Credit Writedowns

Regarding Cyprus, recently I heard someone claim that depositors are not creditors of a bank despite the fact that deposits are bank liabilities. This is bollocks. Depositors are indeed creditors, particularly in Europe where they are legally pari passu with other unsecured creditors. Below is an extract from a presentation given by an ECB expert on bank resolution schemes addressing who gets preferential treatment in carving up the losses.

Many of the largest technology companies are making so much money that they are rapidly accumulating cash on their balance sheets. While on could argue that this cash should be stripped off the balance sheet for valuation purposes, I would argue that the cash is worth less than face value because having excess cash on the balance sheet is an invitation to wealth-destroying acquisitions. The excess cash should be returned to shareholders as quickly as possible in the form of dividends or share buybacks to prevent such an outcome.

Below are a number of articles I feel are worth reading on the Hewlett Packard acquisition of Autonomy and the accounting scandal associated with writedowns from that acquisition. I want to briefly analyse the fallout from this episode from a number of different levels from the economy-wide macro to the company specific and investing. First, looking at the autonomy acquisition [...]

As I wrote yesterday, government deficits are the biggest driver of elevated corporate margins. This is significant in the US given the looming fiscal cliff and the already ongoing margin mean reversion. Using the financial sectoral balances approach, it is clear that larger government deficits allow for larger non-government surplus. The question is how those surpluses are distributed amongst the four [...]

I think it goes without saying for those of you who have been using the sectoral balances approach, government deficits are what have been driving corporate profits in the U.S. to record levels. Most analysts and news outlets focus on the micro factors, using a bottoms-up approach. But, looking at it top down from a macro perspective, it is significant [...]

I was reading through an article at Reuters on the problem that public pension plans are having with shortfalls that can only be made up via increased tax revenue, increased investment returns, or decreased benefits. The Reuters article says a recent study shows a shortfall of $1.2 trillion in public pension plans. This is a huge issue that is at [...]

The culture of fraud in economics is a severe problem, and Harvard is a “hot spot” of that culture.

Sandy Weill repudiates his pre-crisis “financial supermarket” legacy in suggesting that banks were too big and too leveraged. He openly advocates re-instituting Glass-Steagall. He also supports mark to market.

The US pension bailout fund PBGC is already stretched and may require more taxpayer money. Now it would be taking over pensions that will be even more underfunded, with asset values way below the present value of the liabilities. And more of taxpayers’ money will be used to fund the benefit payments.

Given a clearly overbought market, the re-emergence of Europe’s sovereign debt problem and the Fed reducing the imminence of QE3, even the bulls concede that a correction is likely. Overall, however, investors remain optimistic, and are looking forward to any correction as a buying opportunity, maintaining that the economy is too strong and the market too cheap to decline very much. As we have written about in recent comments, we do not think the economy is anywhere as strong as many believe. Moreover, we do not accept the conventional wisdom that the market, at current levels is undervalued, a point we want to make in this comment.

This weekly newsletter is a gold-level post and follows up on my prediction early last month about 2012 being a period of margin compression in US companies, threatening the rally in stocks and mandating a rotation in investment style or sector weighting.

That Weidmann now wishes to publicly claim he is concerned about risk associated with the Bundesbank’s Target2 credit does not simply mean that this is a truth that has now been “acknowledged”. I would guess that the sober Bundesbank officials that approved of the monthly bulletin piece on Target2 are fairly disgusted that Weidmann is adopting an approach in public that they know is ungrounded.