Author: sgstofka

Piketty Pushes Back

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June 1st, 2014

First a shout out to our friends in the southern hemisphere where the winter is beginning in earnest.  Hey, you had the sun for six months.  Now it’s our turn.  We all have to share.  I think that because there are more people in the northern hemisphere, the sun should stay up here for longer than six months.  It’s not fair.

Piketty Controversy

Talking about fair…..Last week I touched on some of the highlights in Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the 21st Century.  At the time of that writing, Chris Giles in the Financial Times had just reported that he found some data errors while using Piketty’s source material.  Giles’ criticisms were rather precise and included charts of the revised data which Giles claimed contradicted Piketty’s conclusions that wealth inequality had risen during the past thirty years.  This past Friday, the financial site Bloomberg reported that Piketty had rebutted criticisms of his methodology.  En garde!!! For those of you who are not interested in the minutiae of the disagreements, I will quote from Piketty’s response:

What is troubling about the FT methodological choices is that they use the estimates based upon estate tax statistics for the older decades (until the 1980s), and then they shift to the survey based estimates for the more recent period. This is problematic because we know that in every country wealth surveys tend to underestimate top wealth shares as compared to estimates based upon administrative fiscal data. Therefore such a methodological choice is bound to bias the results in the direction of declining inequality.

Piketty’s rebuttal is sound but the debate over data and methodology does underscore a problem. There were times when I have questioned Piketty’s data only to find that he addressed those concerns in either the footnotes to the book or in notes contained in his tables.   Fearing that I might put readers to sleep, I edited out of last week’s blog a concern I had with Piketty’s rate of inflation shown on page 448 when he presented a table – Table 12.2 – of historical returns by university endowments.  Piketty states a 2.4% inflation rate from 1980-2010, which struck me as too low (BLS figures are 3.3%).  In a note at the bottom of the Excel file TS12.2, he revealed that he used the GDP deflator, not the CPI, in order to keep data consistent with the GDP series.  He could have stated this simply at the bottom of the table in the book.  It’s not like the publishers were trying to save space in a 700 page book.

So, Open Letter to Professor Piketty and other Economists:  Please put your caveats and clarifications up front and center and repeat often. Last week, I gave several examples of Piketty’s clarifications which could be found in a referenced paper or on one of the spreadsheets that his team compiled.  James Joyce famously said of his book Finnegan’s Wake that he expected the reader to put as much time and effort in reading the book as Joyce did in writing the book.  Relatively few people have read Finnegan’s Wake.  Help us understand your point!!

For those of you who want more of the controversy, a reader sent me this, including  Simon Wren-Lewis’s comments on the matter at Mainly Macro, which I link to every week on the side of this blog. Economist Tyler Cowen comments echo my concerns with valuations of capital that vary widely because of asset pricing.  When an asset is difficult to price or varies widely in price, should one use the SNA international convention (System of National Accounts) and estimate a present value based on projected future flows?  The founder of Vanguard, John Bogle, recommends this common sense approach for our personal portfolios; that we should stop looking at our statements and look at the money flows that our portfolio mix will probably generate them when we need them.  That is the true worth of our portfolios, according to Bogle – not some temporary valuation based on the market prices on the last day of the month.

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What is Income?

This week, as I listened to and read discussions of income in the U.S., it became apparent that there are understandable misconceptions of what is being counted when economists tally up the income of a household and the income of a nation.  Update:  Corrected. A 2011 report from the Census Bureau states that household income does include cash benefits before taxes.  EITC payments are not included because they are a reverse tax (Source).  Non-cash benefits like Medicaid, Food Stamps and housing assistance are not included.  These non-cash benefits can easily surpass $1000 per month.

Money income includes earnings, unemployment compensation, workers’ compensation, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, public assistance, veterans’ payments, survivor benefits, pension or retirement income, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, income from estates and trusts, educational assistance, alimony, child support, cash assistance from outside the household, and other miscellaneous sources.

The national income figures that Thomas Piketty uses in his book do include government transfers.  The 2005 NIPA Guide summarizes what is included in personal income.   IVA and CCAdj are inventory and depreciation adjustments.

Personal income is the sum of compensation of em­ployees, received; 
proprietors’ income with IVA and CCAdj; 
rental income of persons with CCAdj; 
personal income receipts on assets; 
and personal current trans­fer receipts; 
less contributions for government social insurance

Measuring income to determine an aggregate level of well-being within the population is challenging and gives each side ample ammunition in the political debate.  The inclusion and exclusion of various types of benefit, cash and otherwise, leads one side to dismiss the conclusions of the other side and hinders a constructive dialog.

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GDP Growth

Each month the BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis) releases a new estimate of the previous quarter’s GDP.  This past week the BEA released the 2nd estimate of 1st Quarter GDP growth, showing an annualized 1% decline.  This was pretty much in line with consensus estimates and the market’s response was rather neutral on the day of the release.  Much of the downturn was ascribed to the particularly harsh winter weather and many economists are projecting a 4% annualized increase in this quarter, a rebound to offset the past quarter’s decline.

Peering under the hood of the GDP report:  under the category of Private Domestic Investment, residential housing dropped almost 8% (annual rate) in the fourth quarter and another 5% in the first quarter of 2014.  What is more surprising is the almost 2% drop in business investment.  Let me go back to a paper by Ed Leamer that I first wrote about in February.  Mr. Leamer’s thesis is that the sales of new homes first decreases, followed by a decrease in business investment. He found that this 1-2 punch precedes most recessions by about 3 – 4 quarters.  In two cases, it was a false positive.  Perhaps this latest 1-2 punch  is a false positive.  Perhaps it was just the winter weather.  This economy does not feel like a recession is at all imminent. Industrial activity, the labor market and auto sales are strong or expanding. More perplexing to a casual investor might be a summer lurch downward in the market if the economy does not show signs of a correcting rebound.

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Fixed Capital Consumption

Since 2000, there has been a notable change in economic growth.  It is not often that we see growth above 3% as we did in the 20th century.

Helping that meager growth rate look – well, less meager – is an item that the BEA adds to GDP called Fixed Capital Consumption.  To the ordinary Joe, this is simply depreciation, but this is not the depreciation that your accountant might have mentioned if you own a small business or rent out part of your home. The depreciation that the BEA calculates is based on the current market price of a piece of equipment, for example, not the actual cost of the item.  As an example, let’s say that Billy and Betty Jones bought a new $20,000 truck for their business and their accountant depreciates it over a 5-year cycle.  To keep it simple, assume that the truck’s depreciation each year is 20%.  That depreciation is based on the cost of the vehicle.  Let’s do it the way the BEA does it (if only!  The IRS does not allow this!).  In year 3, the current market price of a similar vehicle is $24,000.  20% of $24,000 is $4800, higher than the $4000 depreciation based on the cost of the vehicle. In a given year, the amount of depreciation actually reported by companies might be $2 trillion.  The BEA figure will be higher and this is included in Gross Domestic Product.  As a percentage of GDP, depreciation has risen considerably since the early 2000s, driving up reported GDP growth just a smidge.  Below is a chart of the increasing percentage of GDP that is Fixed Capital Consumption.  Almost one of every six dollars of GDP is being allocated to depreciation, a third higher than 1960 rates.

In a low inflation environment, the change in the market prices of equipment and land is muted.  Are capital expenditures becoming obsolete at a faster pace?  Over the past two decades, software and systems development has become an increasing share of non-residential investment.  Rapid changes in technology may be one driver of the acceleration in depreciation.  Wikipedia has a good article on the concept as it is reported in the national accounts.

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Education

As I mentioned last week, I’ll look at a paper I read recently which had some rather startling conclusions. In a paper published in the World Economic Review earlier this year, economists James Galbraith and J. Travis Hale reviewed paycheck and IRS income data to identify state and national trends in income inequality during the past 40+ years.  It comes as no surprise that there is inequality between sectors in the economy, a fact which Galbraith and Hale acknowledge.  Their particular focus was the changes in inequality within and between sectors at the state and national levels.

There are two components to income inequality: 1) wage growth or the lack of it; and 2) employment growth or the lack of it within each sector.  If a particular sector experiences a period of high growth in earnings but jobs decline in that sector, then the gains become more concentrated and inequality between sectors grows.

What Galbraith and Hale found was that the changes in the 1990s and 2000s had one common characteristic: booming sectors of the economy vs. non-booming sectors accounted for most of the growth in income inequality.  Where each decade differed was the change in the sectors that experienced high growth.  The 1990s was marked by a growth spike in information technology, giving rise to out-sized gains to workers in the professional, scientific, and technical fields.   The 2000s was the decade of outsized growth in construction, defense and extractive technologies. Here is a troubling finding of their study: common to both periods is that the number of jobs declined in those sectors that experienced high wage growth.  Higher pay = less job growth. Also common to both decades, until the financial crisis in 2008, was the high growth in the finance and insurance industries.  Problem:  Rising  inequality.  Remedy: More education. The authors acknowledge this common response:

When public discourse admits inequality to be a problem, education is often given as the cure.  According to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (2006), for instance, the correct response to rising inequality is to “focus on helping people of all ages pursue first-rate education and retraining opportunities, so they can acquire the skills needed to advance in a competitive worldwide environment.”  This is a view with powerful support among economists. 

But their evidence casts this common conception into doubt:

As we’ve shown, the last two decades have seen significantly slower job growth in the high-earnings-growth sectors than in the economy at large. So even if large numbers of young people do “acquire the skills needed to advance” there is no evidence that the economy will provide them with jobs to suit.  Many will simply end up not using their skills.  Moreover, a strategy of investment in education presupposes advance knowledge of what the education should be for. Years of education in different fields are not perfect substitutes, and it does little good to train too many people for jobs that, in the short space of four or five years, may (and do) fall out of fashion. And experience shows clearly that the population does not know, in advance, what to train for. Rather, education and training have become a kind of lottery, whose winners and losers are determined, ex post, by the behavior of the economy.

Does this mean that parents and grandparents should cash in those college funds for the kids and take a long vacation with the money?  Hardly.  Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that those with a college education have a significantly greater lifetime income than those without. The findings of this paper imply, however, that the economy and the job market change in ways which none of us can reliably predict.  The wiser course for students might be the same advice financial advisors give to investors: diversify.  If a student is majoring in philosophy, take some business, computer or science courses. Science majors could do with some literature and writing courses as well.

At the start of the 20th Century, 40% of the population was engaged in farming-related jobs.  A century later, less than 2% of jobs are in the agricultural sector.

When I was a teenager, an aunt told me that a reliable bookkeeper could always find a job. That was before the introduction of the computer and accounting programs for small businesses.

The number of librarians has declined about 10% in less than a decade.  In 1990, who could have predicted that?

Records Management, once a clerical job, has evolved into management of many interdependent mediums, complicated by laws and regulations that few could foresee just twenty years. A science major confident in the availability of work in a certain skilled profession might find that the introduction of a qubit computer in 2025 sharply reduces jobs in that profession.

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Takeaway

As investors, we often think that we can avoid the pain so many of us experienced in 2008 if we pay more attention to economic and corporate indicators.  In hindsight, the graphed data looks so obvious. We ignore now what we didn’t ignore then because we know now what to ignore, making hindsight a marvel of clarity.  The future enables us to filter out the noise of the past.

If China’s housing sector implodes and repercussions of that undermine the U.S. economy, we’ll criticize ourselves for not reading that article on page 24 that detailed the coming crisis.  There will be a graph of some spread in interest rates or some other indicator that we glossed over at the time.  If there is a recession 9 months from now (this is just an ‘if’), we will forget the harsh winter of 2014 that blinded us to the early warning signs.  We will see the decline in 1st quarter GDP together with the decline in disposable personal income as the clearest of warning signs and slap ourselves on the head for missing it.  Some guy will get on the telly and show us how he predicted it all along and we’ll think that we should get his newsletter because this guy knows.

As to our current disputes, the grandchildren of our grandchildren may be puzzled by our concerns with income and wealth inequality.  We remember the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, which the signers largely agreed to with a few revisions.  The majority of the Declaration is concerned with a list of grievances against the British Empire, which the signers debated vigorously, making numerous amendments to the text.

When did we last have a debate on which metal, gold or silver, should serve as a backing to the currency?  This burning topic of the late 19th Century is of little more than historic interest.

Over a fifty year period in the 19th Century, bankruptcy became less a criminal act and more a civil matter, culminating in the Nelson Act in 1898 which codified our more modern notion of bankruptcy.

With relatively little debate, 19th Century Americans bequeathed their heirs a country dominated by large corporations.  Less by design and more by default, the raising of private capital by corporations seemed to be a convenient solution to the persistent misuse of public funds by corrupt politicians in that century.

We no longer argue, as they did during the Civil War, whether the Federal Government has a responsibility to bury soldiers who have died on the battlefield.

We argue about guns and the meaning of the Second Amendment, which 19th Century Americans thought was non-controversial and not a universal individual right to gun ownership.

A hot topic of debate in the early part of the 20th Century was whether Irish, Italians and other Southern European immigrants were fully evolved humans and were capable of exercising the right to vote.

19th Century Americans argued about the moral validity of slavery.  We don’t.

What is the minimum working age for children?  Is it six or eight years of age?  What should be the legal maximum hours that they can work?  These burning questions of the early 20th Century are dead embers now.

The issues changes, our perspectives change, but we can be sure of one thing: in a hundred years, we will still be arguing as much as we do today and that is oddly reassuring.

Piketty’s Capital

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May 25, 2014

No graphs this week!  Awwww!

A few months ago, Thomas Piketty, a French economist, released Capital in the 21st Century, a book that I mentioned to readers back in January before its publication.  Piketty’s book has aroused much interest, praise and denunciation.  What could arouse such fire in the hearts of men, you ask?  Inequality.  We humans are a social bunch and, like our chimpanzee cousins, are especially sensitive to inequality.  “She got more chocolate milk than me!  It’s not fair!” is a familiar lament to many parents.

To understand Piketty’s thesis, let’s review some fundamental concepts of capital and income.
“Income is a flow…the quantity of goods produced and distributed in a given period…Capital is a stock…the total wealth owned at a given point in time.” (p. 50)  Piketty’s thesis is based on a ratio of the capital of a nation to the national income.  His definition of capital is so encompassing that my immediate suspicion was the accuracy of estimates of the total wealth of a nation, a flaw that Piketty acknowledges.

The main thesis of Piketty’s book is: as the capital wealth of a nation accumulates, capital’s share of annual national income increases.  For long periods, the rate of growth of accumulated capital is larger than the growth of the economic output/income of a nation.  The process is self-perpetuating, so that capital takes an ever increasing share of national income.  The higher the capital/ national income ratio the more inequality of wealth and income.  Piketty estimates that, in 2010, the capital/income ratio was 450% for the U.S., a bit above Germany and Canada’s ratios, and far below those of France and Great Britain. Piketty proposes a solution to this inexorable process:  a progressive tax on wealth.  Mount up your steeds, men!  The Marxists are coming!

Wealth = Capital

I’ll begin a review of some criticisms of Piketty’s methodology with a brief primer on some measures of capital.  Economists and accountants often analyze the flow generated by a store of capital, but it is capital that can be more easily counted. In finance, there is a metric called Working Capital Turnover Ratio which calculates the flow of sales from the working capital of a firm, and is used to assess both the value and liquidity of a firm.   Piketty rarely uses the term liquidity in his book, but I think it may be an unstated implication of his work.

ROIC, or Return On Invested Capital, is frequently used to measure how well a firm uses the capital and debt invested in the firm to generate a profit.  These measure net after tax profits as a percentage of the stock of capital and debt in a business.  Piketty also measures flow but it is sales, not profits that is his primary focus.  Profits are of course an intrinsic component of sales since they are that portion of sales income that is left over after all expenses.  The change in real GDP is the percent change in that flow.  Piketty’s concern is the accumulation of the residual of past economic flows, the stock of wealth that he claims earn a greater rate of return than the increase in the annual flow of economic activity.  Capital is a key component of economic growth but Piketty raises concerns that Capital can become too large relative to the flow of economic activity.
  
Hopefully, this brief background will enable the reader to appreciate the criticisms of Piketty’s thesis.  Charles Gave is a forty year veteran of investment management and cofounder of the international investment firm GaveKal.  Coming from the world of finance, Gave understands capital as meaning invested capital or working capital. Keep that in mind as you read Gave’s denunciation of Piketty’s thesis:

The extraordinary thing is that Piketty’s analysis is based on a massive logical error. His thesis runs as follows: if R is the rate of return on invested capital and if G is the growth rate of the economy, since R is greater than G, profits will grow faster than GDP, and the rich will get richer and the poor poorer. This is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) at its most egregious. Piketty confuses the return on invested capital, or ROIC, with the growth rate of corporate profits, a mistake so basic it is scarcely believable.“ [Gave’s emphasis]

On page 46 of his book Piketty writes: “In this book, capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market.”  While this includes invested capital, it is not solely invested capital, for it includes residential real estate, government capital, land and natural resources, some of which are very difficult to value.

In short, Gave read “invested capital” when Piketty wrote just “capital.”  Gave read “corporate profits” when Piketty wrote “return on capital, including profits…” (p. 25).

The economist James Galbraith takes issue with Piketty’s all inclusive  definition of capital: “he conflates physical capital equipment with all forms of money-valued wealth, including land and housing, whether that wealth is in productive use or not.”

Piketty anticipated his critics: “some definitions of ‘capital’ hold that the term should apply only to those components of wealth directly employed in the production process…Capital in all its forms has always played a dual role, as both a store of value and a factor of production.  I therefore decided that it was simpler not to impose a rigid distinction between wealth and capital.” (p. 47) 

Let me rephrase the ” R is greater than G” formula that piqued Gave’s derision.  Picketty uses small ‘r’ and small ‘g’ so I will adhere to that: the annual income r derived from capital, as a percentage of that capital stock, will be more than the annual percentage change in real, or inflation adjusted, income/output g.  As Piketty writes: “the inequality implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages.”

An example:  In the teeny tiny kingdom of Miniscule, the total nonhuman capital stock at the beginning of this year is $100.  It  generated output/income of $10, or 10%. That is r, the return on capital.  This income from capital was part of Miniscule’s total output/income of $30, an increase of $2 over last year’s income/output of $28. To keep the math simple, let’s pretend there was no inflation or depreciation in that year.  The growth in total income/output is about 7%, or $2 / $28.  That is g, the growth rate of output/income.  To recap,  r = 10%, g = 7%.  “r can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g.” (p. 571) Is this true?  That’s what Piketty claims to show.

Like Galbraith, I question Piketty’s inclusion of many different forms of wealth which are difficult to measure.  Piketty acknowledges the difficulties in the appendix to a paper he co-authored with Gabriel Zucman in December 2013, “Capital Is Back” and is included as one of the data sources for his book.  Piketty’s thorough explanation of the shortcomings of capital measurements led me to scratch my head and wonder why he decided to include them.

Piketty has no control over accounting conventions adopted by international bodies, yet I’m sure he and his team will be taken to task for the computation of the data that is the responsibility of the various nations included in the study.  A big shout out to Piketty and his collaborators for making the data available.

Back to our tiny kingdom of Miniscule. What if we missed some capital in our tally?  If the capital stock were closer to $120, not $100, then ‘r’, the return on capital would be 8%, not $10% and approximately the same rate of growth as the economy as a whole.

How accurate are the public, or government, capital computations?  In the U.S., the Comptroller General is responsible for auditing the financial statements of the country as part of the Federal Budget.  For ten years, from 1998 – 2008, Comptroller General David Walker refused to certify the financial statements,  listing a number of accounting problems: inadequate  monetary controls, poorly supported adjustments, outdated computer systems, unsupported cash disbursements, an inability to track internal or external fraud and a poorly documented inventory system.  These flawed financial statements are the basis for the capital computations in Piketty’s book.  In the appendix to Capital Is Back, Piketty explains the methodologies used by different nations.   Implicit in these standards is that public capital is understated in the national accounts.  This undervaluation decreases the capital/income ratio while increasing the r, or rate of return, of the capital stock.  Piketty notes the deviations in the various computations of land capital.  In the U.S. only the value of agricultural land is measured (Appendix p. 15).  A vast store of capital in 770 million acres of range land (Source) , more than half of which is private, is thus uncounted, further inflating the r, or return on capital.  70% of the land surface in the U.S. is devoted to livestock grazing (Source). A fundamental weakness in cross country valuations is the assumption that developed countries are more or less similar in most respects.  Key differences in the composition of economies are  factored out of the models.

Human Capital

Piketty separates capital into two categories: human and non-human, including only that non-human capital that can be traded on a market.  This exclusion of human capital may be an appropriate methodology in an analysis of an agrarian economy but is not so when applied to the developed economies of today which rely much more heavily on the human capital amassed through education. This point has been raised by economists Robert Solow and Robert Gordon and Piketty acknowledges this on page 586, note 35.

What are the implications of including educational capital?

Today a person may spend $40,000 to $150,000 to get a college education and expects an inflation adjusted return on that investment  that is greater than the 4% one could get investing in long term Treasury bills.  Developed economies depend greatly on the capital investment that they make in educating most of the young people in a society.  An educated mind is both a capital investment and a leaseable, if not outright tradeable, commodity.  While an employer can not buy an employee’s brain the way one can buy a machine, an employer does lease the knowledge, the output from that brain, by paying a compensation premium to that employee.  Income data from the Census Bureau, the IRS and the Bureau of Labor Statistics enables us to quantify the implied store of value of a college education.  If Piketty’s expansive definition of capital were to include educational capital, what would the resulting capital/income ratio look like?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates an annual return of approximately $24,000 in 2013 for a bachelor’s degree. In 2011, the Census Bureau estimated the number of people in the U.S. with college degrees at 63 million, or 40% of the workforce.  If we guesstimate an average cost of $50K per degree, that is over $3 trillion of capital investment not counted, almost 20% of the $17 trillion in GDP (BEA News Release)  If we were to use the international standard (System of National Accounts) method of computing the present value of a college degree using an average 4.5% return (p. 572), then the capital value of a college degree over a working period of 35 years is over $400,000 per degree and the total is $26 trillion in uncounted capital, 150% of the nation’s GDP.   That inclusion would add $26 trillion to the $65 trillion capital base of the U.S. (p. 151)

If educational capital were included,  the capital/income ratio in the U.S. in 2010 would rise to 620%, far above the 450% calculated by Piketty’s team.  The higher this ratio, the greater the inequality in income and wealth.  By excluding educational capital, Piketty has understated his thesis.  Like Galbraith, I would exclude land and natural resources that are impossible to value.  Unlike Piketty and Galbraith, I would include educational capital, since it is a productive capital.

If we use the BLS figures and guesstimate that 63 million people with college degrees earn an additional $24K per year, then the share of income attributable to capital would increase by $1.5 trillion, from $4 trillion to $5.5 trillion.  As a share of national income, the income from capital would increase to 38% from 28% (p. 222)  The return on capital, r, would stay about the same at a bit over 6%, and more than twice the growth rate of national income in the U.S.

Liquidity

Piketty does not mention the liquidity of a national economy but implies it.  As the capital of a nation becomes more concentrated in a rather small group of families, individuals, and endowments, the trading of capital takes place within a small pool.  The onset of the 2008 financial crisis revealed that a small coterie of investment firms, sovereign funds and mega-banks traded financial instruments among each other.  Contagion in one class of asset – mortgage backed securities – poisoned the financial pool.  Like a gene pool, diversity is the key to survival.

As capital’s share of national income becomes greater, the buyers of capital as a percent of the population shrinks.  Fewer buyers = lack of liquidity.  A nation does have an abiding interest to reduce threats to the stability of its financial system.  The mobility of capital in the global world of finance may be hiding an underlying lack of liquidity.

Solutions

To offset the increasing accumulation and concentration of wealth, Piketty recommends (p. 517) a progressive wealth tax, ranging from .1% to .5% for most Americans, those with assets of less than 1 million euros, $1.36 million dollars at today’s exchange rate.  Piketty is not done yet.  He notes that the progressive income tax taxes only the income from inherited wealth.  In some countries in Europe, that capital income is exempt from the income tax (p. 496).  Piketty advocates a return to the confiscatory income tax rates of the early half of the 20th century (p. 512 – 513), citing an optimal top tax rate at above 80%.  Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have both pledged to give away most of the billions they have amassed.  Why bother, guys?  If Piketty’s solutions were implemented, the politicians bickering on C-Span every night will take care of that for you guys.  In the U.S. the Constitution would have to be amended if the Federal Government were to enact a wealth tax because the 16th Amendment allows only a tax on incomes.  However, that does not prevent the States from enacting such a tax.

Will a wealth tax solve the problem of growing inequality?  In principle, in a mathematical utopia – the kind of world that economists assume in their models – governments would take corrective action by taxing wealth, thereby offsetting the growing accumulation  and concentration of capital and its increasing share of national income.  Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world.  In the real world, politicians – real people that you and I know – would say “Hey, this is a great excuse to grab more money from the private sector to solve problems!  Solving problems wins votes!  Votes get me re-elected!”  Politicians love problems, and solving them.  That’s why they create so many of them with their policies.

If people think income tax reporting and accounting is a nightmare, wait until they see the wealth tax forms.  Since the rich would pay a progressively higher tax, they would be highly motivated to develop ways of sheltering assets.  The hiding of wealth will become a national pastime.  Gold miners and dealers are shouting “Huzzah!”  Accountants and lawyers will cook up complicated investment vehicles that offer rapid depreciation of assets to reduce the amount of notional wealth one has to report.  Insurance companies will lobby for the purchase of annuities that are then excluded from one’s wealth.  The lobbyists are singing in the streets.  Strike up the band and join the tax parade!

In short, I heartily endorse this proposal just as soon as I sell my house, convert any assets to gold and find a private island in the Caribbean where I can bury my assets in the sand. I do heartily recommend this book, though. The book contains far more that caught my interest than I can touch on – public and private debt and capital, a survey of income taxes in developed countries, to name a few. The author has taken great pains to lay out historical trends in the data, acknowledging and anticipating many objections.  But, like the old country doctor, Dr. Piketty has but one solution. Got a problem?  Add another tax and call me in the morning. I also salute the translator, Arthur Goldhammer, for the flow and grammatical construction of his  English translation.

Next week I’ll look at another disturbing and related topic – education.  A recent analysis suggests that the financial advantage of a college education may be eroding.

Retail Sales, Autos, Sell in May

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May 18, 2014

This week I’ll look at sentiment among small business owners, retail and auto sales, and revisit the “Sell in May” idea.

Small Business

Cue the trumpets, clouds part, sun rays stream down upon the green fields.  After almost seven years, sentiment among small business owners broke through the 95 level according to the monthly survey conducted by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB).  Despite the many positives in this latest survey, hiring plans remain muted.  This unfortunately confirms several other reports – the monthly employment report, JOLTS, disposable income, to mention a few – that indicate a befuddling lack of robust employment gains during this recovery.

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Retail Sales

The monthly reports on employment and retail sales probably have the most impact on short term investor sentiment.  Retail sales were flat in April but have rebounded well after the particularly harsh winter.  With a longer term perspective, year over year retail gains are not robust but are still in the healthy zone of 2-1/2%.

Per capita inflation adjusted retail and food service sales are strong.  Rising home prices in the early 2000s drove an upsurge in retail sales, followed by an offsetting plunge as home prices dropped and the financial crisis of 2008 hit consumers hard.  The landslide of employment losses undercut retail sales.

Motor Vehicles sales are particularly strong and are now back to the pre-recession trend line.

However, that recession dip represents millions of vehicles not sold and contributes mightily to the record average age of more than 11 years for vehicles in the U.S. (AutoNews)  As the article noted, better engineering has lengthened the serviceable life of many autos.  There are 247 million registered passenger vehicles and light trucks, more than one for each of the 240 million people in this country over the age of 18 (Census Bureau) According to the industry research firm Motor Intelligence (spreadsheet), April’s year to date passenger car sales have declined 1.8% while sales of light pickups have surged 8.3%.  The particularly harsh winter months probably reduced traffic at car dealerships around the country, but the year-over-year comparison in April was only a 3.6% gain.  The lack of a spring bounce indicates that household income gains are meager.  The rise in sales of light pickups is largely due to a 10% increase in construction spending in the past year.

On an annualized basis, auto sales are approaching 16 million, a level last seen in November 2007 and far above the 10 million vehicle sales in 2009.

The numbers look rather strong but annual sales per capita are at the recession levels of the early 1990s.   Clearly, something has changed.

Better engineering has increased serviceable vehicle life.  Demographic changes may be having an effect. The population is aging and older people who drive less may decide to hang on to their vehicles longer.  A population shift toward urban centers reduces demand for autos.  There is a greater availability of public transportation.  In some areas of the country, an electric scooter or bicycle meets many transportation needs.
Long term shifts in an industry prompt employers to look for opportunities to adjust some part of their strategy or cost structure to meet those changes.  Three weeks ago, Toyota announced that they will move their headquarters from Torrance, CA, in the South Bay area of metro L.A., to Plano, TX.  As the largest employer in Torrance, the city’s economy will surely take a hit. (Daily Breeze)  Toyota joins a list of large employers leaving or reducing their presence in California (article)

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Sell in May

The market has flatlined since early March.  Most of the companies in the S&P500 have reported earnings for the first quarter.  68% beat expectations but this has become a highly sophisticated game of managing expectations.  What is notable is that sales growth has slowed.  As I noted a few weeks earlier, labor productivity is poor.  Companies have done a remarkable job of cutting costs to boost profits but it is unclear how much more they can cut.  Last year’s 30% rise in the market has spurred the rise of mergers, or growing profits through economies of scale.

If the market were to decline 10 – 20% from here, some would point to the chart of the S&P500 and say they saw it all along.  “Classic case of a market top,” they would intone.  “Several failed attempts to break through resistance at the 1900 level indicated a major market correction.”  Oh, and they have a newsletter that you can subscribe to.

If the market goes up 10%, a different set of people will proclaim that they saw it all along.  “The market was forming a baseline of support,” they will sagely pronounce.  Each of these people also have a newsletter.

“Sell in May and go away” is an old quip of short term trading.  In 2011, I explored (here and here) the truths and myths behind this old saw. On a long term basis, one earns better returns by disciplined monthly, or quarterly, investing. Still, in a slight majority of the almost 20 years I reviewed, the Sell in May approach had some validity. Let’s look back at the last five years.  Typically an investor would sell the S&P500 and go into long Term Treasuries (TLT).  A more cautious investor might pick a less volatile intermediate bond fund.

In 2013, the SP500 went nowhere from May 1st to September 1st.  Great call by our intrepid investor who took some of her money out of the market and invested in Long Term Treasuries (TLT) in early May.  By early September, however, her investment would have depreciated 13%. Ooops!  Better to have stayed in stocks.

Likewise, in 2012, stocks went nowhere from early May to early September.  Unlike 2013, an investor buying long term Treasuries during that period had a 7% gain BUT if she had waited a week to sell in September, there was no gain.  The gains were a matter of luck.

2011 was the bing-bang year for the Sell in May crowd.  The stock market lost about 12% during the summer while long Treasuries gained 20%.

In 2010, stocks fell 7% during the summer while long Treasuries gained 10%.  During the summer of stocks gained almost 12% while Treasuries changed little.  In short, the strategy worked three summers out of the past five.

Now for a more fundamental approach – investing in companies that are more stable.  Horan Capital Advisors referred to a report from S&P Capital IQ that found that companies in the S&P500 with a low beta offset or reduced any summer market volatility.  Beta is a measure of a stock’s price volatility.  A value of 1 is the volatility of the entire index.  Betas less than 1 mean that a company’s stock price is less volatile than the index.  As volatility of the total market increases, investors tend to seek companies with a more reliable outlook and performance.  The screening criteria produced a mix of companies dominated by those in the consumer discretionary and health care sectors.  Worth a look for investors who buy individual stocks.

Net Worth, Labor Productivity And Political Pay

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May 10th, 2014

This week I’ll look at some short term mixed signals in economic activity, and long term trends in labor productivity and household net worth.  In advance of the mid term election season in the U.S., I’ll look at several aspects of the money machine that drives elections.

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CWPI

For almost a year, I’ve been tracking a composite index, a Constant Weighted Purchasing Index, based on the Purchasing Manager’s Index produced by the Institute for Supply Management (ISM).  Based on key elements of ISM’s manufacturing and non-manufacturing monthly indexes, it is less erratic than the ISM indexes and gives fewer false signals of recession and recovery.  After reaching a low of 53.5 last month, the CWPI of manufacturing and service industries is on the rise again.  During this recovery this index of economic activity has shown a regular wave pattern.  If that continues, we should expect to see four to five months of rising activity before the next lull in late summer or early fall.  Any deviation from that pattern would be cause for concern if falling and optimism if rising.

The winter probably prolonged the recent downturn in the index.  In the manufacturing sector, new orders and employment are strong.  In the services sector, which comprises most of the economy, new orders are strong but employment growth has slowed to a tepid pace.

This week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released their estimate of Productivity growth for the first quarter.  One of the metrics is the per hour growth in productivity, which is key to the overall growth of the economy.  As seen in the chart below, the last time annual productivity growth was above 2% was in the 3rd quarter of 2010.  To show the historical trend, I took the 3 quarter moving average of the year over year growth rate.  We can see a remarkable shift downward in productivity.

Recovery after recessions are marked by a spike in growth above 3% simply because the comparison base during the recession is so weak. What the chart shows is the shift from steady growth of 3% to a much weaker growth pattern since the 2008 recession.  In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen stated that we may have to adjust our expectations to continuing slow growth.  The erosion of productivity growth has probably prompted concerns in the Fed Open Market Committee.

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JOLTS – Job openings

Continuing on from labor productivity, let’s look at a trend in job openings.  With a month lag, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports on the number of job openings around the country. Preceding a recession, the number of job openings begins to decline.  Recovery is marked by an increase in openings. March’s report showed a slight increase in job openings, near the high of the recovery and closer to late 2005 levels.

When we look at the ratio of job openings to the unemployed, the picture is less encouraging.  The unemployed do not include discouraged job seekers.  If we included those, we the readers might get discouraged.  Almost five years after the official end of the recession, we are barely above the low point of the recession of the early 2000s.

When Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen speaks of weaknesses in the labor market that will require continued central bank support, this is one of the metrics that the Fed is no doubt keeping an eye on.

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Household Net Worth

For many of us, our net worth includes family, friends, pets, interests and passions but the Federal Reserve doesn’t count these in its quarterly Flow of Funds report.  In early March, the Fed released its annual Flow of Funds report, which includes estimated net worth and debt levels of households, business and governments in the U.S.  Below is a chart of household, business and government debt levels from that report.

Rising stock prices and recovering home values have boosted the net worth of households.

As you can see in the chart below, the percent change in net worth has only significantly dipped below zero in the last two recessions.

The severity of this last dip was due to the falls in both the housing and stock markets.  The curious thing is why earlier stock market drops in the 1970s and early 1980s did not produce a significant percentage drop in household net worth. In those earlier periods, increases in home prices were about 4%, similar to the level of economic growth, and not enough to offset significant drops in the stock market.

So what has changed in the past two recessions?  The introduction of IRA accounts in the 1980s prompted individuals to put more of their savings in the stock market instead of bonds, CDs and savings accounts. Downturns in the stock market in the past two recessions affected household balance sheets to a greater degree.  Inflation was greater during the 1970s, 80s and 90s, raising the value of all assets.  China’s growing dominance in the international market was not a factor in the stock market drop in 2000 – 2003.  It was only admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001.  In an odd coincidence, the past twenty years and particularly the past 15 years are marked by a growing and pervasive inflence of the internet in all aspects of our lives.

If we chart the change in a broad stock market index like the SP500 along with the percent change in net worth over the past seven years, we see a loose correlation using 40% of the change in the stock market.  Rises and falls in the stock market produce a material change in the paper net worth of households and can significantly lead to a change in “mood” among consumers, something the economist John Maynard Keynes called “animal spirits.”

Because the swelling demographic tide of the Boomer generation has a significant part of their retirement nest egg in the stock market, price movements in the markets have probably had a greater effect on total net worth in the past decade.

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Party Favors

Now for everyone’s favorite dinner topic – political contributions.  Who contributed the most to the 2012 Presidential campaign?
a) the evil Koch Bros
b) gambling king Sheldon Adelson who almost single-handedly bankrolled the Newt Gingrich campaign
c) hedge fund billionaire George Soros, the  “Octopus” of liberal causes
d) the socialist commie labor unions.

Answer:  Whatever answer suits your political message or opinion.

On the one hand, campaign contributions can be what economists call a “rich” data set so that an analyst can tease out several conclusions or summaries, sometimes contradictory, from the data set.  On the other hand, some “social welfare” organizations do not have to reveal donor lists.  An investigator wishing to discover the myriad channels of political contributions must don their spelunking equipment before descending into the caverns of political finance.   In some cases private IRS data is released by accident, revealing dense networks linking moneyed individuals.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) maintains a compilation of individual and group contributions to political campaigns.  OpenSecrets.org , a project of the Center for Responsive Politics, summarizes the data.  There we find that Sheldon and Miriam Adelson contributed $30 million through the Republican Restore Our Future PAC  and $20 million to the Republic PAC American Crossroads.

The Democratic PAC Priorities USA did not have a single donor as generous as the Adelsons.  George Soros ponied up $1 million along with many others, including Hollywood movie mogul Steven Spielberg, but the most generous donor contributed only $5 million, punk change when compared to the Adelson’s commitment to Republican causes and candidates.

In the 2012 Presidential race, the Obama campaign drew in so many more individual contributions than the Romney team that outside spending by political action groups was the only way to close the money gap.  Pony up they did, outspending the Obama campaign $419 million to $131 million. The NY Times summarized the outside spending with links to the various groups.

Despite their relatively low percentage of the work force, labor unions are major contributors to the Democratic effort.  A WSJ article in July 2012 revealed the extent of their political activity.  The bulk of union campaign spending is not reported to the FEC but is  reported to the Labor Dept. In total, unions disclosed that they spent over $200 million per year from 2005 – 2011.  54% of the spending reported to the Labor Dept was on state and local campaigns.

As a block then, are unions the largest contributors to Democratic campaigns?  Some “napkin math” would get us to a guesstimate of  $90 to $100 million a year on national campaigns, so surely they are at the top, aren’t they?  Not so fast, you conclusion jumper, you.

As transparent as the unions are, contributors to Republican causes are not.  Corporate political spending like that of the private U.S. Chamber of Commerce are not disclosed, as are many other corporate political and lobbying efforts.  These are some of the largest corporations in the world with vast resources and a strongly vested interest in policy decisions that will affect their bottom line.  Most of those contributions are hidden.

As this midterm election approaches rest assured, gentle reader, that you can confidently say – no matter what your political persuasion – that you have data to back up your opinion that the other side is buying the election.  You can hold your head high, confident in the soundness of your opinions.  And don’t we all sleep better at night, knowing that we are right?

Employment, Income and GDP

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May 4th, 2014

Employment

Private payroll processor ADP estimated job gains of 220K in April and revised March’s estimate 10% higher, indicating an economy that is picking up some steam.  Of course, we have seen this, done that, as the saying goes.  Good job gains in the early months of 2012 and 2013 sparked hopes of a strong resurgence of economic growth followed by OK growth.

New unemployment claims this week were pushing 350K, a bit surprising.  The weekly numbers are a bit volatile and the 4 week average is still rather low at 320K.  In a period of resurgent growth, that four week average should continue to drift downward, not reverse direction. Given the strong corporate profit growth expectations in the second half of the year, there is a curious wariness in the market.  Conflicting data like this keeps buyers on the sidelines, waiting for some confirmation.  CALPERS, the California Employees Pension Fund with almost $200 billion in assets, expressed some difficulty finding value in U.S. equities and is looking abroad to invest new dollars.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported job gains of 288K in April, including 15K government jobs.  Most sectors of the economy reported gains but there are several surprises in this report.  The unemployment rate dropped to 6.3% from 6.7% the previous month, but the decline owes much to a huge drop in labor force participation.  After poking through the 156 million mark recently, the labor force shrank more than 800,000 in April, more than wiping out the 500,000 increase in March.

To give recent history some context notice the steady rise in the labor force since the end of World War 2, followed by a flattening of growth in the past six years.

The core work force, those aged 25 – 54 years, finally broke through the 95 million level in January and rose incrementally in February and March.  It was a bit disappointing that employment in this age group dropped slightly this month.

To give this some perspective, look at the employment rate for this age group. Was the strong growth of employment in the core work force largely a Boomer phenomenon unlikely to repeat?  Perhaps this is why the Fed indicated this week that we may have to lower our expectations of growth in the future.

Discouraged job seekers and involuntary part timers saw little change in this latest report.  On the positive side, there was no increase.  On the negative side, these should decline in a growing economy.  There simply isn’t enough growth.  Was the strong pickup in jobs this past month a sign of a resurgent economy?  Was it simply a make up for growth hampered by the exceptional winter?  The answers to these and other questions will become clearer in the future.  My time machine is in the shop.

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GDP

Go back with me now to those days of yesteryear – actually, it was last year.  Real GDP growth crossed the 4% line in mid year.  The crowd cheered.  Then the economic engine began to slow down. The initial estimate of fourth quarter growth a few months ago was 3.2%.  The second estimate for that period was revised down to 2.4%, far below a half century’s average of 3%.  This week the final estimate was nudged up a bit to 2.6%, but still below the long term average.

Earlier in the week, the Federal Reserve announced that it will continue its steady tapering of bond buying and that it may have to adjust long term policy to a slower growth model.  The harsh winter makes any analysis rather tentative so we can guess the Fed doesn’t want to get it wrong?

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Manufacturing – ISM

ISM reported an upswing in manufacturing activity in April, approaching the level of strong growth.  The focus will be on the service sector which has been expanding at a modest clip.  I’ll update the CWPI when the ISM Service sector report comes out next week.

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Income – Spending

Consumer income and spending showed respectable annual gains of 3.4% and 4.0%.  The BLS reported that earnings have increased 1.9% in the past twelve months. CPI annual growth is a bit over 1% so workers are keeping ahead of inflation, but not by much.   Auto sales remain very strong and the percentage of truck sales is rising toward 60%, a sign of growing confidence by those in the construction and service trades.  Construction spending rose in March .2% and is up over 8% year over year but the leveling off of the residential housing market has clearly had an effect on this sector in the past six months.

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Conservative and Liberals

While this blog focuses mainly on investing and economics, public policy is becoming an ever increasing part of each family’s economic heatlh, both now and particularly in the future.
Some conservatives say that they endorse policies which strengthen the family yet are against rent control, minimum wage and family leave laws, all of which do support families.  How to explain this apparent contradiction?  A feature of philosophies, be they political, social or economic, is that they have a set of rules.  Some rules may be common to competing philosophies but what distinguishes a conceptual framework or viewpoint is the difference in the ordering of those rules.  The prolific author Isaac Asimov, biologist and science fiction writer, proposed a set of three rules programmed into each robot to safeguard humans.  A robot could not obey the second law if it conflicted with the first.  Robots are rigid; humans are not.  Yet we do construct some ordering of our rules.

A conservative, then, might have a rule that policies that protect the family are good.  But conservatives also have two higher priority rules which honor the sanctity of contract and private property: 1) that government should not interfere in voluntary private contracts, and 2) that private property is not to be taken from private individuals or companies without some compensation, either money or an exchange of a good or service. Through rent control policies, governments interfere in a private contract between landlord and tenant and essentially take money from a landlord and give it to a tenant, a violation of both rules 1 and 2.  Minimum wage and mandatory family leave laws enable a government to interfere in a private contract between employer and employee and essentially transfer money from one to the other, another violation of both rules.

In my state, Colorado, there is no rent control.  Instead, landlords receive a prevailing market price and low income tenants receive housing subsidies and energy assistance.  Under rent control, money is taken from a specific subset of the population, landlords, and given to tenants.  Under housing subsidies, money is taken from general tax revenues of one sort or another and given to tenants.  Of the two systems, housing subsidies seems the fairer but many conservatives object to either policy because the government takes from individuals or companies without any exchange, a violation of rule #2.  All policies like housing subsidies which involve transfers of income from one person to another, are mandatory charity, and violate rule #2.

Liberals want to support families as well but they have a different set of rules that prioritizes the sanctity of the social contract: 1) individuals living in a society have an obligation to the well being of other members of that society, and 2) those with greater means have a greater obligation to the well being of the society.  A government which is representative of the individuals of that society has the responsibility to facilitate the movement of wealth and income among those individuals in order to achieve a more equitable balance of happiness within the society.  Flat tax policies espoused by more conservative individuals violate rule #2.  Libertarian proposals for a much smaller regulatory role for government violate rule #1.

For liberals, both of the above rules are subservient to the prime rule: humans have a greater priority than things.  When the preservation of property rights violates the prime rule, property rights are diminished in preference to the preservation of human well-being.  On the other hand, conservatives view property rights as an integral aspect of being human; to diminish property rights is to diminish an individual’s humanity.

In the centuries old dynamic tension between the individual and the group, the liberal view is more tribal, focusing on the well being of the group.  Liberals sometimes ridicule some tax policies espoused by conservatives as “trickle down economics.”  In a touch of irony, it is liberals who truly believe in a trickle down approach in social and economic policies.  The liberal philosophy seeks to protect society from the natural and sometimes reckless self-interest of the individuals within that society. The conservative viewpoint is concerned more with the protection of the individual from the group, believing that the group will achieve a greater degree of well-being if the individuals are secure in their contracts and property. Conservatives then favor what could be called a bottom up approach to organizing society.

Conservatives honor the social contract but give it a lower priority than private contracts.  Liberals honor private contracts but not if they conflict with the social contract. Most people probably fall somewhere on the scale between the two ends of these philosophies and arguments about which approach is “right” will never resolve the fundamental discord between these two philosophies.

In the coming years, we are going to have to learn to negotiate between these two philosophies or public policy will have little direction or effectiveness.  Negotiating between the two will require an understanding of the ordering of priorities of each ideological camp.

Before the 1970s political candidates were picked by the party bosses in each state, who picked those candidates they thought would appeal to the most party voters in the district.   The present system of promoting political candidates by a primary system within each state has favored candidates who are fervent advocates of a strictly conservative or liberal philosophy, chosen by a small group of equally fervent voters in each state.  The middle has mostly deserted each party, leading to a growing polarization.  Survey after survey reveals that the views of most voters are not as polarized as the candidates who are elected to represent them. A graph from the Brookings Institution shows the increasing polarity of the Congress, while repeated surveys indicate that voters are rather evenly divided.

Spring Fever

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April 27th, 2014

Existing Home Sales

Sales of existing homes in March were disappointing, dropping 7.5% year over year.  Some analysts use the 5 million mark as an indication of a healthy housing market.

As a percent of the population, the change in existing home sales is rather small, yet the change of ownership prompts remodeling projects and home furnishing purchases after the sale, spiff ups before the sale, and commissions and fees for real estate professionals at the time of the sale.

As a percent of the total stock of homes, sales are likewise small yet determine the valuation of everyone’s home.  There are concrete consequences: a lowered evaluation of a home’s value might mean that a person cannot get a home equity loan to help start a new business.  As we discovered in this last recession, lowered valuations of a  home can mean that homeowners are upside down on their mortgages.  Low valuations “box in” a homeowner’s choices so that they may feel that they can not move to a nearby town to be closer to a new job.  These cumulative effects can promote a defeatist attitude among homeowners.  In the past several years, many of us recently found that we were worth less – $50K, $100K, $200K – because the value of our homes had dropped.  Even though many of us had no intention of moving, we felt poorer.

The methodology underlying the calculation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) involves the concept of Owner Equivalent Rent (OER).  The CPI treats home ownership as though the family who owns the home is renting the home to themselves.  In this sense, owning a home is like a owning a U.S. Treasury bond that pays regular interest payments, or coupons.  Until the recent recession, many regarded home ownership as though it were a Treasury bond, unlikely to ever lose value.  Even better than a Treasury bond, a house was likely to gain in value.

Most of us, however, do not think in  terms of OER.  We feel poorer when the value of our home drops by 20%. Likewise, a stock market drop of 20% has a significant effect on the value of our retirement funds.  Even if we do not need that money for 10 years or more, we are poorer on paper and this affects many other buying decisions.

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Spring Fever

Other economic reports this week offset the negative news on home sales.  The flash, or preliminary, index of manufacturing activity indicates a positive report next week on the sector.  Durable goods orders were strong, reinforcing the signs that manufacturing is on a spring upswing.  New claims for unemployment were a bit above expectations but nothing significant and the 4 week moving average of claims indicates a much improved labor market.

Although UPS and 3M had disappointing earnings or forecasts, industrial giants GM and Caterpillar surprised to the upside, as did tech giants Microsoft and Apple.  Expectations for this earnings season were rather lukewarm but the aggregate earnings growth of the SP500 may come in below 1%.  Some attribute Friday’s drop in the market to accelerating tensions in Ukraine but the market was essentially flat this past week, reflecting a general lack of enthusiasm or worry.

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Buffet Investing Advice

In mid March Warren Buffet got the attention of many when he made a surprising recommendation:

Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. I suggest Vanguard’s. (VFINX) I believe the trust’s long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors – whether pension funds, institutions, or individuals – who employ high-fee managers.

Doughroller presented some good observations on Buffet’s recommendation.  Also at the same site Rob Berger offers a fresh perspective on the stock – bond allocation mix.

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Consumer Price Index and College Tuition

In a recent analysis of trends in the various components of the Consumer Price Index, Doug Short presented several graphs of the annualized growth rates of the different components.  It comes as no surprise that medical care costs have risen 70% in the past 13 years.  The real surprise to me was that college tuition costs have shot up almost twice that – 130% in the same period.  Average tuition and fees for an in state student at a public four year college are currently almost $9K per year.

The growth in costs should worry parents with a son or daughter six years away from entering college.  Perhaps they may have planned on $10K – $12K a year.  However, if these growth trends remain as constant in the coming years as they have in the past, tuition and fees will be more like $15K per year when their child begins college.  By the time they graduate – if they graduate within four years – the cost could be $20K per year.  Remember, this doesn’t include any housing costs.  Higher education receives heavy subsidies from each state and the Federal government. So why the skyrocketing tuition costs?  Heavy lobbying, influence in the state capitols in the nation, inefficient and bloated administrative structures, protectionism – these are just a few of the reasons for the escalation in costs.  A spokesman for higher education won’t give those reasons, of course.  She will cite the need to attract quality teachers, investments in new technologies, aging infrastructure that is costly to maintain, and those certainly do contribute to increasing costs.  Higher education is still largely built on a framework that was suited for the sons of the landed gentry in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  As Obama and voters discovered after the 2008 elections, change comes slowly.  Like the tax system, higher education will continue to receive incremental changes, a hodgepodge of patches to fix this and that, to pad the pockets of this interest group or ameliorate a select slice of voters.

Earnings, Revenues and Retail Sales

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April 20, 2014

You’re on a date with me, the pickin’s have been lush
And yet before this evenin’ is over you might give me the brush

Luck Be a Lady from the play Guys and Dolls

Easy money

In opening remarks Tuesday at a Federal Reserve conference in Atlanta, Janet Yellen, head of the Fed, made the case that ongoing weakness in the global economy warranted support from central banks and that she did not anticipate full employment in the U.S. for another two years.  The Fed reported that the economies in all 12 Fed districts improved in March as consumers ventured out of their winter burrows. The stock market rose in each of the four trading days this week, but has still not risen to the level it opened at on Friday, April 11th, when the market dropped 2%.  Disappointing earnings reports restrained enthusiasm sparked by the prospect of continued easy monetary policy from the Fed.

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Earnings

On Tuesday, discount broker Charles Schwab reported a 58% increase in first quarter profits.  Trading volume was the highest in its history as many individual investors returned to the stock market.

In the tech sector, Intel and IBM reported declining revenues of 1% and 4% respectively.  The stock price of both companies is about the same as it was two years ago.  Intel is trying to transition from its traditional dominance in PC chips as sales of PCs continue to slow.  IBM is undergoing a similar transition from hardware – particularly mainframes – to business software.

Since early 2012, the Technology SPDR ETF,  a broad basket of tech stocks, is up almost 50%.  For an investor who does not have the time to research trends in a particular sector, particularly one as dynamic as the technology sector, buying a representative basket of the sector may be the safer choice.

American Express reported a first quarter drop in revenue of 4%, attributing most of the decline to small business and corporate spending.

Google reported an 8% drop in first quarter revenue from the fourth quarter.  Year over year, revenue rose 10% but investors have realized that the days of 20 – 40% annual revenue gains are probably over.  Since early March, the company’s stock has dropped 12%.

W.W. Grainger sells supplies, parts, equipment and tools to businesses.  Since 2009 revenues have risen almost 50% but sales growth has been meager since the middle of last year.  A few weeks ago, I noted the lack of growth in maintenance and repair employment.  Grainger’s lack of revenue growth and declining spending by businesses at American Express are disturbing indicators that there is a lack of confidence and investment in growth.

The industrial and financial megalith General Electric reported a year over year revenue increase of 2.2% but the company’s revenues have been fairly flat for four years and the stock price is almost 20% below its mid 2007 level.  GE is gradually shedding its financial businesses in order to focus on what it does best – making stuff, big stuff and small stuff.  With a dividend yield of 3.4%, this stock may be worth a more in depth look for investors who buy individual stocks and think that the company can make the transition.  As a side note:  in 2013, GE managed to defer $3.3 billion, or 85%, of its income tax liability, which will no doubt get some attention in the coming election cycle.  What won’t be mentioned is that GE paid over $8 billion in 2011 and 2012.

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Retail Sales and Household Debt

Retail sales were up a strong 1.1% in March, the most in two years.  Auto sales were particularly strong. Household debt is at the same level as it was in the 1st quarter of 2007 but has been slowly rising in the past year.  The years from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s is often called the Great Moderation by many economists but the period is marked by an immoderate 8.6% annual growth rate in household debt.  Since the onset of the financial crisis and recession, households have jumped off that runaway train yet today’s levels still reflect a 34 year annualized growth rate of 7%.

With meager growth in personal income, it is unlikely that consumers can afford to rise to those heady and unsustainable growth rates in debt.  However, the percent of income needed to service that debt is at 34 year lows.  Growing consumer confidence and willingness to take on more debt may pull the economy out of the current lackluster growth.

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Margin Debt

A link on this blog is to the excellent work that Doug Short does.  In case you missed it, here are some graphs he presented on margin debt reported by the NY Stock Exchange, or the amount of money that investors have borrowed against their stock holdings.

I am not sure how reliable this indicator is.  Selling as margin debt starts to drop and buying as it starts rising again has mixed results.  The strategy would have kept a hypothetical investor out of the market during the market downturn in the early 2000s, back into the market in late 2003, out of the market in early 2008, and back into the market in July 2009.  So far, the timing looks great.  Since then, however, the rise and fall in margin debt has signaled some fake outs, so that an investor would have sold during a temporary market disruption, only to buy in later at a higher level.

Oddly enough, the last buy signal in February 2012 coincided with the Golden Cross in late January 2012.  The Golden Cross occurs when the 50 day moving average crosses above the 200 day moving average.

Employment, Obamacare and the Market

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April 13, 2014

Nasdaq, Biotech and the Market

The recent declines in the market have come despite positive reports in employment and  manufacturing in the past few weeks.  Nasdaq market is off about 7% from its high on March 6th and some biotech indexes have lost 8% in the past few weeks. A bellwether in the tech industry is Apple whose stock is down about 9% since the beginning of the year, and 4% in the past few weeks.

The larger market, the SP500, has declined about 4% in the past six trading days, prompting the inevitable “the sky is falling” comments on CNBC.  The decline has not even reached the 5% level of what is considered a normal intermediate correction and already the sky is falling. It sells advertising.  The broader market is at about the same level as mid-January.  Ho-hum news like that does not sell advertising.

Both the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the smaller sub-sector of biotech are attractive to momentum investors who ride a wave of sentiment till the wave appears to be turning back out to sea.  In the broader market, expectations for earnings growth are focused on the second half of the year, not this quarter whose results are expected to be rather lackluster.  The 7-1/2% rise in February and early March might have been a bit frothy.

The aluminum company Alcoa kicks off each earnings season.  Because aluminum in used in so many products Alcoa has become a canary in the coal mine, signalling strength or weakness in the global economy.  On Tuesday, Alcoa reported slightly less revenues than forecast but way overshot profit expectations.  This helped stabilize a market that had lost 2.3% in the past two trading days.

On Thursday, the banking giant JPMorgan announced quarterly profit and revenues that were more than 8% below expectations.  Revenues from mortgages dropped a whopping 68% from last year, while interest income from consumer loans and banking fell 25%.  Investors had been expecting declines but not this severe.  JPMorgan’s stock has lost 5% in the past week, giving it a yield of 2.8% but it may need to come down a bit more to entice wary investors.  Johnson and Johnson, which actually makes tangible things that people need, want and buy every week, pays a yield of 2.7%.  Given the choice and assuming a bit of caution, what would you do?

The banking sector makes up about a sixth of the market value of the SP500, competing with the technology sector for first place (Bloomberg) The technology sector has enriched our lives immensely in the past two decades and deserves to have a significant portion of market value.  The financial sector – not so much.  They are like that one in the family that everyone wishes would just settle down and act responsibly.

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Jolts and New Unemployment Claims 

February’s Job Openings report (JOLTS) recorded a milestone, passing the 4 million mark and – finally, after six years – surpassing the number of job openings at the start of the recession.  The number of Quits shows that there still is not much confidence among employees that they can find a better job if they leave their current employment.

New unemployment claims dropped to 300,000 this week; the steadier 4 week average is at 316,000.  As a percent of the workforce, the number of new claims for unemployment is near historic lows, surpassed only by the tech and housing bubbles.

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Full-time Employee

A 1986 study of Current Population Survey (CPS) data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that “well over half of employed Americans work the standard [40 hour] schedule.”  The median hours worked by full time employees changed little at just a bit over 40 hours. The average hours worked by full time employees was 42.5.  The study noted that between 1973 and 1985 the number of full time workers who worked 35 to 39 hours actually declined.

A paper published in 2000 by a BLS economist noted that the Current Population Survey (CPS) that the Census Bureau conducts is the more reliable data when compared to the average work week hours that the BLS publishes each month as part of their Establishment Survey of businesses.  The Establishment survey is taken from employment records but does not properly capture the data on people who work more than one job.  In that survey, a person working two part time jobs at 20 hours each is treated as though they were two people working two part time jobs. The CPS treats that person as one person working 40 hours a week.  Writing in 2000, the author noted that the work week had changed little from 1964 – 1999.

Fast forward to 2013 and the BLS reports that full time workers work an average of 42.5 hours, the same as the 1986 study.  More than 68% of workers reported working 40 or more hours a week.

The House recently passed H.R.2575, titled the “Save American Workers Act of 2014” – I’ll bet the people who write the titles for these bills love their jobs.  I always envision several twenty-somethings sitting in a conference room with pizza and some poetic lubricant and having a “Name That Bill” contest.  I digress.  This bill defines a full time employee as one who works on average 40 hours a week, not the 30 hours currently defined under the Affordable Care Act.

When I first started doing research on this I was biased toward a compromise of 35 hours as the definition of a full time employee.  My gut instinct was that fewer full time employees work a 40 hour week than they did 30 years ago.   The data from the BLS doesn’t support my gut instinct.

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Obamacare

A monthly survey of small businesses by NFIB reported an upswing in confidence in March after a fairly severe decline in February.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that optimism among small business owners can not seem to break the 95 index since 2007.  According to the U.S. Small Business Administration 2/3rds of new jobs come from small businesses. “Since 1990, as big business eliminated 4 million jobs, small businesses added 8 million new jobs.”

This is the first full year that all the provisions of the ACA, aka Obamacare, take effect.  Millions of small businesses around the country who provide health insurance for their employees are getting their annual business health insurance renewal packages.  For twelve years, my small business has provided health care for employees.  When I received the renewal package a few weeks ago, I was disappointed to find several changes that made comparisons with last year’s costs a bit more difficult.  As an aside, this health insurance carrier has always been the most competitive among five prominent health insurance carriers in the state.

Making the comparison difficult was a change in age banding.  What’s that, you ask?  In my state, business health plans were age banded in 5 year increments; e.g. a 50 year old and a 54 year old would pay the same rate for a particular policy.  Now the age banding is in one year increments.  If I compared the cost for a 45 year old employee last year with the rate for a 46 year old employee this year, the rate increase was a modest 5%.  Not bad.  But if I compare a 48 year old employee’s rate last year with a 49 year old employee this year, costs have risen 11%.   The provider for my company no longer offers the same high deductible ($3000) plan we had, offering a choice between an even higher deductible ($4500) plan or one with a much lower deductible ($1200).  Again, this makes the comparison more difficult.   Changes like this make cost planning more difficult and are less likely to encourage small businesses to bother offering health coverage to their employees.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at 2002 prices. The company long ago abandoned the no deductible plan we had in 2002 simply because it became unaffordable – this was while George Bush was President.  A plan similar to the HMO plan we had in 2002 – $20 copay, $50 specialist, $0 routine physical, no deductible, $2000 Max OOP –  now costs 270% what it did 12 years ago, an annual increase of more than 8%.  An HMO plan as generous as the one we had in 2002 is no longer available, so a more accurate comparison is that health insurance has tripled in twelve years.   It is no wonder that many small businesses either offer no health insurance or cap benefits at a certain amount that reduces the affordability and availability of insurance for many employees.

Until the unemployment rate decreases further, employees and job applicants are unlikely to exert much pressure for benefits from small business employers, a far different scenario than the heady days of the mid-2000s when unemployment was low and employers had to bargain to get decent employees.  There is no one single powerful voice for  many small businesses, other than the NFIB,  which makes it unlikely that Congress or state representatives will get their collective heads out of their butts and address the myriad regulatory and cost burdens that are far more onerous on small business owners.  Because of that we can expect incremental employment gains.

Betraying the lack of long term confidence in the economy and in response to employment burdens, employers increasingly turn to temporary workers, who make up less than 2% of the work force.

As an economy recovers from recession, it is normal for job gains to be distributed unevenly so that the increase in temporary workers is far above their share of the workforce.  Employers are understandably cautious and don’t want to make long term commitments.  Gains in temporary employment as a percent of total job gains should decline below 10%, indicating a stabilizing work force.

For the past two decades of recoveries and relatively healthy growth the average percentage is 7.4% (adjusted for census employment).  The percentage finally fell below this average in early 2012, rose back above it for a few months then stayed under the average till January 2013.  Since February of last year, that percentage has been rising again, crossing above the 10% mark in January, an inexorable evaporation of confidence.

For the past year, repair and maintenance employment has flatlined at 1999 levels, indicating a lack of investment in commercial property and production equipment.

Specialty trade contractors in the construction industries are at 1998 levels despite an increase in population of 40 million.

While not alarming these trends indicate an underlying malaise in the workforce  that will continue to hamper solid growth.  Those ambitious and earnest folks in Washington, eager to make a difference and advance their political careers, continue to create more fixes which make the problem worse.  Imagine a car out of gas.  People out here on Main St. are pushing while the politicians keep hopping in the car to figure out what’s wrong, making the car that much more difficult to push.  At this rate, it is going to be slow going.

Employment and Economy Swings Up

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April 6th, 2014

Capital Goods

Factory orders, including aircraft, rose in February but general investment spending on capital goods declined.  The leveling off of non-defense capital spending in the past year indicates a lack of certainty among many businesses to commit funds for future growth.

A more panoramic view of the past two decades shows a peaking phenomenon at about $68 billion, one which this recovery has not been able to rise above.

Remember that these peaks are in current dollars and do not take inflation into account.  When adjusted for inflation, the trend is not reassuring.  A significant component of capital goods orders comes from the manufacturing sector – manufacturers ordering capital goods from other manufacturers – whose declining share of the economy puts a damper on growth in this area.

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Employment

Modestly strong job gains of almost 200,000 in March sparked hope that the winter doldrums are over. The private payroll processor ADP reported 191,000 private job gains in March, in line with expectations and revised their February job gains from 139,000 to 178,000.  The headline this month was that private sector employment FINALLY surpassed the level in late 2008.

Net gains or losses in government employment have been negligible in the past several months.  State and local governments have been hiring enough to offset the small monthly declines in federal employees. Total non-farm employment is still below 2007 levels but so-o-o-o-o close.

While the unemployment rate stayed unchanged, many more unemployed started looking for work.  A reader writes “I read that the labor force has increased by 1.5 million from Jan-Mar, but that doesn’t jive with the number of people hired over that time.  Am I missing something here?”

The labor force includes both the employed and the unemployed.  Unemployed people, including those who retire, who have not looked for work in the past four weeks are not considered active participants in the labor force.   Whether a person was 50 or 80, if they started looking for work, they would then be counted in the unemployed and in the labor force.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) states that:
The basic concepts involved in identifying the employed and unemployed are quite simple:
People with jobs are employed.
People who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work are unemployed.
People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.
This definition of the labor force uses the narrowest, or headline, measure of unemployment.  Since the beginning of the year, the labor force has increased 1.3 million, 1.6 million since October.

When people get discouraged, they stop looking for work.  Then a friend says “Hey, ABC company is hiring,” and people start their job hunt again.  In the past quarter, a net 800,000 people have come back into the labor force, despite the record number of people retiring and leaving the work force.

As the economy improves, enrollment in for-profit and community college will continue to decline, accelerating from the 2% decline in 2012 – 2013 (NY Times article)  As students start looking for work, they officially re-enter the labor force.

Retirees: According to PolitiFact 11,000 boomers per day become eligible for Social Security.  Let’s say that only 8,000 per day drop out of the labor force, making a total of about 700,000+ who retired this past quarter.  A job market that can continue to overcome the drag from retirement is a sign of strength.

The Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate is the percentage of (employed + unemployed) / (people who can legally work).  So if the Civilian Labor Force were 150 million and there were 250 million people 16 years and over and not institutionalized, 150/250 = .6 or 60%.  The participation rate is currently at 63%.

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CWPI

In the March ISM survey of service sector purchasing managers, employment rebounded strongly from the contracting readings of February.  New orders grew stronger; both of these components get more emphasis in the calculation of the CWPI.

Weighed down by the winter lull, the smoothed composite index of manufacturing and services growth has declined for six months in a row but this should be the bottoming out of this expansionary wave. Barring any April surprises, March’s strength in employment and new orders should lead to an uptick in  the composite in the coming months.

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Investing

What are the chances an actively managed fund beat its benchmark?  Not good.  An analyst at Standard and Poors compared various indexes that her company produces vs the performance of actively managed funds.  In the past five years, only 28% of large cap actively managed funds beat the benchmark SP500 index.  Some mid cap and real estate funds did much worse; less than 20% beat their benchmarks.  Consider also that actively managed funds carry higher annual fees and/or operating expenses because the fund has to pay for the brain power of active management.

Income and GDP

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March 30th, 2014

Business Activity

The Institute for Supply Mgmt (ISM) and Markit Economics are two private companies that survey purchasing managers and release the results in the first week of each month. Toward the end of each month Markit releases what is called a “Flash PMI”, an early indication of activity for the month.  This month’s flash index of manufacturing activity declined slightly but is still showing strong growth.  New orders are showing strong growth at a reading of 58.  The Flash reading of the services sector rose to over 55 but this is a mixed report, with only tepid growth in employment and backlogs actually in a slight contraction.  The most remarkable feature of this report was the 78.1 index of business expectations, an outstandingly optimistic reading. This Flash index gives investors a glimpse of the full survey reports from ISM and Markit that will be released in the first week of next month.

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On the other hand…

The monthly report of durable goods indicates a rather tepid 1-1/2% year over year growth.  This excludes planes, autos, and other transportation orders.  Including those components, there has been no yearly growth.

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Stick with the plan, Stan…

Rising equity and real estate markets have been good for a lot of people. A Bankrate.com blog noted the number of people entering the ranks of millionaires in 2012.  Toward the end of this report was an important lesson: “60 percent of investors worth $5 million or more say they’ll invest in equities this year, while 31 percent of those worth $100,000 to $1 million plan to do the same.”  Hmmm…rich people are not buying into the prophecy prediction analysis that the market will crash this year.  Could they be sticking with a plan that  allocates investments across a variety of assets, including stocks?

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Personal Income

This week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released February’s estimate of personal income.  Real, or inflation adjusted, disposable personal income (DPI), rose 2.1%, a decline from January’s 2.75% increase but above the 1% that has historically led to recessions.

A few weeks ago I noted that annual DPI had dropped below 1% in 2013.  Contributing to the weak year over year comparison was the high spike in income in the fourth quarter of 2012 when many companies “paid forward” both dividends and bonuses in December in advance of tax increases scheduled for 2013.

While this may have been a contributing factor to the decline, it would be a  mistake to give it too much weight.  The growth in personal income has been relatively weak and it shows in the consumer spending index released this week.  The .1% year over year increase – essentially zero – indicates consumer demand that is too weak to put any upward pressure on prices.  Sensing this, businesses are less likely to invest in growth.  Less investment growth means that employment gains will be modest, which further reinforces modest economic growth.

The stock market trades on profit growth.  Standard and Poors reports that 4th quarter earnings for the companies in the SP500 rose 9.8%, accelerating from the 6.0% growth in the 3rd quarter of 2013.  A moderately improving economy and only modest growth in investment has helped boost profits.  Profits are expected to rise 11% in the second half of 2014.

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GDP

The third estimate of GDP growth in the fourth quarter of last year was 2.6%, in line with consensus estimates.  In her testimony before Senate Finance Committee two weeks ago, Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen noted that we may be in for an extended period of slow growth below the fifty year average of 3%.

Three weeks ago I looked at GDP and the personal savings rate.  This week I’ll look at per hour GDP.  Readers should understand that this is what some economists would call a messy data set.  I have made some assumptions about the number of hours worked per employee.  The BLS publishes average hours worked for manufacturing employees and I made a guesstimate that the average for all workers is about 90% of that.  The number of part time employees who do not work this amount of hours offsets the unreported hours of the self-employed.  I am less concerned about the absolute accuracy of the GDP output per hour worked but that any inaccuracies be fairly consistent.  The trend is more important than the actual numbers.  What can we learn when output per hour flattens or declines?  Below is a graph of sixty five years.

We can see that flat growth tends to precede recessions but there is no definite pattern where we can say with any confidence that a flattening or decline in per hour GDP necessarily precludes a recession.  If we zoom in on the past thirty years, we do notice that the preceding decade has been marked by long periods of flat growth.  More importantly, the recovery from this past recession is marked by the longest period of flat growth in the history of the series.

The summer of 2009 marked the official end of this past recession.  For five years there has been no increase in real GDP per hour worked.  For a few years following a recession in the early 1990s, per hour GDP flattened before taking off in the late 1990s.

Does this flat growth represent a pruning of the economic tree before a surge of new growth? Or does it presage an even worse recession? Is the economy locked inside a limbo of limp growth for years to come, echoing the two decades of little growth in Japan’s economy?  Whatever happens, we can be certain of one thing – the trend and pattern will be so much more obvious in the future simply because we will disregard some past data based on what happens in the future.

As we make investment decisions, we should remember that the “obvious” patterns we see when we look back were much less clear at the time.  Sure there will be investment gurus who tell us that they saw it coming.  We forget that they also saw the depressions of 1994, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2011 – the ones that didn’t happen.

Let’s look a bit more closely at recent periods of flat growth.  The recovery from the recession of 1991 was marked by a painfully slow recovery in the job market.  After a 30% rise over three years, the market stumbled.

There’s a story to be told when we look at the growth in the market index and per hour GDP.  Whether it is by coincidence or not, there is a loose response of the market to changes in output.

After another slow recovery from the recession of 2001, the market began to climb in 2004.

But this time the market was not responding to the flattening growth in per hour output.

In the past four years, there has been little growth in output per hour.

But the market has doubled over that time.

Part of that recovery can be attributed to the market simply reversing the decline of 2008 and early 2009, but a good 40% increase in market value can be attributed to the greater share of output that companies have been able to convert to profit. (See last week’s blog)  How long that trend can and will continue is anyone’s guess but we know that it can not go on forever.  Flat revenue growth makes growing profits an ever more difficult task.

The flat growth in per hour output gives us perhaps another insight into the so-so growth in employment.  Without a clear vision of a stimulus that will spur growth, companies are reluctant to commit to plans for an expansion of their work force.