Tag: investment

Liquidity Drain and QT, Copper Gap, & Retail and the US Consumer w/ Daniel Lacalle

Post author By admin
Post date November 19, 2022

This Week Ahead, we’re joined by Daniel Lacalle, Tracy Shuchart, and Sam Rines.

First discussion is on liquidity drain and quantitative tightening (QT). How difficult is it?

Rate hikes get a lot of the headlines, but QT peaked at just under $9 trillion in April of this year. The Fed has pulled just over $200 billion from the balance sheet since then, which isn’t nothing, but it’s not much compared to the total.

Where do we go from here? Most of the Fed’s balance sheet is in Treasuries, followed by Mortgage-backed securities. What does the path ahead look like – and where is the pain felt most acutely? Daniel leads on this discussion.

We also look at the copper gap with Tracy. We don’t really have enough copper over the next ten years to fill the demand. Despite that, we’ve seen copper prices fall this year – and Complete Intelligence doesn’t expect them to rise in the coming months. Tracy helps us understand why we’re seeing this and what’s the reason for the more recent fall in the copper price. Is it just recession? Will we see prices snap upward to fill the gap or will it be a gradual upward price trend?

We’ve had some earnings reports for retail over the past couple of weeks and Sam had a fantastic newsletter on that. On previous shows, we’ve talked about how successful US retailers have pushed price (because of inflation) over volume.

Costco and Home Depot have done this successfully. Walmart had serious inventory problems earlier this year, but their grocery has really saved them. Target has problems, but as Sam showed in his newsletter, general merchandise retailers have had a harder time pushing price. What does this mean? Is Target an early indicator that the US consumer is dead?

Key themes:
1. Liquidity drain and QT
2. Copper Gap
3. Retail and the US Consumer
4. What’s up for the Week Ahead?

This is the 42nd episode of The Week Ahead, where experts talk about the week that just happened and what will most likely happen in the coming week.

Follow The Week Ahead panel on Twitter:
Tony: https://twitter.com/TonyNashNerd
Daniel: https://twitter.com/dlacalle_IA
Sam: https://twitter.com/SamuelRines
Tracy: https://twitter.com/chigrl

Transcript

Tony

Hi, and welcome to The Week Ahead. I am Tony Nash. And this week we’re joined by Dr. Daniel Lacalle or Daniel Lacalle. Daniel is a chief economist, he is a fund manager, he’s an author, he’s a professor. Kind of everything under the sun, Daniel does.

Daniel, thank you so much for joining us today. I know you have a very busy schedule. I appreciate you taking the time to join us. We’re also joined by Tracy Shuart. Tracy is the president at Hightower Resources, a brand-new firm. So pop over and see Tracy’s new firm and subscribe. We’re also joined by Sam Rines of Corbu. Thanks all of you guys for taking the time out of today.

Before we get started. I’m going to take 30 seconds on CI Futures, our core subscription product. CI Futures is a machine learning platform where we forecast market and economic variables. We forecast currencies commodities, equity indices.

Every week markets closed, we automatically download that data, have trillions of calculations, have new forecasts up for you Monday morning. We show you our error. You understand the risk associated with using our data. I don’t know if anybody else in the market who shows you their forecast error.

We also forecast about two thousand economic variables for the top 50 economies globally, and that is reforcast every month.

There are a few key themes we’re going to look at today. First is liquidity drain and quantitative tightening, or QT. Daniel will lead on that and I think everyone will have a little bit to join in on that.

We’ll then look at copper gap, meaning we don’t really have enough copper over the next, say, ten years to fill the needs of EVs and other things. So Tracy will dig into that a little bit.

We’ve had some earnings reports for retail over the past couple weeks and Sam had a fantastic newsletter on that this week. So we’ll dig into that as well. Then we’ll look at what we expect for the week ahead.

So Daniel, thanks again for joining us. It’s fantastic. You’ve spoken to our group about a year ago or so. It was amazing.

So you tweeted out this item on screen right now about the liquidity drain.

You sent that out earlier this week and it really got me thinking about the complexities of draining liquidity from global markets, especially the US. Since I guess global markets are hypersensitive to draining in the US.

Of course, rate hikes get a lot of headlines, but you mentioned QT, so it’s a bit more complicated. Obviously, QT peaked in April of this year. There’s a chart on the screen right now at just under $9 trillion.

And the Fed’s put about $200 billion back from their balance sheet, back in the market from their balance sheet, which isn’t nothing, but it’s really not much compared to the total.

So I guess my question is, where do we go from here? Most of the Fed’s balance sheet is in Treasuries as we’re showing on the screen right now, followed by mortgage backed securities.

So what does this say about the path ahead? What do you expect? How quickly do you expect? Does it matter that much?

Daniel

Thank you very much, Tony. I think that it’s very important for the following reason. When people talk about liquidity, they tend to think of liquidity as something is static, as something that is simply there. And when central banks inject liquidity, it’s an added. And when they take liquidity away from the system, that simply balances the whole thing. And it doesn’t work that way.

Capital is either created or destroyed. Capital is not static. So when quantitative easing happens, what basically happens is the equivalent of a tsunami. Now, you basically add into the balance sheet of central banks trillion, whatever it is, of assets, though, by taking those assets away from the market, you generate an increased leverage that makes every unit of money that is created from the balance sheet of the central bank basically multiplied by five, six, we don’t know how many times. And it also depends on the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, which is at the end of the day, what the reason why central banks do QE is precisely to free up the balance sheet commercial banks so that they can lend more.

Tony

Let me stop you there. Just to dig into so people understand what you’re talking about. When you talk about transmission mechanism, and the Fed holds mortgage backed securities, the transmission mechanism would be through mortgages taken out by people because mortgages are cheaper, because the Fed is buying MBS. Is that fair to say?

Daniel

Not cheaper. They don’t necessarily have to be cheaper. They have to be more abundant. Ultimately…

Tony

That’s fair. Yeah. Okay.

Daniel

Ultimately, this is why when people talk so much about rate hikes, rate hikes or rate cuts are not that important. But liquidity injections and liquidity training are incredibly important for markets because rate hikes or rate cuts do not generate multiple expansions. Yet liquidity injections do create multiple expansion, and liquidity draining is much more severe than the impact of the rate hike.

Tony

Okay, so when you say multiple expansion, you’re talking in the equity markets?

Daniel

In equity markets or in the valuation of bonds price. That means lower bond yields or in the valuation of private equity. We saw, for example, in the period of quantitative easing, how the multiples of private equity transactions went from ten times EV to even to 15 times easily without any problem.

So what quantitative tightening does is much worse than what quantitative easing does, because the market can absorb an increase of liquidity through all these multiple assets. However, when quantitative tightening happens, the process is the reverse. Is that the first thing that happens, obviously, is that the treasury, the allegedly lowest risk asset, becomes more cheap, ie, the bond yield goes up, the price goes down, the bond yield goes up, and in turn it creates the same multiplier effect, but a larger dividing effect on the way out.

Tony

So the divisor is greater than the multiplier.

Daniel

The divisor is greater. And I tell you why. In the process of capital creation, there is always misinformation that leads to multiple expansion. Okay? So one unit of capital adds two more units of capital plus a certain excess valuation, et cetera. Now from that point, if you reduce one unit of the balance yield of the central bank, the impact down is much larger. So where it goes to, this is the problem that we as investors find it very difficult to analyze is where is the multiple at which equities, bonds, certain assets are going to stop because it is very likely to be below the level where they started.

The challenge of quantitative tightening is even worse when the process of quantitative easing has been prolonged, not just in period of compression of economic activity or recessions, but also in the periods of growth.

Tony

Okay?

Daniel

Because the level of risk that investors take becomes not just larger but exponential under QE. Under QT. Under QE, you get Bitcoin going from 20 to 60 under QT, you get bitcoin going from 60 to maybe zero.

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Tony

The comments are going to be full of angry bitcoin people.

Daniel

I just want people to understand that just like on the way up in a roller coaster, you go slowly and it seems that everything is going relatively smoothly. When you start to go down, you go down really fast and it’s truly scary.

Tony

Okay, so let me ask you this, because when you talk about multiple expansion, I’m sure we’re going to get some comments back about tech firms because we’ve seen tech firms multiple expansion decline pretty dramatically in the past, say six months, certainly past year, for companies like Meta. So although we’ve only seen $200 billion in quantitative tightening, how does that reconcile with your statement about interest rates not necessarily impacting valuations.

Daniel

No, interest rates impact valuations, but not as aggressive as quantitative tightenint. They do, particularly in tech for a very simple reason. I think that all of us can understand that a technology company is in the process of money creation. A technology company is one of the first recipients of newly created money because it absorbs capital quicker and it obviously benefits enormously from low interest rates, obviously.

But the process of multiple expansion tends to happen in the early stages of those companies. Now the process of multiple compression is much more viscious because I would be genuinely interested to have a discussion with, I don’t know, with people that invest in nonprofitable tech, but I would really like to understand how they get to the current levels of valuation comfortably.

The biggest problem I see of quantitative tightening is the same problem I see of the hidden risks of quantitative easing is that central banks cannot discern which part of the wealth effect comes from the improvement in the real economy or simply from bubbles. And the creation of bubbles obviously, we can imagine that something is a bubble, but we don’t really know until it bursts.

So it’s going to be very problematic for a central bank to achieve almost one thing and the opposite, which is what they’re trying to do. What they’re trying to do is to say, okay, we’re going to reduce the balance sheet. Hey, we’re going to reduce the balance sheet by 95 billion a month and think that that will have no impact on the bond market, on the equity market, and on the housing market. The housing market is already showing.

Tony

Yeah, I don’t necessarily think they’re saying that will have no impact on that stuff. Sam, from your point of view, is that their expectation that QT would have no impact on asset prices?

Sam

I wouldn’t say it’s their expectation that it wouldn’t have an impact on asset prices. I think they understand that there’s an impact on asset prices from just the narrative of tightening generally. But to the point, I think it is very difficult to parse what portion of their tightening is doing what particularly for them.

You look at some of the research on coming out of the Fed, on what QT is expected to do and what QT does, and you come out of it thinking they have no idea. I think that they would probably say that quietly behind closed doors, without microphones. But to the point, I would agree that there is an effect and that the Fed likes to say set it and forget it, because they don’t really understand what the actual impact is on either the real economy or the financial economy. Come up with our star-star, which is some stupid concept that they decided to come up with to rationalize some of their ideas. But I would say no, that makes perfect sense, that they really don’t understand exactly how much it is. Which is why they say we’re just going to set it, forget it, and we’re not really going to talk about it.

Because if you listen to the Fed, their concentration is on the path to the terminal rate and the length of holding the terminal rate there. And if you Google or try to find any sort of commentary about quantitative tightening within their speeches and their statements, it’s actually pretty hard to find.

Daniel

Yeah. So just to clarify one thing, just to clarify. In the messages from, for example, of the ECB and the Bank of Japan, less so of the Fed. And I would absolutely agree with that because the Fed is not so worried because they know that they have the world reserve currency, but the ECB and the Bank of Japan certainly expect very little impact on asset prices. For example, the ECB are just saying right now that they’re expecting to reduce the balance sheet in the next two years by almost a trillion euros without seeing spreads widening in the sovereign market. That is insane to be fairly honest. So that is what I’m trying to put together is that the same… A central bank that is unable to see that negative bond yield and that compressed spreads of sovereign nations relative to Germany is a bubble. It’s certainly not going to see the risk of tightening.

Sam

I would start with saying that if the ECB thinks they are going to take a trillion off the books in a couple of years, that’s the first insane part of that statement.

Tony

Good. Okay. So what I’m getting from this is taking liquidity out of markets can be really damaging and the guys who are doing it don’t really know the impact of their actions. Is that good top level summary?

Daniel

Absolutely. That is the summary.

Tony

Okay, so since they’ve only taken 200 billion off, I say “only,” but compared to 9 trillion, it’s not much. Since they’re pulling the interest rate lever now at the Fed and they’re kind of tepidly moving forward on the balance sheet, do we expect them to finish the interest rate activities before they aggressively go after the balance sheet or are they just going to go march forward with everything?

Daniel

No, I think that’s.. They want to see the impact of interest rates first before they make a drastic action on the balance sheet. Particularly in the case of the Fed with mortgage backed securities, and the case of the Bank of Japan with ETFs because the Bank of Japan is going to kill the Nikkei if it starts to get rid of ETFs. And certainly the Fed is going to kill the housing market with mortgage backed securities are warranted.

Tony

Yup.

Sam

And then it’s kind of interesting because there’s two dynamics that I think are intriguing here. One is that the Fed’s balance sheet is getting longer in duration as interest rates rise because those mortgage backs are just blowing out to the right because you’re not going to have to have the roll down and you’re not going to have the prepays on those mortgages anytime soon. So the Fed is putting themselves in a position where hitting those caps on mortgage backs is just simply not going to happen on a mechanical basis. And they’re either going to have to sell or they’re going to have to say, we’re just not going to hit we’re not going to hit our cap on mortgage backed securities for the next 20 years.

Tony

Yup. So I get to put those to maturity like they’re doing with all the treasury debt.

Sam

Yeah, they’re just letting them roll off, which means they’re not going to have mortgage backs rolling off with a six and a half percent refi rate.

Daniel

Yeah, I agree with that.

Tony

Wow. It’s almost as if QT potentially is a non issue for the longer duration debt? Are you saying they’ll continue holding? Sam you’re saying , “No.” So what am I missing? What I’m hearing is they may just hold the longer duration stuff. So if that’s the case, is it kind of a non issue if they just hold it?

Daniel

It’s not a non issue. They are in conversations all the time with the Bank of Japan to do this composite yield curve management, which in a sense means playing with duration here and there on the asset base. But it doesn’t work when the yield curve is flattening all over the place and when you have a negative yield curve in almost every part of the structure.

So the point is that by the time that markets realize the difficulty of unwinding the balance sheet, the way that central banks have said, probably the impact on asset prices has already happened because commercial banks need to end margin calls, et cetera, margin calls become more expensive. Commercial banks cannot lend with the same amount of leverage that they did before. Capital is already being destroyed as we speak.

Sam

Into the point. As soon as you had the Bank of England announce that they were going to have an outright sale of Gilts, you saw what happened to their market. They broke themselves in two minutes.

Tony

Right. Okay. So that’s what I’m looking for. So it’s a little muddy. We’re not exactly sure. Right. QT is complicated. It’s really complicated. And liquidity is dangerous, as you say, Daniel. It’s easy on the way up. It’s really hard coming down from it. And that’s where…

Daniel

I think it was Jim Grant recently who said how easy it is to become a heroin addict and how difficult it is to get out of it.

Tony

Sure, yeah. I mean, not that I know, but I can see that.

Daniel

We don’t know it, obviously. None of us do. But it’s a very visual way of understanding how you build risk in the system and how difficult it is to reduce that risk from the system.

Tony

Yeah, just stopping adding liquidity is a good first step, and then figuring out what to do after that is I think they’re right. A lot of people like to knock on the Fed, but doing one thing at a time is, I think, better than trying to reconcile everything at once.

Okay, great. Since we’re taking a little bit of longer term view on things with some of that mortgage backed security debt, I just also was in a longer term mood this week and saw something that Tracy tweeted out about copper consumption and demand.

This was looking at long term demand, say, by 2030, and there’s a gap of what, 20 no, sorry, 10 million tons. Is that right, Tracy?

Tracy

8.1 million tons.

Tony

8.1 million tons. Okay. Now, when we look at copper prices right now, we’ve seen copper prices fall. We don’t really have an expectation of them rising on the screen as our Complete Intelligence forecast of them rising in the next few months.

So why the mismatch, Tracy? What’s going on there? And why aren’t we seeing the impact on copper prices right now?

Tracy

Well, I think if we look at basic industrial metals really as a whole, except for, say, lithium, really, we’ve seen a very large pullback in all these prices in these specific metals that we are going to need for this green transition.

Now, part of that is, I think, part of that is QT, we’re just saying money liquidity drained from the system. But I also think that we have overriding fears of a global recession. We also have seen people are worried about Europe because with high natural gas prices, a lot of their smelting capacity went offline.

And one would think that would be bullish metals, but it’s scaring the market as far as global recession fears. And then, of course, you always have China, which is obviously a major buyer of industrial base and industrial metals. They’re huge consumer as well as producer of the solar panels. Wind turbines and things of that nature.

So I think that’s really the overriding fears and what I’ve been talking about even for the last couple of years, that I think metals is really going to be more of H2 2023 into 2024 story. I didn’t really expect this year for that to be the real story.

I know you thought that energy was still going to be the focus. And I think even though we’ve seen prices come off, energy prices are still very high. And I think energy prices we’re going to see a resurgence of natural gas prices again in Europe as soon as we kind of get past March, when that storage is kind of done. Because we have to realize that even though the storage is still this year, 50% of that did still come from piped in natural gas from Russia.

I think we’ll start to see natural gas prices higher. Oil prices are still high. Even at $75, $80, it’s still traditionally high. So the input cost going into metals to bring it all together, the input cost going in metals, we are going to need a lot of fossil fuels. It’s very expensive. We also see mining capex suffers from the same problem that oil does is that over the last seven years, we’ve seen huge declines. And then when we look at copper in particular, we really haven’t had any new discoveries since 2015. So all of those are contributing factors. But again, I don’t think that’s really a story until last half of 2023 and 2024 going forward.

Tony

Okay, so to me, the copper price tells me, and I could be, tell me if I’m wrong here. Copper rise tells me that markets don’t believe China is going to open up fully anytime soon, and they don’t believe China is going to stimulate anytime soon. Is that a fair assessment?

Tracy

Yes, absolutely. I think we kind of saw metal prices. We’re bouncing on some of the headlines back and forth, but really we haven’t seen anything come to fruition, and I think most people are not looking until probably spring for them to open up. And I think China really hasn’t changed its stance, right. As far as. There Zero Covid policy, they’re still on that. So I think markets have been digesting that over the last couple of weeks or so. And that’s also another contributor to seeing a pullback in some of these metals in the energy sector.

Tony

Yeah, if you look at the headlines over the past week, you definitely see a softer tone towards China, with Xi Jinping coming out in the APEC meeting sorry, not the APEC meeting, the ASEAN meeting. And he’s a real human being and all this stuff, and he’s talking with Biden and he’s talking with European leaders and Southeast Asian leaders.

So I think there’s been a softer tone toward China and this belief that good things can happen in the near term, but I don’t think most investors will believe it until they see it, first of all. And I think places like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, US. Other places, maybe not. The Germans are also a little bit worried about short term sentiment in China. Things could turn pretty quickly. So, like you say, I think base metals prices are down on that. But over the long term, obviously, it doesn’t seem like there’s enough capacity right now. So, anyway, we’ll see. So for bringing that up. Sorry. Go ahead, Sam.

Sam

Yeah, I think there’s just two things to add there. One, if you didn’t have investment in base metals and energy at zero interest rates, you’re not going to get it at five. Let’s be honest. That’s point number one, this isn’t a short term thing. This is a much longer term thing. And you need to have much higher prices for commodities broadly in order to incentivize any sort of investment, because they’re, one, very capital intensive, and two, capital is very expensive right now. So I think that’s also something to keep in mind over the medium term, is we’re not solving this problem at five and a half percent interest rates here. That’s clearly not going to happen. And the other thing is you haven’t seen the Aussie dollar react in a positive way. So if the Aussie dollar is reacting, China is not reopening. It’s just that simple.

Tony

Yeah, that’s a very point.

Daniel

If I may, I would also like to point out that the bullish story for copper, lithium, cobalt is so evident from the energy transition and from the disparity between the available capacity and the demand. But when the gap is so wide between what would be the demand and the available supply, what tends to happen is that the market, rightly so, sees that it’s such an impossibility that you don’t even consider, at least as a net present value view, that bullish signal as Tracy was mentioning until 2023 or 2024, when it starts to manifest itself.

Right now, it’s so far between the reality of the available supply and the expectation of demand that it looks a little bit like what happened with Solar in 2007, 2008. We just saw bankruptcy after bankruptcy because you didn’t match the two. And on top of it, Tracy correct me. But this is the first year in which you had a massive bullish signal on prices, in energy and in metals, yet you’ve seen no response from a capping.

Tracy

Exactly. Nobody’s prepared, nobody wants to really still spend that kind of money, particularly not the oil industry when they’re being demonized by everybody in the west in particular. So you know, you’re not going to see a lot of, nobody wants to invest in a project when they’re saying we want to phase you out in ten years.

Tony

What’s really interesting though also is BHP bought a small midsized copper miner in Australia this week, so I forget their name, but the miners are seeing opportunities, but they’re just not seeing the demand there yet. So we’ll see what happens there. So anyway, thanks guys for that. That’s hugely valuable.

Sam, you wrote on retail this week and you have really brought out some interesting dynamics around pushing price versus volume within stores over the past several months. And your newsletter looked at Target, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot. Earnings across retail sectors.

So Costco and Home Depot seem to have pushed price successfully. Walmart, as you say, had serious inventory problems earlier in the year, but their grocery business seemed to have really saved them. But Target really has problems and their earnings report this week was a mess. So we’ve got on screen a table that you took out of some government data looking at, has made a change of sales for different types of retail firms, building materials, general merchandise and food services. And things seem to be going very well for everyone except general merchandise stores like Target.

So can you help us understand why is that the case for, I mean, maybe Target is just terribly wrong, but why is that the case for general merchandise specifically and what does this say about the US consumer? Is the US consumer kind of dead in some areas?

Sam

No. US consumers is not dead, which is the strangest part about this earning season to me is everybody kind of read into Targets reporting was like, wow, this is horrible. It’s bad, it’s bad. Target is its own problem. Their merchandising, horrible. Their executive team, horrible. I mean, I don’t know how you survive this. With Walmart putting up huge comp numbers on a relative basis. I mean, they pounded Target and to me that was single number one. That’s Target’s issue.

The general merchandise store. We bought a whole bunch of stuff during COVID that we don’t really need to buy at 17 of right? We bought it during COVID You could get Walmart and Target delivered to you, that was a boom for their business and that’s just not being repeated. Same thing with if you look at Best Buy and electronic stores not doing great because we all bought TVs during COVID and computers, we needed them at home. These are just pivots. When you look at the numbers for restaurants, when you look at it for grocery, I mean, again, a lot of it is pushing price onto the consumer, but the consumer is taking it.

And those are pushing revenues higher. Look at something, the company that controls Popeyes and Burger King, absolute blowout, same store numbers. I mean, these are restaurants that are pushing price. They’re still having traffic and they’re not getting enough pushback.

Home Depot pushed 8% pricing, well, almost 9% pricing in the quarter. They didn’t care about foot traffic, but traffic was down mid 4%. They didn’t care about the foot traffic. They got to push the price and they, guess what, blew it out? Loads had a decent quarter. These are housing companies, at least home exposed companies and building exposed companies that had great third quarters that were supposed to be getting smashed, right? The housing is not supposed to be the place that you’re going to right now. And somehow these companies could push in a price.

There’s something of a tailwind to the consumer where the consumer is kind of learning to take it in certain areas and just saying, no, I don’t need another Tshirt or I don’t need to make another trip to Target. I think that it’s pretty much a story of where the consumer spending not if the consumer spending.

That retail sales report, it will get revised, who knows by how much, but the retail sales report, even if it gets knocked down by a few bips called 20 basis points, 0.2%, it’s not going to be a big deal. It’s still blowing number. These are not things you want to see.

If you’re the Fed thinking about going from 75 to 50, 2 reasons there. One is that pricing little too much. And if it begins to become embedded, not necessarily in the consumer’s mind, but also in the business’s mind, I can push price. I can push price. I can push price. That’s a twosided coin where the consumer’s willing to take it and businesses are willing to push it. That is the embedding of inflation expectations moving forward.

Going back to I think it was last quarter, Cracker Barrel announced during like, yeah, we’re seeing some traffic flow, but we’re going to push price next year, and here’s how much we’re going to push it by. These companies aren’t slowing down their price increases, and they’re not seeing enough of a pushback from consumers.

Tony

Cracker Barrel and Walmart are not topend market companies. They’re midmarket companies. And if they’re able to push price at the mid market, then it says that your average consumer is kind of taking it. But the volume is down. So fewer people are buying things, but the ones who are buying are paying more. Is that fair to say?

Sam

It’s fair to say. Fewer trips, more expensive. It’s fair to say. But there’s also something to point out where Macy’s, their flagship brand, kind of had a meh quarter. Bloomingdale’s, heirt luxury? Blew it out.

Tony

Okay.

Sam

So you’re seeing even within general merchandise stores, you’re seeing a significant difference between, call it luxury, middle, and low.

Tony

Okay. So what is it about, say, Target and Macy’s? I’ll say Target more than Macy’s, but is it just the management, or is it the mech?

Sam

It’s merchandising and it’s the Mexican.

Tony

Right, okay.

Sam

And if you don’t have the right stuff that you can push price on, you’re not going to make it.

Tony

So will we see some of these general merchandisers move into other sectors? Grocery or whatever?

Sam

I mean, Target has grocery. TVs closed. They have everything. It’s a question of do you have the right thing to sell right now in terms of that? So I don’t really think you’ll see many big moves, mostly because they already have too much inventory. So their ability to pivot is zero at this point. So it’s going to be a tough holiday season. I think it’s going to be a pretty tough holiday season to Target. But I didn’t see Walmart taking down numbers for the Christmas season. We’ll see with Amazon, but cool.

Tony

It seems healthy. Just observationally. They seem pretty healthy.

Sam

Yeah. And the other thing to mention, just as a side note, there’s a lot of this consternation around FedEx and UPS and their estimated deliveries for Christmas. This is the first year that Amazon has had a very, very large fleet going into the Christmas holiday season where they don’t have to send packages through FedEx and UPS only. They have a very, very large in house fleet of vehicles to do so with, and they built that out massively over the past 18 months. So I would read a lot less into that for the Christmas season, et cetera, than people are. That’s something I think it’s kind of taking the big picture and missing the finer points.

Tracy

I had a question really just on that same vein. I’ve seen a lot of the freight companies that report on freight, like Freight Waves, have been screaming at the top of their lungs, loadings are falling. People are going out of work. They’re firing everybody. Nobody’s delivering anything. Nobody’s delivering any goods. Do you think that’s sort of cyclical or because it seems like there’s a mismatch right now. There’s a lot of goods out there to be delivered, but for some reason, these guys can’t get loading.

Sam

I think it’s two things. One, everybody double ordered in spring and summer. So I think Freight Waves and a lot of other companies saw a lot of livings that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise. And you spread those out, and I think that’s point number one. Point number two is these retailers are stuffed with inventory. Target, even Walmart is somewhat elevated. They don’t have that big problem. They have the inventory. I would say it’s much more of a timing issue. You’ll probably see Freight Waves have too many loadings, called it in the spring and summer of next year because people are playing catch up and trying to get the right merchandise, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it’s just more of a Covid whipsaw than anything else.

Tracy

Makes sense, right?

Tony

Okay, so bottom line, us. Consumer is still taking it, right? They’re still spending, they’re still okay. Despite what bank deposits and other things tell us, things are still moving. And is that largely accumulating credit or how is the US consumer still spending? They’re accumulating credit?

Sam

A couple of things. One, they have their bank deposits are fine, particularly at the middle and upper levels. They’re still relatively elevated. Two, you’re getting a much higher wage. So your marginal propensity to consume when you see a significant pay raise, even if prices are higher, is higher, right. So you’re going to spend that dollar.

So you’re getting paid more. You’re switching jobs a lot more. Your switchers are getting something like a double digit pay increase. These are rather large chefs, so I would say the consumer feels a lot more comfortable with taking the inflation because they’re getting paid a lot more. Unemployment is sub 4%, so they’re not afraid of losing their job unless they’re at Twitter. So the consumer is sitting there like, all right, I’m not losing my job. I’m getting paid increases. Why would I stop spending? I think it’s that simple.

Tony

Great.

Sam

Yeah, they have credit cards.

Daniel

That is a very important point. What you just mentioned, employment. Employment makes all the difference. The pain threshold of consumers is always being tested. Companies raise prices. Volumes are pretty much okay. So they continue to raise prices to maintain their margins. And that works for a period of time.

I think that what is happening both in the Eurozone and in the United States is that after a prolonged period of very low inflation, consumers also feel comfortable about the idea that inflation is temporary. Basically everybody and actually I have this on TV this morning, we’re talking about everybody is saying, okay, so prices are rising a lot, but when are they coming down? But I’m still buying.

The problem, the pain threshold starts to appear when employment growth, wage growth, starts to stop, and at the same time, prices go up. And obviously the companies that feel comfortable about raising prices start to see their inflation rate, rise. So it’s always difficult because we never know. There’s a variable there that we’re very unsure of, which is credits. How much credit are we willing to take to continue to consume the same number of goods and services at a higher price?

But it is absolutely key what you’re saying, which is as long as even though wage growth in real terms might be negative, but you’re getting a pay rise and you still feel comfortable about your job, you feel comfortable about your wealth to a certain extent and credit keeps you safe, consumption in the United States is not going to crack.

However, where do you see it cracking? And we’re seeing it cracking in the eurozone. In Germany, where you don’t get the pay rise, you don’t get the benefit of taking expensive credit from numerous different sources or cheap credit from different numerous sources and at the same time you get elevated inflation. Consumption is actually going down the drain. The way that I see it is that the problem, the consumption, not collapsed, but certainly the consumption crack is very likely to happen more north to south in the eurozone than in the United States at the rate at which the economy is growing.

Tony

Yes, yes, very good. Thanks for that, until on Europe, Daniel, that was really helpful.

Okay, let’s do it very quick. What do you expect for the same week or two weeks ahead? We have a Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, so things are going to be kind of slow. But Tracy, what are you looking for, especially in energy markets for the next couple weeks? We’ve seen energy really come off a little bit this week. So what’s happening there?

Tracy

Yeah, absolutely. Part of the reason of that, besides all the global factors involved, the recession didn’t help UK him out and said they were already in the recession. That then sparked fears. We have pipeline at reduced capacity right now, which means that’s going to funnel some more crude into cushion, TWI contract is actually cushing. So that’s putting a little bit of pressure. I think holidays, obviously I think this next week we’re not really going to see much action as usual. So really looking forward to the following week is we have the Russian oil embargo by the EU and we also have the OPEC meeting and I would suspect that at these lower prices they would probably, they might be considering cutting again. So that’s definitely those two things. I’m looking forward to in that first week in December.

Tony

Great, thanks. Daniel, what are you looking for in the next week or two?

Daniel

The next week or two are going to be pretty uneventful, to be fairly honest. We will see very little action or messages that make a real difference from Fed officials or from the ECB. On the energy front, there’s plenty of news that we pay attention to Tracy’s Twitter account. But in Europe we will get quite a lot of data, quite a lot of data that is likely to show again this slow grind into recession that we’ve been talking and very little help. I think that from here to December, most of the news are not going to change where investors are and that will probably start to reconfigure our views into the end of the trading season, 27 to 28.

Tony

Okay, very good. And Sam, what do you see next week? The week after?

Sam

I’ll just be watching Black Friday sales that are coming in. Honestly, I think that will be a pretty important sign as to how things are developing into the holiday season and begin to set the narrative as we enter in December. Again, there’s no real interesting Fed talk coming out next week, but we’ll begin to have some pretty good data coming from a number of sources on Black Friday, foot traffic, internet traffic, etc. Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tony

Very good.

Sam

The following week. That’s all I care about.

Tony

Excellent. Really appreciate that. For those of you guys in the States, have a great Thanksgiving next week. Daniel, thank you so much. Have a fantastic weekend. Always value your time, guys. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend.

Sam

Thank you.

Daniel

Have a good weekend. Bye bye.

Sam

Thank you.

Week Ahead

China risks, tech earnings, and crude stockpiling: The Week Ahead – 31 Oct 2022

Post author By admin
Post date October 29, 2022

Learn more about CI Futures

In this episode, we’re joined by Isaac Stone Fish, who is the CEO of Strategy Risks. He’s the author of a book called America Second, and he lived in China for seven years.

We talk about how are foreign companies dealing with the political changes in China? Or what should they be paying attention to? We’ve seen changes in Xi’s team that, to be honest, weren’t all that unexpected, but seems unexpected anyway. It’s certainly a hard turn to the CCP’s commie roots. This tweet really underscores how desperate Xi is to set an old school tone.

Markets have seemed a little spooked this week, so we saw orders from Beijing to prop up the CNY and Chinese equities, which didn’t work all that well. But with all the political and market backdrop, what does all of this mean for US and other foreign businesses? Are foreign employees at risk? Do we expect direct investment to slow down?

On the risk side, we look at tech earnings, which are super bad. Hiring is a huge issue and tech firms seem to have been hiring based on their valuation not based on their revenues. When will we see headcount reduction announcements? One of Meta’s investors was saying they should cut 20%. Albert shares his views on this.

And we’re also looking at crude oil inventories and refined product inventories. They’re way below averages. We saw another draw on global inventories this week. As OPEC supply is contracting ~1.2m bpd. Russian crude sanctions start soon. And US exported 5.12m bpd last week, making it the 3rd largest crude exporter. We know global inventories are low, but when will it start to bite? Tracy shares to us what’s going in.

Key themes

1. China risk for Western companies
2. Tech earnings & China
3. Crude inventories & Asia stockpiling

This is the 39th episode of The Week Ahead, where experts talk about the week that just happened and what will most likely happen in the coming week.

Follow The Week Ahead panel on Twitter:

Tony: https://twitter.com/TonyNashNerd
Isaac: https://twitter.com/isaacstonefish
Albert: https://twitter.com/amlivemon
Tracy: https://twitter.com/chigrl

Time Stamp:

0:00 Start
1:00 Key themes for this Week Ahead
2:52 What the news about China means to Western businesses
6:38 What has changed around the concept of Communist Party membership over the last ten or 15 years?
8:20 Anybody who’s overseeing a business in China has to understand modern Chinese history
9:31 Risks for foreign staff in China
12:34 Congress does not want US companies to do business with China
14:14 Danger of a rush to the exits in twelve months
17:58 Tech earnings are super bad – how bad will layoffs be?
21:10 Is it possible to cut 20% of Meta’s workforce?
22:44 China and US competition in India and other countries
24:52 Crude inventories – when will this start to bite?
28:31 Japan is stockpiling crude – is it because of geopolitical concerns?
29:47 China stimulus – will they do it in February?
31:55 What happens to the crude demand of Covid Zero ends?
34:27 Will oil prices raise by 30% before 2022 ends?

Transcript

Tony Nash: Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Week Ahead. I’m Tony Nash. Today we’re joined by Isaac Stone Fish. Isaac is the CEO of Strategy Risks. He’s the author of a book called America Second, and he lived in China for seven years as the New York Times in New York Times bureau. So we’re really lucky to have Isaac with us. We have Albert Marko, of course. And Tracy Shuchart. We’re very fortunate to have them again today with us.

So, Isaac, welcome and we’re really happy to have you.

Our theme today that we’re going to talk through first is how are foreign companies dealing with the political changes in China? Or what should they be paying attention to?

On the risk side, we’re looking at tech earnings and the impact that tech earnings will have on other earnings and headcount reductions and other things over the next few months. And we’re also looking at crude oil inventories and refined product inventories. They’re way below averages.

And we want to hear from Tracy as to what’s going on.

Please take a look at our product, CI Futures. It’s a forecast subscription product. It’s $99 a month. We cover a few thousand assets over a twelve month horizon. Economics, currencies, commodities, equity indices. So please take a look at that. The URL is on the screen. Thanks a lot for that.

So, Isaac, welcome. Would you give us a quick overview of what Strategy Risks does?

Issac Stone Fish: Strategy Risks works with corporations and investors to help them manage and reduce their China risk. And with increased tensions between the United States and China, and growing awareness of the liabilities in both China and the United States of working with the People’s Liberation Army or the United Front or the Ministry of State Security or the Chinese Communist Party more broadly, it’s been a good couple of months for us.

And so excited to be joining you and chatting with you on these issues.

TN: You must be working 24 hours a day. I have no idea how you stay, how you get any rest right now with all the stuff that’s going on in China.

ISF: Under drugs right here.

TN: Isaac, I’m curious, with all of the political changes announced this week, of course, that’s been way analyzed, a lot of different perspectives on things. I would warn people as they read through that analysis, just be careful of kind of some anti China bias, but we have to kind of read things for what they are too.

We saw changes in Xi’s team that, to be honest, weren’t all that unexpected. People have talked about this for months, but the fact that he actually carried through with it, I think made people feel like it was a little bit unexpected.

But it’s certainly a hard turn to the CCP’s communist roots. I’m showing a Tweet right now looking at Xi taking his team to pilgrimage where the long march ended during the Communist revolution. And so he’s just the optics around the hard turn to the party’s communist roots are front and center.

So Isaac, markets were spooked this week. Of course, we saw orders from Beijing to prop up CNY and prop up Chinese equities. Obviously didn’t work very well. But with that backdrop, what does all this mean for US and other foreign businesses? I know it means a million things, but if you had some top level takeaways, what are the things that you’re seeing that it means for, say, US and other foreign businesses in China?

ISF: Have a really good understanding of leftist ideology. If you decide that you want to stay, which oftentimes we discourage, and if you decide that you don’t want to reduce your exposure, which we always discourage. Have a really good understanding of how Communism works, and read the tea leaves. Spend a lot of time on analysis. Understand that every Chinese company or every company in China that has at least three party members has to have a party cell. And for a long time people overlook that law.

But companies like Alibaba have tens of thousands of party members. So understanding that you’re partnering with the Chinese Communist Party and things that you used to be able to get away with, you can’t anymore. I think the other high level take away is with increased media, consumer and congressional scrutiny on China.

What happens in China doesn’t stay in China. So the work that you do with a major Chinese charity which does say party building exercises in Chinese orphanages, aka Brainwashing Chinese Children on Party ideology, we can get that information here. Congressional staffers can read that, journalists can pick that up, and you’re going to have to start dealing with the liability of that from a PR perspective. The final highlevel takeaway, the more Xi marches to the left, the more draconian things get. And the more saber rattling we see with Taiwan, the more likely it is that the US and China go to war over Taiwan.

Right now, I would say that’s still not the base case. War is very avoidable. It probably won’t happen. But it’s a very concrete risk and investors and I would argue especially boards of major corporations, need to be discussing this risk. And perhaps the best thing to do with the risk is to say, okay, we know this, we’re not going to change.

But I think if there is a war, companies are going to have to face some pretty serious shareholder lawsuits because it’s a viewable risk and you didn’t do anything about it.

TN: Right. So let me ask you, take two questions. First is, in 2010 or ’11, I spoke at the Central Party School in Beijing, and the person who drove. I was giving an economic update. I was working with the Economist at the time, and it was so surreal for me. The person who drove me to that event was a venture capitalist. And so I think the view that many people have of Communist Party members is, oh, you know, they’re these soft guys, they’re capitalists like us too, you know, that sort of thing. What has changed around the concept of Communist Party membership over the last ten or 15 years?

ISF: Think of the perception. So when Rupert Murdoch in early 2000s was going into business in China, he would downplay the importance of the Communist Party and say things like, oh, they’re just like us, there’s really no difference. And some people just join the party for opportunistic reasons, and some people do it because they believe, but they’re fairly soft spoken and gentle. And then there’s the very hard security element of the party.

And I think people are realizing that for every venture capitalist, there’s also the PLA secret agent or the MSS agent or the public security agent in that these people are increasingly important in the Chinese system.

And the other piece of it is that it used to be seen from a Western context, both PR and regulatory, relatively benign to be working with party members in the Communist Party. But after the genocide in Xinjiang, after Xi’s increasing authoritarianism, people are not getting the pass that they had before when you and I were out there.

TN: Right. And so I think it’s really critical. Anybody who’s overseeing a business in China has to understand modern Chinese history. You have to start from the great famine, really. I mean, start from the revolution, but really the great famine through the Cultural Revolution, through the 70s, through Deng Xiaoping, through… That era is really critical to understand what’s happening today. Right. Because that’s when Xi Jinping grew up and that’s when his ideologies were formed. Is that safe to say?

ISF: Good is safe to say. I think the other thing that we have to understand is we do have to be incredibly humble about our ability to understand what’s going on at the top of the party. We have very little idea. People are going to keep speculating about that crazy video with former Chairman Hujing Tao. We probably won’t know what happened there for decades, I would guess.

And I think when we talk about war with Taiwan, we talk about what’s going to happen between the US and China, we have a lot of insight into how Biden thinks and almost none into how Xi Jinping thinks. We just need to bake that into our predictions.

TN: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I cautioned on that earlier this week about the Hoojin Tao exit. It could be health, you don’t know. Right? It could be intrigue. You don’t know. So none of us know.

So let me also ask you, when you talk about you had a tweet about potential China-Taiwan war earlier this week, and you talked about Chinese staff for American companies or Western companies, sorry, and you talked about Western staff in China. So can we talk about some of those risks, like the real people risks for multinational companies who hire Chinese employees. And none of this is intended to be Xenophobic.

This is intended to be purely practical in understanding really what the risks are. And also with those foreign staff in China. Can you help us understand some of those risks?

Tracy Shuchart: Yeah, I was going to ask something along that line, if I can just tag on my question to that one. We saw a bunch of people who are Americans pulling their staff from Chinese chip companies right, lately. So I was wondering if you saw that, see that trend continuing and bleeding into other sectors besides just the tech sector.

ISF: I very much do, and I think there’s two ways to think about this. One is the economic and regulatory so increasing difficulty doing business in China, desire for localization of staff, Biden regulations that restrict the ability of Americans to work at certain Chinese chip companies. And then you have the potential for war.

And the idea is that if the US and China go to war, American staff in China and also Chinese staff for certain American companies could be seen as enemy combatants. And we saw this with Afghanistan, we saw this with Ukraine. There’s orders of magnitude, more staff for Western companies in China than in these places. I mean, it’s not even comparable, the numbers.

And I think from an ethical perspective, I get really worried that people don’t talk about war because then war could just be on us. And the United States has a terrible history of interning Japanese during World War II and harassing Germans during World War I. I think with the dynamic with Chinese people here, we need to have a concrete conversation about it so that we can defend the rights of Chinese and Chinese Americans in America if we go to war.

And from a corporate perspective and from a risk perspective, companies need to have exit plans for their staff in China because they’re going to be dealing with major, major ethical and insurance risk issues if this happens. And they can’t just take the foreign staff out to Hong Kong anymore. Because that’s not like a free zone anymore. And you hear stories of people being smuggled out now, and I think we’re going to hear a lot more of those, and that’s going to be more and more common.

TN: So, Isaac, what are we missing when you see the discussion about China right now and with American businesses, what are we missing? What’s not being discussed that you’re like, Gosh, I can’t believe people don’t see this.

ISF: Congress does not want American companies to do business in China. And with the UFLPA, the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, we talked to a lot of corporates about that, and they don’t seem to understand how to comply with the law. And that’s the point. It’s a law that’s meant to deter behavior as opposed to shape behavior.

So it’s okay, we can’t invest in Xinjiang, but this company that we work with, has a branch of Xinjiang. Well, don’t work with that company. And I think the American political calculus of this too.

People don’t really get Pelosi’s trip, I think didn’t really bake into corporate behavior in the way that it should have because people think this is a Republican issue. They hear Marco Rubio, they hear Ted Cruz, they hear some of the awful remarks that Trump made, and they don’t realize that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer sound almost exactly like Rubio and Cruz on these issues. They think it’s a Republican issue. It’s not a Republican issue. There are holdouts on the progressive left, there are holdouts on the libertarian right. But the US is pretty united about this from a government perspective.

It’s just not from a business perspective. And that’s fine. You can have that discordance. But businesses need to understand main street and Congress feel very differently about these issues than they do.

TN: Yeah. So one last question on this. Unless Albert, Tracy, you guys were going to come in, but do you think we’ll see publicly traded American companies disposing of their China units with say a Hong Kong IPO?

I mean, I know this is an old idea, but better than nationalization, at least they can get some value of it. And I think of like a GM or something like that, right? It’s a huge business for them. So they could potentially either have that nationalized or they could make it public on the Hong Kong stock exchange or something.

So do you think we’ll see more of this? Young Brands is the one that everyone knows about from ten years ago or whatever, but do you think we’ll see more of this? And if people don’t do it now, is there a danger of a rush to the exits in say twelve months?

ISF: I think that’s an excellent point. Ping on, which is a major shareholder of HSBC, suggested HSBC break up into two different banks, one headquartered in Hong Kong to focus on China market and one of the rest of the world.

And companies like Boeing, which has an airplane business that I think it’s something like 14% to 18%, goes to China, specifically the Chinese Communist Party and then has a very important government contracting business which is increasingly at odds with its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and need to start considering these issues.

I think you’re right also on the timing, these things take a lot of time and companies are very private with them for obvious reasons. So if they’re considering them now and we’re going to see announcements on it and it doesn’t require that much scrutiny from Cyphius or the Beijing’s regulatory Agency or other Beijing other Chinese agencies, I can see these things happening.

I think if companies are starting to think about it now, it’s probably too late. I think years process. But in the same way that nobody wants to talk about war, nobody wants to talk about spinning off their China assets.

TN: Right. But you either do it now or it gets nationalized. Or you do it for $0.10 on the dollar in a year or two years.

ISF: I think you’re exactly right. And Tony, we should write something on this, and I think this is a good time to talk about this issue.

Albert Marko: Okay. There are other issues. Capital flight out of China, even if you decide to list in Hong Kong, is like, where’s the money going to come from? It’s not going to come from the west. Even the Chinese are starting to take their money out into Singapore and Macau and anywhere else they can get it out of at the moment.

But I agree with Isaac on 90% of what he’s saying. I don’t think that war, Taiwan is even a remote possibility in the next ten years, to be honest with you. The pilot bureau, Xi is inspired politburo. It looks scary. There’s no question about that. And the Western companies need to take a look at that because it reminds me of the Nazis from the 1930s.

Now, I’m not talking about what the Nazi crimes were, but just the mobilization of the country and the nationalization of corporations and then starting to boost the economy internally. It’s most likely going to start happening, and they will nationalize companies that they see are instrumental for their vision going forward.

TN: Yes. I mean, honestly, I don’t know why anybody related to SAIC Shanghai automotive. Why would that not become the property of SAIC? If they’re really taking this nationalist bent, that’s a real risk, right? I think so. Any of these guys really need to pay attention and really start to evaluate what is their path going forward? What is their path for Chinese staff? What is their path for foreign staff there? What is their path for IP that’s shared between those units? These are real head scratcher questions.

Okay, Isaac, thank you so much for that. This is so insightful. I’d love to spend 2 hours with you on this, but we’ve got to talk about tech earnings.

So, Albert, tech earnings are super bad, right? Super bad.

AM: Super bad is an understatement.

TN: Yeah. Horrific. It’s a tech wreck, all that stuff. So we can talk about what missed and kind of we all know what’s missed. That’s been analyzed over the last 24 hours or say a few days or whatever. But I guess what I’m most interested in tech is staffing.

So the vacancies in the US. Workforce has been a big issue for the Fed. Okay. And I’m showing right now on the screen that the Meta’s stock price from $350 all the way down to I think it was $97 yesterday, just over one year. It’s incredible, right?

So a lot of these tech firms have been over hiring. They’ve been putting out job wrecks for things that they where they just want to target one person and they don’t really want to target the job and all this stuff. They’ve almost been hiring based on their valuation rather than their revenues. So in terms of those productivity metrics, do you think we’ll start to see headcount reduction in tech? Or they’ve been saying, hey, we’re just going to slow down our hiring.

So do you think they’re going to stick to only slowing down their hiring? Or do you think we’re going to see this kind of tech halt and kind of shrink the tech workforce?

AM: Oh, absolutely. You got to shrink the tech workforce. But that’s not going to come till after midterms. I mean, nobody wants to be in the line of sight of Biden’s firing squad over firing 10 thousand people just before midterms happen. But afterwards you will. Probably after Christmas, you’ll actually start seeing quite the number of job layoffs in the tech industry.

TN: Every time I’ve worked with a tech related firm, the pink slips come literally the week before Christmas.

AM: Yeah, you know what I mean? I don’t think that people understand how bad these tech earnings are. Right. We can note Facebook and Amazon and whatnot, but they had tailwinds of inflation of an extra 10% because CPI, they say 8%. It’s really like 20%. So they had an extra 10% baked into their earnings that people don’t really catch. Right? And even with that, they’re down 30, 40%.

Amazon lost 25% in two days. Amazon. These are just astronomical. Which is a solid company. I love Amazon. I don’t have any… Company. Yeah, it is a solid company. And I like Amazon, I like the tech, I like the delivery service. And everything they do is correct. But I mean, realistically, they were, them and along with another dozen tech names were so over inflated for the last two years because the market just kept pumping up to just the high heavens that this was just I mean, it was an easy call that tech had to come down.

And on top of that, tech is based on zero rates. We’re not going to see zero rates for years.

TN: Right, that’s fair. Okay, so, you know, one of the hedge funds, I can’t remember who, was pushing Meta or Facebook now, I guess, again, to cut 20% of their workforce. Do you think something like that is possible?

AM: And it sounds like a lot, but given what’s happened with their valuations, do you think a 20% cut is possible? Do you think more or less is possible? And 20% is a lot. Usually when you have over 12%, you start looking at a company as going into bankruptcy. That’s one of the signs that you look at. So 20% is way too much. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Maybe seven to 10% staggered over the next few years.

TN: Okay, that’s fair. But I mean, they hire a huge number of people. What that would do to wages in tech would be immediate, right? $300,000, 22-year-old dev, that would be gone.

AM: Well, yeah, that cuts into the state’s budgets also because they take those tax revenue and whatnot. The other thing that we should talk about is China’s mix with the tech industry. I mean, now that the US congress, like Isaac was saying, is actively trying to prevent companies to go over there, I don’t know where tech earnings are going to come from. I just don’t see it. They’re taking away massive market share. They’re taking away supply chains and semiconductors and everything. I don’t see any silver lining in tech for the next two, three years.

I think they need to run size their organizations and really focus. Plus there’s more competition in the ad market, so you’re not going to see ad rates necessarily rise from here for some time.

So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of headwinds. I actually have to get Isaac’s opinion on this one is no one is talking about the tech industry in China competition with American companies in countries like India. Right? Because you have Chin Data and a couple of other countries that are massive and makes generate a ton of cash out of there.

And nobody’s talking about the competition level in India between the two. And I don’t know if you’ve heard anything, Isaac, but like, that’s something that I wanted to start looking into.

ISF: I think that’s an excellent point, is it doesn’t get nearly enough attention. And the market for the rest of the world for most of these companies is larger than the market for the US and China combined. There are a lot of contested spaces, especially in countries like India, Brazil, Indonesia.

And I think the lens through which we should see it is the political battle between the US and China because both countries are really pushing all of these third countries to be more sympathetic towards their way of view because so many of these tech companies can be hobbled by regulations. We see that with Huawei. We see that a lot in India where there’s a lot of distrust for Chinese tech companies, a lot of restrictions on the ability of Chinese tech companies to operate.

And so it’s protectionist, but it’s good political warfare for both sides to be making these arguments in countries around the world. And it is good business for these companies to be spending heavily on government affairs in all of these companies, in all of these countries and figuring out how they position their relationship with the government, whether it be the Chinese government or the US.

AM: Yeah, and that’s something I actually criticized the Biden administration that they’ve been so hard on India about using Russian tech and Russian oil. It’s like, come on, you guys got to be a little bit pragmatic here. You know what I mean? They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place with China and Pakistan.

TN: True.

ISF: I think that’s a great I mean, they buy huge amount of weapons from Russia, and they buy those in large part to defend against China.

TN: Yeah, very good. Okay, great. Thanks for that, Albert.

Now, Tracy, let’s move on to crude inventories. I’ve got a Tweet up where you talk about there was another draw this week.

And we saw a draw on global inventories. As we have inventory drawdowns, we have OPEC supply contracting by what, about 1.2 million barrels per day, something like that. Russian crude sanctions starting. We also have with the SPR, it was interesting to see the US became the third largest exporter of crude, I think last week or something, with over 5 million barrels per day because of the SPR draw.

So we know global industries are low, but when does that start to bite? I feel like the easy answer is well, after the SPR stops, right? What more to the story is there?

TS: I mean, I think it really depends on where you are. I mean, we’re already seeing the SPR. Those draws are kind of dwindling down, right? We’ve gone from about seven, 8 million barrels per week to 3.5 million. Even though that’s still a lot. That’s been part of the reason why we’re exporting, because we kind of, first, we were drawing down sour crude because that’s really what US refiners need. But at some point, that’s almost gone, so we had to start releasing sweet crude, and we can’t do anything with those barrels. And so they are making their way to China, they are making their way overseas.

And that’s why our exports have increased over the last few months there. In particular, we’re kind of seeing an uneven balance where we’re seeing global inventories are drawing, still drawing, right? US inventories are drawing, by all intents and purposes. I mean, we had, what, a 2.8 million build, but we also had a 3.5 million SPR release and an adjustment factor of 15.8 million barrels. Technically, we are drawing. And really, if you include the SPR, we had a draw of 5.9 million barrels total crude plus products this week.

But we are seeing what’s interesting is we are seeing Japan. Their stocks are actually going up because they’re stockpiling mad right now. So they’re buying everything from everybody. It’s stockpiling, and they were giving subsidies for companies to buy that in their SPR. So Japan kind of had a different kind of way of looking at things and the rest worlds just dumping. But they’re literally stockpiling.

China did stockpile for a while, but really their SPR is down, obviously, from the 2020 highs. They’re not stockpiling as much. But with China, I know that there are many problems going on there, but if they increase those import quotas for the Teapots, then we’re going to start seeing them by a lot.

TN: By Teapots, you mean the small refinery?

TS: Is just correct, because they’re talking about possibly raising those import quotas. But we won’t really find that out until December, and that’ll be for into 2023.

TN: Okay, so just a question on both, well, in Japan, first of all. With the yen at these dramatic lows, they’re stockpiling and it’s hugely expensive for them. It’s not just kind of incidental decision, this is a really intentional decision for them to stockpile. So are they partly, do you know, are they partly stockpiling

on geopolitical concerns?

TS: Yes, absolutely. I believe so. And all around, because we really saw them that sort of started to kick off in March after Ukraine invasions. Same with LNG, right? They’ve always been huge importers of LNG, the world’s largest, but they’re importing even more because they’re kind of seeing what’s happening in Europe right now and they don’t want that to happen to them.

AM: I think it’s a little bit more than that. Also, I think that they see that we’re probably even got cues from the US that Japan is going to be a manufacturing hub to try to pick up the slack from China. So I think they’re preparing for that in 2023, 2024. And on top of that, the price of oil right now, that’s still discounting China not stimulating because once China stimulates, the demand is just going to skyrocket.

TN: Okay, all three of you guys want to ask about that China stimulus. So you guys all know China Beige Book, and they’ve been saying everyone’s really foolish for thinking China is going to stimulate, and they’ve been saying that for something like six months. Right? And I hear a lot of people say, oh, they’ll stimulate after the Party Congress. I said that too, and we still haven’t seen that. Do we think that we’re going to see stimulus in China, say, before Chinese New Year, which is what, February?

ISF: I would say absolutely not. I think the real stimulus for the Chinese economy, too, will be less a government led infusion of capital and more a relaxation of COVID concerns.

And I think that’s going to be a lot more likely after Spring Festival than after the March Congress because, A, you have the appointment of the premiere, you have some important events there, but you also don’t have to worry about mass contagion with hundreds of millions of people wanting to travel.

So I think the base case for the opening of the economy and then potentially economic inflation is after the Congress, after Spring Festival. And who knows, it’s very hard to predict, but that would be my best guess for that.

TN: I think that’s really solid. What do you think about that?

AM: Yeah, I think COVID Zero policies are going to be still in place until March. There’s no question about that. I think stimulus happens around the same time that they think that inflation is under control. I think that’s pretty much their driver at the moment, because if they stimulate price of copper and oil and everything in the country is going to go to the moon and they know this. So I think it really depends on inflation. What the US can do to tame it.

TN: So when do you think they’ll think that inflation is under control?

AM: I think close around March after the US. And also the end of quantitative tightening and whatnot. So it’ll probably be a coordinated effort.

TN: Okay, so Tracy, if they just let go of the lockdowns, what does that do to crude demand?

TS: Well, definitely we obviously start to see that rise because they’re locking down millions of people at a time, you know what I’m saying? An entire city, and not for a couple of days. We’ve seen some cities lock down as long as two months.

So I think as soon as they start relaxing that we’re definitely going to see demand come flooding into the market.

And again, China hasn’t really been stockpiling this whole time during this, which they have a little bit from their lows, if you look at their SPR, but not a lot. Not as much as everybody thinks they are. Everybody thinks they are because oil prices are lower and they like lower oil prices. But really, comparatively speaking to how they purchased in the past, the SPR hasn’t been as much as most people think.

AM: Okay, do you think that they could be? First of all, I don’t trust the data of China. I don’t have anything.

TS: Well, what we can see from satellite systems, right? We have no idea what their underground storage looks like or anything of that nature. But what we can tell and what we can track, what’s actually going into the country.

AM: Do you think that they can hide that in tankers on the sea for a while?

TS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they’ve been known to do that before. Absolutely. They’ve used Myanmar,

AM: Singapore also, I believe.

TS: Well, Singapore is a little bit harder to hide just because it’s so huge and so many people are tracking vessels there. So they kind of like to kind of stay away from there when they’re kind of trying to hide stuff.

But definitely, I mean, they’ve, you know, hidden purchases from Venezuela through Singapore, through other ports in that area. From what you can see from the best guess. From the best guess, what you can see, what you can tell what satellite services have picked up, like Kepler or whatever.

TN: OK, let me kind of close up with this question. So I just filled up with gas in the US last night and I posted this price in Texas is $2.95. So I’m sure you’re all jealous. I said, will this be 30% higher by the end of the year? Because post election, SPR releases stop, other things? Do you expect gasoline to rise, say, as much as 30% before the end of the year since SPR release and other things are stopping? Or do you think we’re kind of in this zone that we’re going to be in for a little while?

TS: Well, I think that generally this is kind of lower demand season anyway, right? I mean, usually typically we don’t see prices really start to rise again until about mid December, just seasonally speaking, right before the holidays. Christmas in particular, and everybody goes on vacation, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think, I don’t know. 30% might be a lot for this year, but definitely for next year we’re going to have some problems because they took that last 10-15 million barrels and they pushed that out for December, so we’ll still have some releases then.

So I think they did that it was actually 14 million barrels that are left and so they did push those out until December. So they’re kind of going to triple it out in order to kind of control prices.

TN: Okay, so the selection bias for people telling me that I was right is wrong.

TS: I think it’ll probably depend on where you are in the country, you know, depending on the state. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’re in the Northeast, you’re going to have a huge problem, right, because they have the same issues going on that Europe. They don’t have any pipelines, they don’t have any storage, and they don’t have any refining capacity.

So this winter, especially with the diesel shortage, you’ll probably see the highest gasoline prices, obviously in California and then the Northeast will be the next higher.

TN: And I just want to say to everybody, I’m not promoting the gasoline price as a reason to move to Texas. I mean, it’s all scorpions and rattlesnakes and really terrible bagels here, so please don’t move here. It’s just an incidental benefit of living in a place that’s a pretty rough place to survive.

So anyway, guys, thank you so much. Isaac, really invaluable. I don’t think we’re going to gotten this perspective from anybody else on earth, so I really appreciate the time that you spent with us.

Albert. Tracy. Thank you, guys. I always appreciate your point of view. So thanks very much. Have a great weekend. Thank you.

QuickHit

How Bain uses alternative data and AI to solve business biggest problems

Post author By admin
Post date September 16, 2021
No Comments on How Bain uses alternative data and AI to solve business biggest problems

Richard Lichtenstein of Bain & Company joins us this week to talk about advanced analytics. What is it actually and how can companies and private equity firms use this to make better business decisions? He also shares some B2C and B2B examples and use cases. Also, what are some common barriers for companies to incorporate advanced analytics to their toolset?

Richard Lichtenstein is an expert partner at Bain & Company in New York. He has been at Bain for 17 years and he leads their efforts around advanced analytics and private equity. To get in touch with Richard, please email him at Richard.Lichtenstein@bain.com.

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This QuickHit episode was recorded on September 10, 2021.

The views and opinions expressed in this Here’s how Bain uses alternative data and AI to solve businesses’ biggest problems 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

TS: For people that might not be familiar with advanced analytics or what that entails, can you kind of give us an overview of what this encompasses?

RL: At Bain & Company, we have a team of over 50 people that thinks about just how can we use advanced analytics to serve private equity? And so what do all these people do?

Well, we’ve got a bunch of people scouring the world trying to find the latest and greatest and interesting data sources that we can use. And those could be B2B or B2C. And I can talk more about what those are. Right.

Then we have teams of data cleaners, because sometimes those data sources are really messy on credit card data, and they specialize in cleaning them and making them usable for analysis.

Then we have a group of data scientists who are building Python libraries that they can use to take that data and run fairly sophisticated analysis on these over and over again. So these might be looking at retention by cohort or customer lifetime value or understanding switching behavior and things of that nature.

Then we have a group that takes that output and builds ways to automatically turn that in slides or into tableau so that we can get that in front of clients quickly in a form that brings out the insights.

And then lastly, we have some people who just help other people at Bain figure out how to use all this stuff. We get about over a thousand requests a year from teams trying to figure out which tools should I use? Which data source should I use? Et cetera. And so we just have to help them figure out how to do it.

TS: Can you give us some of your use cases, maybe go into a little bit more detail?

RL: Yeah, of course. So in a way, it’s quite different for B2B and B2C, but both of them have a lot of good advanced analytics examples. If we start with B2C, in that environment, there’s a number of interesting alternative data sets that we leverage, things like credit card data, things like e-receipt data. These show us what people are buying online. Sometimes what people are buying in store, where they go. But it goes beyond some of the traditional data sources, like Nielsen and IRI, and actually shows you what customers are doing. What happens at the customer level. And that allows you to learn some really interesting things.

So, for example, we’ve done some work recently with a fast food restaurant chain. And they’re trying to figure out why are we losing share? We were able to see well among people who are going to your restaurant less often or stopped going, a lot of them were going to Chick-Fil-A. And this isn’t a restaurant that sells chicken. So they hadn’t really thought of them as a competitor. But they are. And that was news to them. Or we did similar work for a coffee chain, and they thought they were losing to McDonald’s on the low-end for coffee. But it turned out, actually, that Starbucks was also a threat to them on the high-end. That help them to figure out strategy. But for private equity investor in these companies, it tells them a lot about the business and where to go.

TS: You wrote a piece last year on like Wayfair and how they used advanced analytics to understand that it was like on the precipice of rapid growth. So what kind of other data or companies using to better understand their market?

RL: Yeah. The Wayfair analysis was really quite interesting. So it’s a great example here. So that’s. And in that case, it was understanding the customer behavior that we were seeing. This was early in COVID, right before the huge spike that we all know now happened. And we were just seeing people coming to Wayfair for the first time. We had never been there before, buying stuff. We were seeing people coming back with great retention. And we were able to observe these kinds of customer metrics at completely outside in.

And that gave our client confidence to make an investment there. One of the other ways we can use analytics there. So we’re working with, you know, another company that’s in a similar space. And so one of the things you can see with this data is because you can see what people are actually buying, you can see what they’re buying from the competition.

So, for example, you could see what are customers who like to shop on Wayfair buying at Overstock or buying a Target or IKEA. And then you could say, Well, if you’re Wayfairer, you then say, well, maybe we need to stock those products. Right. So maybe we should think of adding them. Or maybe we had a stock out on that product for a little bit. And that cost us a business. And so we need to think about our inventory.

And so you can quickly. You can quickly think about your customers differently. At the same time if you’re a brand, obviously, you can use this data to get much better analytics than you ever could about who’s buying your products. Because previously, if you’re a brand and you’re selling online, you don’t know anything about your customers. And now you can start to understand loyalty and things like that.

TS: Have you found any big issues for companies using advanced analytics like it’s hard to access data. It seems fairly sophisticated. So is there a barrier to understanding this kind of data and how it’s presented?

RL: Yeah. I mean, I would say it’s not really for the faint of heart in terms of diving into advanced analytics. If you’re an individual company or an individual private equity firm, it’s hard to really dive in to the degree that we have for a few reasons.

One is there’s a lot of data sources out there. If you go to one of these conferences, there are hundreds of these sources out there, and then there’s more even if you don’t even go to these conferences, right. There’s a lot of sources. It’s hard to figure out which ones are good, which ones really have sufficient sample size and data quality. And these sources also come and go.

Sometimes you might have a source that you really like, and sometimes they disappear or the quality degrades. And what have you. And so you need to maintain a rotating stable of sources. And you need to think a lot about sourcing them. And again, we have people whose job is just to figure that out, which is hard for an individual company to do. And then you also need armies of people to figure out how to use the data in productive ways.

Again, at Bain, we’ve set all that up, but there is a high fixed cost associated with it. And so I think it’s a little self-serving. But I think my view would be that if you’re a firm and you want to get your feet wet in this kind of data, you’re better off partnering with a company like us, like Bain & Company or someone else who’s already got all this figured out and see what insights are possible. What can I really learn doing this? How can this help me make smarter business or investing decisions?

And then once you’ve figured that out, then sort of and you got a narrower focus, then figure out how can you get that on a recurring date? Get a feed of that on a recurring basis versus trying to start from scratch.

TS: Right. That absolutely makes sense. Did you have anything else that you wanted to add to give us any broader scope of your company?

RL: Yeah. The one other thing I might mention, it’s easy to get. And I mean, I just fell into this trap. It’s easy to get sucked into the B2C examples because they’re so enticing and easy to under stand. But I do think there is a lot of exciting work and B2B that we see. And so just to give a couple of quick examples.

One, I think is around people analytics. So that’s an area that’s really come a long way in the last few years. And there’s a lot you can do outside and to understand at a company who works there, what those people do, what’s their turnover and how does that change? And that’s actually enabled a lot of interesting insights. Just to give an example that we did a recent diligence on a software company that served, did a complex sort of B2B type of software.

And the company we looked at was cloud native, and there was a legacy software provider in the space who had been there forever and was slowly developing cloud functionality.

And there was a big question of, well, how fast are they going to catch up? At the moment the cloud native company was ahead. But obviously, the question is could they maintain advantage forever? And so we just looked at the people data, and we saw that our target, the cloud company had a hundred people there and software engineers doing R&D, and the legacy company had 200 people doing it. And so I mean, you sort of figure, well, if one company’s got 200 people and one’s got 100, the 200 person, and it’s going to catch up at some point.

TS: Right.

RL: And I don’t know if it’s in a year or two years, but certainly within the holding period, you have to worry about them reaching parody. And that was not a super complicated insight, but one that had a big impact on thinking about the investment. And if you bought the company, what kind of investment in R&D is required? Just an example.

TS: I was actually I was looking at your site. What is the founder’s mentality?

RL: So that’s a great question. I mean, I will admit, I’m not the expert on founder’s mentality. That was a book that Jimmy Allen wrote. That’s a great book. And if you can get him on your show, he’s far more articulate on this than I am.

But the idea of the founder’s mentality is that, you know, founders can bring a certain sort of secret sauce to their companies and create a dynamic and innovative culture. And that once they leave, sometimes that dynamism can erode and things can become more bureaucratic and ossified. And it can be harder for companies to innovate.

And I think that that is actually, it’s interesting you mention that because this is actually something that’s come up in some of the work that I’ve been doing. One of the ways you can apply this data is in sourcing. So you can help a fund scan the ocean of companies out there and find, you know, of the millions and millions of companies, here’s a sector that’s interesting. And here’s a sub sector. And then within that here are companies that meet our specific thesis and so forth.

One type of thesis that we see sometimes is they’re interested in companies that are still led by the original founder or sometimes they’re interested in companies where the founders just left very recently. And there is an opportunity to think about the culture in a different way.

And we’ve actually built some tools that allow you to look at which companies have founders that have just recently left right. And that was something that at least the fund that we worked with on that, that was very exciting as they look for opportunities. So anyway, that’s the concept. And that’s at least how it fits into my world.

TS: I got it. It seems very interesting. And did you have anything else? We’re going to wrap this up here in a minute. So did you have anything else you wanted to add?

RL: No. I mean, I think we covered the main point. The main thing I would just say to people who are thinking about this is the world of alternative data is really exciting. And the insights that are possible today that just we’re not possible even a year ago.

So it’s really moving fast. We’re signing a new data source practically every month, at least. So it’s great. But it’s also very complicated and tricky and hard to navigate. And again, it sounds self serving. But we strongly recommend that if you’re waiting into this for the first time, you talk to people like us at Bain & Company to really understand specifically how this stuff can help, because often it’s hard to sort of just talk to a data provider. And then from that conversation, really figure out if they’re going to be the right fit. So anyway, we’re here to help, of course.

TS: If people want to contact you, how would they go about contacting you or.

RL: Sure. I mean, I’m happy to have someone reach out to me. I’m certainly here to talk to anyone who wants to think about this, how they can use alternative data. It’s Richard.Lichtenstein@bain.com is an easy way to get in touch with me. And I’m happy to talk to anyone again who wants to think about this stuff.

So thanks for the time, Tracy. Really appreciate it. And hope somebody out there who sees this gives me a call.

TS: Absolutely. Thanks again, Richard. We really appreciate everything you’ve shared with us today.

And for everyone watching, please don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and we look forward to seeing you on the next QuickHit.

Podcasts

What is the Future of Investing?

Post author By admin
Post date July 8, 2019

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8 July 2019 | Money FM 89.3

Tony Nash, CEO of Complete Intelligence shares what is the future of investing and how investors can deal with recent economic concerns including the US-China trade war, and how they can position themselves to come out on top.

Listen in Money FM 89.3

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Tags Future of Investing, interview, Investing, investment, investors, Money FM, Money FM 89.3, podcast

Podcasts

Trade Wars

Post author By admin
Post date May 26, 2019

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26 May 2019

The trade war between the US and China is boiling up again. David takes a closer look at what’s happening between these two economic powerhouses with Tony Nash, founder of “Complete Intelligence.” David and Tony discuss ongoing government subsidies to Chinese companies and if the US has a “Plan B” for imports. Get more acquainted with the trade war and find out what it means for your portfolio.

Listen the whole podcast in Investing in Asia

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Tags audio, China, Chinese companies, government subsidies, Investing, investment, money, podcast, trade war, USA

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