It’s now 50%. In other words, they couldn’t find the jobs for these people, so the dividend never paid off.

TN: OK, so jobs lead to consumption, of course.

CL: That’s right.

TN: But I guess. So it’s going to take these countries 10 to 15 years or more to get the quality of jobs that are needed.

CL: Yeah.

TN: So, you know, that growth that we’ve lazily relied on, say, China for the last 10 or 20 or 20 to 30 years, is there a gap between now and 10 to 15 years from now in terms of the rate of growth for, say, consumer goods and say, economic kind of new market entry, that sort of thing?

CL: Yeah, well, this is the crisis that’s coming. Because if we take, again, the kind of what I call the family stage countries, India, Brazil, etc, they actually need around about 250 million extra jobs in the next 25 years to get, to maintain their existing level of employment. Not lift it. Just maintain it. And that gives them a reasonable level of income. Not great, but hopefully with education situation, the earnings go up.

But let me put another layer on the cake, so to speak. This is fourth group of countries, which I call young and poor. I call them young because the median age of all of the countries in this group is 20 and some of them have a median age of 14. Mali and Niger, they both have a median age of 14.

That means half the population in those countries is under the age of 14 today. Yeah, and their birth rates are high. The average birth rate, an unweighted across these countries is 130 per thousand women. Most countries are at 40 elsewhere in the world. And the number of women of childbearing age, of course, are going up dramatically because of that as well. So even though the birthrate is starting to come down, it goes up dramatically. And it has a seismic effect.

First of all, is roughly a billion people in this part of the world at the moment. In 25 years time, there’s two billion of these people. In other words, in twenty five years, they add a billion people to their populations. And if I can just go on and to take Nigeria, for example, at the moment, has 45 million school age children, irrespective whether they are going to school, most of them are not. 45 million. It’s 90 million in 25 years time. Just to stand still on education, they have to double their education budget. And so, little own issues need improving.

TN: OK, so governments take, need tax revenue to grow their budgets. So will there will there be the incomes to allow them to grow those budgets just to keep up with where they are? And further, will they be able to accelerate the job growth to make sure they have those incomes, to keep their education, to improve their education like, say, India or Indonesia is doing well?

CL: Well, this is the crisis that’s coming because the answer simply is no. And it’s no for the simple reason that up until now, this is really what I was saying we were at a cusp. Up until now, the growth in consumption by the older affluent or the older countries generally, which includes China, has been such that it’s kept relatively full employment throughout the world.

There’s been enough jobs for those who are looking for jobs. And that doesn’t sound a bit. But even the young, poor countries have been trotting along at about 55% of working age people employed, which seems to work out quite well. But suddenly that whole relationship changes. As I said, the countries that account for, well, the old affluent account for 63% of global consumption. The other old add another 14% say up to 77% or 80%, chuck in a bit of India, 80%, which is also flattening out. So the countries account for 80% of the money that’s spent by households now flatten out in growth in their demand.

Layer on top of that, there’s a continuous increase in productivity per worker. The amount of number of workers needed to meet the new additional demand over the next 25 years is 300 million. And as I told you earlier, this 740 million people that are going to be looking for an extra job.

It’s going to be roughly 400 million people, mainly in the poor countries, are in a little bit in need, family stage countries, who are at working age, would like to have a job, but can’t get a job. That’s 400 million.

TN: That’s astounding. OK, so that’s as big as, say, the EU, right?

CL: Yeah, well, bigger.

TN: So if everyone in the EU didn’t have a job but they wanted a job. Man, woman and child couldn’t get a job.

CL: That’s right.

TN: So that’s terrible. So what do you think those people will do? What do you think some of the effects will be of this? First of all, where is this, kind of generally, geographically? Is this the kind of Bangladesh, Nigeria, kind of those types of countries?

CL: It’s based of the African continent and what we call South India, but not including India or Sri Lanka, which will be in Tibet, out there.

TN: So Bangladesh, Pakistan, Central Asia generally.

CL: And there’s a few small countries, obviously, in South America or Central America that are falling into this category as well. So it’s reasonably concentrated geographically. And it’s a real worry. And I think of myself. If I was turning, well, let’s say 20 and I cannot get a job. I’m scrambling for food. I’m scrambling for water, in some places in the world. What do I do? I’ve got nothing to lose. And that’s what something dramatic, I would rot and just die miserable, which is terrible.

So I think the world has a fairly major migration problem coming. These people are going to walk north. I would. So I don’t blame them. But it’s a desperate situation. So much so that in my own mind, it’s all very well to donate money to buy mosquito nets and things like that. I actually think would be better to donate money for a TV and an Internet connection so we could educate the kids. Because we could deliver education quite cheaply using modern technology. And if you could educate them, then they could do more productive things and then and so on and so on. You get the part of that. But there’s no easy solution to this one.

These people are largely alive today, will be alive in the next 10 years. And the consumption trends, well, they’re there too. The people with the money are getting older and saving. So the drawbridges are coming up. So this is.

TN: So migration. The migration issues we’ve seen over the last, say, 5 to 10 years sounds to me that they only intensify over the next, say, 15 to 20 years.

CL: Oh, incredibly so.

TN: And Europe is really the focal point. Yes. The US has some issues and maybe India, China have some issues. But it really seems to me that Europe is the major focal point there.

CL: But it’s the easy one to get to.

TN: Sure. Yeah.

CL: But there’s some other dimensions of migration, too, which is starting to come under stress. And I mean, for example, let’s take the U.K. It has one nurse for every 440 people in the population. So if you get sick, your access to a nurse is pretty good. But the UK hires nurses who have been trained and educated in the Philippines where there’s one nurse for every 4000 people in the population. Is that morally correct? Should affluent countries take skilled workers, from developing countries?

TN: But can you blame that worker for wanting to go to UK?

CL: Not at all. If I was the nurse, I’d be on the plane. I mean, basically, you’ve got the individual motivation and you’ve got the moral issue, and you’ve got the need. And then even if you take a country like Greece, which everyone says, oh, that’s nice and comfortable.

Greece’s population has dropped by one million people in the last 10 years. And that one million that are gone are skilled workers who got on a train and went north to Germany because under the EU, they can move.

TN: What percentage of the population is that? One?

CL: About 10%.

TN: 10% of the population?

CL: Well, you know, it’s a big drop. And again, you don’t blame the skilled plumber or electrician or whatever because he or she can earn 2 to 3 times as much going to Germany or getting across to Britain, which they could do perfectly legally. And then in 5 years time, the wife is with them, the kids are going to school, that kids speak German now, they never go back.

TN: So does this change, does this, you know, let’s say the education deficit issues and the jobs deficit issues in Africa, does it change immigration policy in Europe, for example, in the way Australia has the checklist of skills and those sorts of things to to migrate?

Does Europe come more to that type of migration policy to where they incentivize people, let’s say, in parts of Africa before coming, meaning get educated, you know, these sorts of things. And you can definitely come in. I mean, it certainly sounds like something that would be really helpful for places like Greece.

CL: Yeah, but not too helpful for places like Nigeria.

TN: Right.

CL: They’re losing the skilled worker. And the ability to lift the Nigerian economy is going to be a function of having skilled people. And if Greece takes them, that’s actually not that great. Right. So, yeah, you sort of resolve the great problem, but you don’t resolve the core problem, which is the change so to speak. Yeah. So it’s interesting because Greece, with its drop in population, its household values are dropping because the number of households is going down. And that’s the core asset of many households. So it’s trying to create some economic problems as well because the asset they could borrow against is going down in value, not going up in value. But that’s not just Greece. It’s Italy, Spain. It’s Romania, it’s Poland. And that being, you know, some of the talents are being sucked out. And that’s not good.

TN: So in sum, let me try to sum this up, because this has been a great conversation and it’s really opened up a lot of things I haven’t really thought about before. So so global consumption generally for, let’s say, the next 10 years or so is relatively stable.

We won’t see the rapid expansion that we saw in places like China over the last 10 or 20 years. So let’s say the pull on commodities right now, the inflation we’re seeing, the, you know, this sort of thing, that stuff really tamps down pretty quickly and really stabilizes for maybe a decade or so.

CL: Exactly.

TN: Once that stabilizes, then we see real disparities as these kind of young, poor countries explode in population. But the wealthy countries are pretty stable and continue to be pretty rich. Right. So we kind of have a status quo for the next decade or so. But then after that, there’s a real danger that emerges from global disparity.

CL: That’s right. You start to have a major, what I’d call a population crisis.

TN: Wow. OK. It’s a little bit dire. But this is great. Before we go, can you talk about, I know you have a couple of books coming out. Can you tell us what they’re about? I know they’re a little bit from coming to press, but I think it would be really helpful for people to understand what you’re writing about.

CL: Right. Well, one of the two books is basically called 2045: The Growing Demographic Crisis. And it’s pretty much along the lines that I’ve just discussed, the difference is, all the data is there. And you’ve got the data, if you like, at the segment level, which also go to by country level. And you can see how the numbers play out. It’s not something that we’re making these numbers up. They’re actually there. They’re pretty solid. And the core source, of course, is the World Bank and the United Nations that you can’t really argue with that. And it’s all old numbers behind what I’ve just discussed.

And the second book coming out is called China: 2040. Similar sort of theme. And what I have done that is China is going through a lot of changes that I’ve explained and China will continue to be important economically and politically for the next 10 years at least, if not longer. We know that.

So it’s actually quite important that people have a better understanding of what China is like demographically. And it’s not one country, it’s at least thirty one countries. The differences in consumption within that, it’s quite diversified.

This book is, if you like, the primer for someone that’s either doing business, thinking of doing business, investing in, whatever, into China. If you haven’t read it and you don’t know China, then you’d be dealing somewhat riskilly. If you read this, it’ll help you focus where the opportunities potentially are. Thanks for the opportunity to mention.

TN: Of course. Thank you so much for your time. You’ve been very generous and I think we’ve taken it a lot. I think of it to watch this two or three times before I kind of fully take it in. So I really appreciate it.

Further watching, please. We’d really appreciate if you’d like the video. We’d love it if you’d subscribe to our YouTube channel. And we’ll see you next time. Thank. Thanks very much.

CL: Thank you.

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