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In
this weekend's Thoughts from the Frontlines, I quoted from part of a very thoughtful,
right-on-target analysis by David A. Rosenberg entitled "The Elusive Bottom." Over
the weekend, I decided that you should read the whole piece, as Rosenberg makes
some very solid points about how the markets and the economy may play out over
the next few years. He has a non-consensus viewpoint, but that is what I like
for Outside the Box. In fact, I think this is one of the more thought-provoking
pieces I have used in OTB for some time.
Rosenberg is the North American Economist for Merrill Lynch. They were gracious
to give me permission to send this letter out on such a short notice, and I
believe you will well served to take the time to think through his analysis.
And rather than try and give you a quick summary, let's just jump right in.
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
The Elusive Bottom: Conference Call Notes
14 August 2008
David A. Rosenberg
We aren't past the halfway point of this recession
My sense is that we probably aren't even past the halfway point yet of this
recession, the credit losses or the house price deflation. Looking at whether
equities may have bottomed or not on an intermediate basis, maybe the recent
action to the negative side was an important inflection. In terms of what I
do, which is trying to tie the macro into the markets, I have a very tough
time believing that we have reached anything close to a fundamental low, either
in the S&P 500 or in the long-bond yield, for that matter.
300-point rallies in the Dow happen in bear markets
We're in a very confusing atmosphere. People didn't really know what to make
of a 300-point rally in the Dow the other day, but my main message was that
300point rallies from the Dow don't happen in bull markets. In fact, they never
happened in the bull market from October '02 to October '07, but it has happened
6 times in this bear market and happened 12 times in the last bear market.
You don't get moves like that in bull markets. As Rich Bernstein has said time
and again, "This is the hallmark of a recession and a hallmark of a bear market."
How can there be recession with GDP still positive?
We are at a crossroad in the economy. The 2Q GDP numbers recently came in
at plus 1.9%. The details of the number left a little to be desired, but it
was still a positive number. Turn on CNBC, and everybody says, "How can there
possibly be a recession with GDP positive?"
Employment has been down seven months in a row
The very next day we got nonfarm payrolls. It prints down 51,000 and frankly,
it doesn't matter whether it was below or above Wall Street expectations. The
bottom line is that employment is down seven months in a row. In 60 years of
sifting through the data here, that's never happened before without the economy
being in a classic recession.
GDP is useful but it has its limitations
I think the point that has to be made as an economist talking to a group of
portfolio managers or FAs or investors, it is important to convey to clients
that there is a lot of noise out there. GDP is useful, but it has its limitations.
First, GDP is going to get revised. We thought we had a plus 0.6 in the fourth
quarter; all of a sudden, it's minus 0.2. Twenty percent of GDP is government.
So, you really can't fully concentrate on GDP when a fifth of it is state,
local and federal government, unless you're trading defense stocks.
You'll miss a lot of action waiting for GDP to go negative
More to the point, if you're waiting as an investor for GDP to actually turn
negative, you're going to miss a lot of action along the way. I think the best
example is to just go back to Japan. They had a real estate bubble that turned
bust and they had their own credit contraction back in the early 1990s. Guess
what; Japan didn't post its first back-to-back contraction of real GDP until
the second half of 1993. By the time the back-to-back negative that people
seem to be waiting for happened, the Nikkei had already plunged 50%, the 10-year
JGB yield rallied 300 basis points, and the Bank of Japan had cut the overnight
rate 500 basis points, which said a thing or two about the efficacy of using
the traditional monetary policy response of cutting interest rates into a credit
contraction (as we're now finding out here in the US).
Dating the recession is a very scientific process
The point is we can't make the assumption that we've avoided a recessionary
condition in the economy, just because we have so far managed to avoid back-toback
quarters of negative GDP. I'm just telling you as the economist that it is
basically irrelevant. The only body that officially makes the call on the broad
contours - when the recession started, when it ends, when the expansion starts,
when it ends - is the National Bureau of Economic Research, the NBER. It's
a very scientific process. It's not a gut check or a judgment call.
We should actually be welcoming the recession call
When they make the determination - it's very interesting, by the way - when
they make the announcement that the recession began, when they actually date
it for us, traditionally we're a month away from the recession actually ending.
The announcement, in fact, is going to be a rather cathartic event, something
we should actually welcome happening, but so far they are still taking their
sweet time in making the proclamation.
Four factors used to determine recession
1) Employment
The NBER relies on four different variables. The first is employment. Now I've
told you before; employment is down seven months in a row. Does employment
go in the GDP? The answer is no. Is it correlated? Yes. Does it help grow
the business cycle? Of course.
2) Industrial production
The next variable is industrial production. Does that go into GDP? The answer
is no. Does it help grow the business cycle? The answer is yes. This is a
number that comes from the Fed. The GDP comes from the Commerce Department.
It's a very important variable.
3) Real personal income net government transfers
The next variable, the third one, is real personal income excluding government
transfers. This metric is now down four months in a row. Does personal income
go into GDP? The answer is no; of course, it doesn't. GDP is all about spending.
Personal income goes into gross domestic income, which is another chart of
the national accounts.
4) Real sales activity
The fourth variable and the only variable that actually feeds into GDP is real
sales activity in manufacturing, retail and wholesale sectors.
Recession probably started in January
When I take a look at these four key indicators that define the broad contours
of the business cycle, they all peaked and began to roll over sometime between
October of last year and February of this year. I am convinced that when the
NBER does make the final proclamation, it will tell us a that recession officially
began in January. Of course, to any market person, this would make perfect
sense, because of when the S&P 500 peaked. It did a double top into October,
right when it usually does, before a recession begins.
This recession won't end before mid-2009, in our view
Now I'm just giving you the rearview mirror. What's most important to you
folks is let's look through the front window and see when this recession is
going to end. The tea leaves that I'm reading at this point in time show that
this recession is not ending any time before the mid part of 2009, which would
mean that, if you're looking for, not the Mary Ann Bartels intermediate bottoms,
but the fundamental bottom, I don't think you can expect to see it before February
or March of next year, if I'm correct on when this recession ends. Historically
the S&P 500 troughs four months before the economy actually hits its bottom
point.
Profit as a share of GDP was at unheard of levels
The next question, of course, is what levels are we talking about? Again,
I'm going to take what I do, which is earnings, and then talk about the appropriate
multiple. What is the appropriate multiple at the low in a recession? In terms
of earnings, I think that we have to understand where we're coming from in
this cycle. We're coming from a situation where, because of all the leverage
in the system, profits in the share of GDP went into this recession and bear
market at 14% of GDP, which is unheard of. That's never happened before. A
lot of the reason why profits soared was because everybody turned to financials.
There was this tremendous amount of leverage, and that accounted for half of
just about everything in the cycle from GDP growth to employment to profits.
The profits share of GDP, again, as a proxy for margins, is now down to 12%.
Think about that for a second. This terrible earnings recession so far has
taken the share of profits from 14% down to 12%. The question is, if I'm right
on a recession, where does the profit share of GDP go to at a recession trough?
Well, consistently it goes to 7%.
We could get below $50 on operating earnings
Even the economists who are predicting a recession are going say, "Playing
in a little recession, on average, troughs go down 25%." The problem this time
is that we have to overlay the revenue decline that actually comes from a recession
with a much more significant margin, considering the levels from which we headed
into this bear market and recession. So when I'm talking about that historically,
what's normal in a recession is that this profit share equals to 7% and we
started at 14%, we are talking about a 25% decline in earnings. We can be talking
about something closer to 50% peak to trough. The peak is $90 on a full-quarter
trailing basis. It's not beyond the realm of possibilities that we get below
$50 in operating earnings. The first call consensus numbers is $105 earnings
for next year. I give the odds of that happening at exactly 0.0%.
There is a good chance we test the 2002 lows
Now, I'm not at $50 for next year. We're at $63 for operating EPS, but that
means that the answer is no, I don't feel that we're too low on earnings. Usually
you slap a historical trough multiple on in a recession. But typically, during
a recession coupled with a credit crunch, the multiple bottoms at 12. You're
at a 12 multiple with $63 in earnings and you're going to ask the question, "Are
you talking about the possibility that we can actually test the ... 2002 lows?" And
the answer is that it is certainly not outside the realm of the possible. I'm
not making that forecast, but what I am telling you is that there is a good
chance that that could happen.
We are in a secular bear market
With that being respectful to the fact, I believe we're in a secular bear
market. I don't even think that's an opinion anymore. I think it's a stylized
fact. If you saw it, Rich Bernstein put out his performance asset mix table.
Out of all the asset classes, stocks, cash, bonds, commodities, the only one
to have a negative inflation-adjusted return over the past 10 years is the
S&P 500. So I think we have to be honest about this. If it's something
like a 1929 and 1955 or 1966, 1982 type of secular bear market, I think this
one actually started in 2000, it doesn't mean that you don't get cyclical bull
markets along the way. We actually had a cyclical bull market in the context
of a secular bear market that actually took the S&P to a new high. Of course,
as I said before, half of that was unprecedented leverage, the stone process
of unwinding.
I think that it is important now to recognize for our clients that we have
a cyclical bear market being overlaid into a secular bear market. I think the
message that we're trying to send is that there is a different investing style
and strategy for every part of the business cycle. One part of the business
cycle is all about adding ... data and risk to maximize your turns. Then there
are times when it is all about preserving your capital and focusing on income,
earnings, stability and dividend growth. I think that's where we have been,
and I firmly believe that's where we will continue to be, at least over the
course of the next 12 months.
Chapter 1 was the end of the res construction bubble
When I look at where we are in this book, and we continue to write chapters
in this book and it is a book; this is an epic period. We are living through
history. People will be writing about this in the future, no different than
they wrote about the 1920s and the 1930s. Chapter one of the book was the end
of the residential construction bubble, which I would tag as the first quarter
of 2006, when housing started to peak and began to roll over at 2.3 million
units. I continue to look back at that, 2.3 million units.
The natural level of demographic demand for housing in this country is annual
demand of 1.45 million units. From 2003 until 2007, builders added on average
nearly 2 million residential units per year, or 30% more, than the natural
demand could absorb, because, of course, we were in a new paradigm. So the
builders were building homes and condos as if we had the same demographics
as the 1970s when the Boomers were buying their first refrigerator. This is
a case of Global Crossing meeting D.R. Horton, and we are paying the price
for that, even today.
Chapter two was the end of the home price bubble
Chapter two of the book was the end of the home-price bubble, and I would
date that to the first quarter of 2007 when the Case-Shiller Index began to
deflate year over year. Now, I want to make this point, and I want to make
this point emphatically. Home prices in this country on average rose 20% per
year for six years. That has never happened before. When you take a look at
home prices in real terms, they're still more than 30% higher today than they
were when this mania morphed into a bubble back in 2001. So to those people
who are thinking that we're only 5% away from the low, I'd say I don't think
so. Make no mistake that there is going to be more deflation in home prices
ahead - I think significant deflation - just as Freddie Mac put us on notice
yesterday.
Chapter three was the end of the credit cycle
The third chapter was the end of the credit cycle, which, again, I would tag
at exactly a year ago. I think the way we have to look at this, and we're talking
about how this affects our ability to navigate the portfolio and manage the
macro forecast. This cycle saw the end of a 20-year secular credit expansion
that went absolutely parabolic in the last 6 years and accounted for half the
growth in just about every segment that's forecast.
Chapter four was the end of the employment cycle
This is very big stuff and it's taking on different forms. We have the end
of the credit cycle as chapter three. Chapter four was the end of the employment
cycle, which I discussed earlier, which started in December of 2007.
Chapter 5 is the first consumer recession since 1990-91
We're heading into chapter five, and chapter five is the onset of the first
consumer recession since 1990-91. I would argue this could end up being very
similar to that six-quarter consumer recession that we endured from 1973-75.
There are differences, but there are similarities. A lot of people like to
compare this to 199091, because of the real estate flavor and the credit crunch,
but there is actually a lot more going on that compares it to 1975.
I was around in the 1980s, and I remember that it played out very similarly.
What people called resilience and people called contained and people called
decoupling were all very pleasant euphemisms for lags. That's what they are;
they're lags. There are built-in lags. Housing peaked in 1988, rolled over,
the credit crunch intensified in 1989 when RTC got into real action. Then 1990
... two years after housing peaked, we had this very surprising consumer recession
that caught even the Fed off guard.
The Four Horsemen
I wrote a report late last year titled The Four Horsemen. It was a
regretful choice of words, because I kept on fielding questions as to whether
or not I was, in fact, calling for the end of the world. I got to a point where
my answer was "Just wait; it's going to get worse than that." In any event,
who are the four horsemen? The four horsemen are credit contraction, deflation
of both housing and equities, and that happened in the mid-1970s. Usually you'll
get one or the other. To have both housing and equities deflate on the household
balance sheet, we're talking about $30 trillion of assets. Half the assets
on the household balance sheet are compressing dramatically right now. That
last happened in the mid-1970s. We got credit contraction. We got deflation
on the asset side of the household balance sheet that's forcing the savings
rate higher. We have employment, which I mentioned before.
Of course, food and energy - and, again, not just energy, but energy and food
- and food is a bigger deal. Food is 15% of the household budget; energy is
10%. That's a quarter of the household budget constrained by food and energy.
Food is going to come down at a slower rate than energy will, but it's already
too late.
Oil prices are going down because demand is going down
People are saying to me all the time, "Gee, aren't you going to turn more
bullish with oil prices going down?" Well, oil prices are going down, because
for the first time in this cycle it took $145 to break the back of the consumer.
Quite amazing that it took that long, but it has happened. So we're seeing
true demand destruction in energy at a rate we haven't seen in almost two decades.
It's something to get an oil price decline that's predicated on a new oil
supply. I would keep that as a de facto exogenous tax cut; but when
you're getting oil price declines because of recessionary pressures cutting
into energy demand, it's no different than what happened in late 2000. That
was the last time we had oil peel off as much as it is right now. I think it
would have been a bit of a mistake for the economists at the end of 2000 to
say, "Ah-ha, oil is coming down; I'm going to raise my 2001 GDP forecast." You
have to take a look at the reason why oil is going down, and the reason is
not because of supply. The reason is because consumer demand is starting to
go down. Again, the last time you had food and energy deviating so much from
the long-run norm was in the mid-1970s.
Cash flow drain to household sector is $800 billion
When I take a look at the four horsemen and I try to come up with a number,
the number I'm trying to come up with is a cash flow number. What is the cash
flow drain on the household sector from the four horsemen in the coming year?
The answer is $800 billion. So Uncle Sam, give me six more of those tax stimulus
plans. That is a huge number. It's equivalent to 12% of discretionary spending,
which, by the way, is exactly the peak-to-trough decline in real consumer cyclical
spending back in that 1973 to 1975 recession. The S&P 500 goes down peak
to trough not by 20%, but more like 40%.
Three markers to turn us bullish
In terms of what are some of the markers that I'm weighing down to turn more
bullish? I think this is very important. I look at not so much where am I going
to be wrong, but looking at what are the things that will turn me more positive?
There are three markers that I have laid down. The first marker is the personal
savings rate. I have to see the personal savings rate go back to the pre-bubbles,
normalized levels, which was 8%. I'm not talking about the Jurassic period
here. I'm talking about where we were in the late 1980s and the early 1990s,
before the last two bubbles. That's why I said plural.
We had a tech stock bubble followed very quickly by a housing bubble. This
had tremendous implications for perceived net worth and perceived future asset
growth of the household sector. It had monumental impact on how people spent
their after-tax income. That's why we got to a point last year where briefly
the savings rate got to negative for the first time since the 1920s. There
was a belief system that we could retire on our assets, and now these assets
are deflating and people's expectations of how they're going to retire is going
to force that savings rate higher. That's going to be very disinflationary,
by the way.
I think it's important to note that, in 2002, as the tech sector was deflating,
Greenspan and Bernanke decided that it was a good idea to re-slate the housing
stock as an antidote to the deflation in the tech capital stock. This is almost
a piece of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; we built the monster, now we
have to tear it down. I don't know what else is left. We've had an equity bubble
followed by a housing bubble, followed by a credit bubble. I don't think there
are any more rabbits in the hat to create the next bubble, unless that bubble
is going to be in Treasuries, and maybe that is, in fact, going to happen.
It's pretty clear that the Fed is going to be concentrating a lot more in the
future on non-traditional measures to ease monetary conditions, and not just
cutting the Fed fund rate. Part of that may be reflating by expanding its balance
sheet, which means that it's not just talk. The Fed is actually going to add
to its balance sheet, and that's exactly what happened.
1) Need to see the savings rate go to eight percent
With the Bank of Japan and the operations they conducted back in the 1990s,
this is just stuff to consider for the future. Let me just say that a savings
rate of 8% would leave me feeling very good about the fact that we would have
gone to a level of pent-up demand that would help us embark on the next bull
market and economic expansion. That's going to take quite a bit of time. This
is a process. This a process we're talking, even after the recession ends,
that's going to be an elongated recovery, as there was in the early 1990s,
after that asset cycle. Remember, the recession might have ended in November
2001, but that did not give you a "get out of jail free" card as an equity
investor, and certainly the recovery was a good two years away, even if the
recession technically ended at the end of 2001. I'm talking about the markers
that will turn me bullish for the next cycle. An eight percent savings rate,
to me, would be a very critical launching pad.
2) Months supply below eight months
What else? Well, I doubt that anything is really going to bottom, including
the financials, until we're convinced that house prices have hit bottom. For
that we have to look at the inventory to sales ratio, and there are different
measures. There is the new inventory, which is a 10-month supply. There's the
resale; that's 11-month supply. When I take a look at the Census Bureau data,
which includes total vacant units for sale, single-family, condo, it's more
like 17-month supply. We need to include everything, including foreclosed properties.
I have to see that number sliced in half. I have to see it down below eight
months supply before I'll be convinced home prices don't bottom, at least the
second derivatives start to turn positive. I have to see that metric at the
eight-month supply. I'm keeping a very close eye on it. That will make me feel
a lot more comfortable with turning bullish for the next cycle.
3) Interest coverage ratio has to come down to 10.5%
The third and last marker comes down to the household balance sheet. What
I'm referring to here is interest coverage in the household sector. We have
a record debt-income ratio, but that's a stop-to-flow concept. I'm talking
about interest coverage, how much are principal and interest payments from
the record debt absorbing out of household income? It is 14.1%. It's at a near-record
high. We have never been in a recession with this metric at this level. So,
that means there are too many things that are levels we've never seen before.
The whole thing about economic bottling is you run the rest of it based on
the past, and there are so many things that we're entering into this thing
that I've never seen before.
There is, I'd have to admit, a wide dispersion around the forecast I am providing.
What I am really trying to do is put things into a certain perspective. What
I know, being an economist, is that in some sense you're a glorified historian.
So when I take a look at the chart of interest coverage in the household sector,
what do I see? I see that after the recession of the early 1980s, this interest
coverage ratio got down to 10.5% by 1982 and, voila, that was the touch-off
point for a multi-year bull market and economic expansion.
Then we had the recession of the early 1990s, and what do you know? In 1992,
interest coverage went down to 10.5% again. That was the launching pad for
a multi-year bull market and economic expansion. We're 14.1% in this metric
today. I know this historical record tells me that there is something about
a 10.5% ratio that is a very cathartic event. The problem is that to get there
from here would require the elimination of $2 trillion of household debt. So,
maybe when NYU's Nouriel Roubini talks about that the total losses could be
up to $2 trillion, maybe he's not talking through a paper bag.
Frugality is going to set in
As far as I know, there are only two ways to eliminate debt. You either walk
away from it, which people obviously are doing, which is why we got these write-downs
and these foreclosures, or you pay it down. I think people with a FICO score
that they are concerned about are going to pay that down. That means that the
savings rate is going to be forced higher. This, again, is going to be very,
very disinflationary. It means that fashions are going to change. It means
frugality is going to set in. We're going to be living in smaller houses, driving
smaller cars and living more frugally. It's not going to be the end of the
world; it's going to be a necessary process to truly embark on getting the
balance sheets down to more comfortable levels so that we can actually embark
on the next cycle.
Intense deleveraging in the banking sector
The whole thing about being an economist is that you're being requested to
model behavior. What I found recently was three signs of significant changes
in behavior. We obviously know of at least one investment bank that is taking
aggressive action to sell assets and to deleverage. That's going to force a
lot of action in other parts of the industry. What we're talking about here
is intensified deleveraging in the banking sector.
Inventories cut by $62 billion despite tax stimulus
What else did we see? Well, those GDP numbers were just fascinating when you
dig through them. Think about it for a second. How did businesses respond to
the biggest tax stimulus of all time? They cut their inventory by $62 billion.
Can you fathom that? Instead of boosting production as a result of the stimulus,
they just allowed the stimulus to absorb past production. We already know that
the inventory component went down another five points based on the July ISM
number, so this inventory liquidation process is continuing.
Savings rate boosted despite stimulus too
Alan Greenspan cut his teeth on inventory investment cycles. So banks are
deleveraging, and companies are liquidating inventories. How did households
respond to the biggest tax stimulus of all time? They boosted their savings
rate from 0.3% in the first quarter to 2.6% in the second quarter, which is
only the third steepest increase in the savings rate in any given quarter in
the past 55 years. Now you probably didn't read that in the front page of The
Wall Street Journal, but I find that to be a very relevant statistic.
So we have financial sector deleveraging. We have business sector inventory
liquidation overlaid with the households boosting their savings rate. These
are new themes, and the theme is about getting small. That's going to play
very well into Rich Bernstein's decision two months ago to allocate an extra
15 percentage points to his fixed income portfolio. Now we're talking about
fixed income. We're talking about bonds that are high quality and have non-callable
protection.
Nominal GDP growth has highest correlation with yields
I'll tell you that the really key forecast next year coming from the economics
department here is the nominal GDP, nominal, price times quantity, because
we're calling for nominal GDP growth next year to average 1.5%. That is going
to be very bullish for sectors that have proven earnings stability and reliable
dividend growth, and it's going to be very bullish for bonds. I say that, because
I know that the critical driving factor for bonds is not fiscal deficits. It's
not the dollar and, guess what, it's not commodities. Nominal GDP growth has
the highest correlation. People look and they say, "Four percent 10-year note;
who'd want to touch it?" The reality is that nominal GDP growth this year is
averaging 4%. The fact that the 10-year note is averaging 4% is not really
a big mystery, if you're looking at the macro underpinnings.
Now, if I'm right on 1.5% nominal GDP growth for next year, all I can tell
you is that the last time we had a condition like that was in 1958. All I can
tell you is that 1958, the funds rate averaged to 1.5% and the 10-year note
averaged 3%. If you're going to ask me if we have a realistic chance of going
back and retesting the June 2003 lows and the 10-year note or the March 2008
lows and the 10-year note, I firmly believe that's going to happen. I believe
that's going to also provide you with very handsome total returns.
Your glad to see oil dropping in price analyst,
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