Tag: finance

Nigerian Doctor Treating Ebola Casualty Contracts Virus; Troops Deployed In Liberia

The Lagos doctor who treated American Patrick Sawyer (who died from Ebola in late July) has been confirmed as infected by the deadly virus by Nigerian authorities. This is Nigeria’s second confirmed case of Ebola but what is most concerning is the fact that the doctor’s infection suggests contagion is less well-contained that authorities have claimed – especially in light of the fact that they did not quarantine Sawyer’s fellow passengers. Nigeria is now the fourth nation to report Ebola cases, as Sierra Leone and Liberia are deploying hundreds of troops under an emergency plan to “contain” the worst outbreak of Ebola virus in history.

As AP reports,

Nigerian authorities say they have confirmed a second case of Ebola in Africa’s most populous country, an alarming development after a man who flew by plane to the country died of Ebola.

 

Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said Monday that the second person with Ebola is a doctor who had helped treat Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American man who died of Ebola in late July.

 

Sawyer, who was traveling to Nigeria on business, became ill while aboard a flight and Nigerian authorities immediately took him into isolation. They did not quarantine his fellow passengers, and have insisted that the risk of additional cases was minimal.

But it seems this is changing now as contagion concerns rise…

According to the Minister, 70 people are now placed under surveillance while eight people would be quarantined on Monday for developing symptoms of the disease.

 

Apart from taking those steps, the government has also set up a treatment research group, that will carry out treatment research, receive and verify treatment claims as well as advise government on issues relating to Ebola virus in Nigeria.

Nigeria is the fourth country to report Ebola cases and at least 728 other people have died in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. And as Reuters reports, troops are now being deployed to manage the chaos…

Hundreds of troops deployed in Sierra Leone and Liberia on Monday under an emergency plan to fight the worst outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, which has killed more than 826 people across West Africa.

 

Panic among local communities, which have attacked health workers and threatened to burn down isolation wards, prompted regional governments to impose tough measures last week, including the closure of schools and quarantine of the remote forest region hardest hit by the disease.

 

…

 

Long convoys of military trucks ferried troops and medical workers on Monday to Sierra Leone’s far east, where the density of cases is highest. Military spokesman Colonel Michael Samoura said the operation, code named Octopus, involved around 750 military personnel.

 

Troops will gather in the southeastern town of Bo before travelling to isolated communities to implement quarantines, he added. Healthcare workers will be allowed to come and go freely, and the communities will be kept supplied with food.

 

In neighbouring Liberia, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and ministers held a crisis meeting on Sunday on putting in place a series of anti-Ebola measures as police contained infected communities in the northern Lofa county.

 

Police were setting up checkpoints and roadblocks for key entrance and exit points to those infected communities and every resident would be stopped. Nobody would be allowed to exit quarantined communities. Troops were fanning out across Liberia to help to deal with the emergency.

 

“The situation will probably get worse before it gets better,” Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown told Reuters. “We are over-stretched. We need support; we need resources; we need workers.”

 

…

 

Director of Liberian National Police Chris Massaquoi said last week that troops would place forces in areas where crowds had previously stoned health workers. He added that all protests, demonstrations and marches had been forbidden.

*  *  *
Sadly, just as we warned here, this ‘containment’ was entirely foreseeable.




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8 Months of Muppet Brutality: Why And Where Goldman Told Clients To Buy Banco Espirito Santo

Another day, another case of unprecedented muppet brutality, or, as Cramer would say: “Bear Espirito Stearns is fine“…

Rewind to January 14, 2014 where Goldman said:

Buy BES: Winner at home, recovering abroad

 

In our view, BES is (1) optimally positioned to gain from Portugal’s banking market evolution and (2) likely to benefit from improving margins in Angola. With the stock trading at a 29% discount to peers’ 2015E P/TBV and with 28% upside to our 12m target price of €1.55, we upgrade BES to Buy.

 

* * *

 

Positioning: Looking beyond the crisis – BES best placed

 

Resilience to asset quality deterioration determined banks’ ability to withstand the effects of the economic and financial crisis. Those effects, however, have their cause in macroeconomic imbalances that led Portugal to ask for financial assistance from the EU/IMF. Addressing those causes will determine the future shape of the Portuguese banking market and the relative positioning of the banks. In this context, we develop a theoretical (and severe) scenario to assess relative positioning in a deleveraging economy: under this scenario, we estimate that Portuguese banks would need to delever by a further €35 bn domestic loans (or 15%) by 2020 to partially reverse the imbalances that contributed to the crisis. This is a top-end assumption and depends heavily on the country’s future macroeconomic performance. In this negative scenario, we show that BES would be best positioned to gain from a “race to the bottom”. Our estimate is harsh, but we still believe that it is a good proxy for the underlying trends in the lending market. In this context, even under more benign scenarios, BES is best placed.

Goldman had BES at a Buy until, well, now.

So how did the stock perform during this period?

And now… the common is finished, or would be if it wasn’t halted.




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US Equities Tumble – Give Up All “Europe Is Saved” Gains

But Banco Espirito Santo was bailed out… and Europe is fixed again?

 

 

Treasury yields are all lower on the day with the 10Y well under 2.5%

 

The driver for the weakness… as we warned earlier, USDJPY losing its overnight support…

 

Charts: Bloomberg




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US Equities Tumble – Give Up All "Europe Is Saved" Gains

But Banco Espirito Santo was bailed out… and Europe is fixed again?

 

 

Treasury yields are all lower on the day with the 10Y well under 2.5%

 

The driver for the weakness… as we warned earlier, USDJPY losing its overnight support…

 

Charts: Bloomberg




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Netanyahu: The Bombings Will Continue Until Calm Is Restored

One can’t make this up. Well, one can, if one was the Onion, which alas has permanently missed its IPO window in a world in which reality is now the very definition of absurd.




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The Slide To Collapse Is Greased With Self-Interest

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Self-interest is intrinsically self-liquidating on a systemic level.

One enduring if rarely stated principle of Neoliberal Democracy is that the single-minded pursuit of self-interest magically produces an equilibrium which serves everyone's interests well enough to avoid the destabilization of rebellion or systemic collapse.

 
Let's start by defining Neoliberal Democracy: neoliberalism sees markets as the only efficient, fair and durable method of organizing resource extraction and the social order: governance, employment, distribution of income, etc. Turning every social and economic function into a marketplace ensures that market forces provide the discipline and transparency participants need to make prudent choices and investments.
 
Democracy is a political marketplace in which votes replace investor and consumer decisions as the mechanisms that enforce discipline and transparency.
 
The melding of these two ideologies is clearly natural, as both see a transparent market as the best possible system for both governance and and the economy.
 
The key characteristic of a market is that all participants exclusively pursue their own self-interest. No one need sacrifice their own self-interest for the good of the whole system because by definition the system of competing interests naturally organizes itself to maximize the choices of each individual and the equilibrium of the system.
 
The transparency, fairness and stability offered by this ideological system is very compelling: the advantages of a system that transparently discovers the price of everything while offering roughly equal opportunity to all participants to seek self-fulfillment (i.e. the pursuit of happiness) via a dogged focus on self-interest are self-evident.
 
Looking out for Number One is thus the foundation not just of personal self-aggrandizement but of systemic stability and fairness.
But let's move from ideological abstraction to the pragmatic–what happens in the real world? What we find in the real world is that participants seek to transfer their own risk to others while minimizing their productive work and maximizing their gain/skim.
 
Risk inevitably introduces the possibility of loss–both fair and unfair. Let's say a participant in the market invests in a scheme to produce the Acme Brand widget. 
 
Unfortunately, the widget fails to find a market and the enterprise closes its doors. The investors lose their investment: this is fair because any enterprise in a market is at risk of losing favor from changes in fashion or the emergence of more agile competitors.
 
Unfair risk is loss incurred through no fault of one's own. Let's say an employee of Acme Widget Corporation gave his all to the company, and was laid off anyway–not through some failing in his efforts or talents but as a result of dynamics beyond his control: the marketplace found little value in the Acme Widget.
 
The rational, self-interested participant will naturally seek to offload risk of loss to other participants. Employees of the state (i.e. the government) transfer most of the risk of being laid off to the larger group of taxpayers: in a recession, the state can raise taxes on everyone in the system to guarantee its employees get paid. In effect, the risk of loss is distributed to everyone paying taxes in order to guarantee the employment of state employees.
 
Financiers have learned that making bets big enough to render their enterprise too big to fail effectively transfers the risk of loss to the taxpayers. We see the same mechanism in action: those who manage to transfer the risk of loss to others guarantee their self-interest can be pursued risk-free.
 
The rational, self-interested participant will also naturally seek to minimize his productive contribution while maximizing his income/gain. The state employee will (for example) game the system to retire early on a fake disability claim, or manage to evade work, accountability or responsibility with little risk of loss because the system makes firing a slacker employee almost impossible.
 
A financier will use free money for financiers issued by the Federal Reserve to buy assets everyone needs to live: private water systems, rental homes, parking meters, etc.–what are known as rentier assets because the financier isn't adding or creating any value in his ownership; he is skimming a fee from those who pass through the gate he owns.
 
The rational, self-interested participant will minimize his own expenses and maximize his income/gain by exploiting the commons–assets shared by all participants. The rational, self-interested participant will thus let his sheep out into the common pasture to graze for free, dump his waste into the river and the smoke from his works into the air, all free of charge.
 
This dynamic of everyone pursuing their own self-interest destroying the commons was articulated by Garrett Hardin in his paper The Tragedy of the Commons.
 
There is another dynamic at work called tyranny of the majority.
 
Imagine a ship with 100 passengers and crew drifting down a river that eventually cascades over a 1,000 foot waterfall. It's easy to plot the ship's course and the waterfall ahead. You might think 100% of those onboard would agree that something drastic must be done to either reverse course or abandon ship, but before we jump to any conclusion we must first identify what each of the 100 people perceive as serving their self-interest.
 
If life onboard is good for 60 of the 100, they may well rationalize away the waterfall dead ahead. Why risk the treacherous river currents by abandoning ship? As a result, the majority vote to tweak the ship's course slightly, thus dooming the 40 others who can hear the thundering cascade ahead but who are powerless to change course in a democracy.
 
This is the tyranny of the majority feared by some of the American Founding Fathers.
 
If 60% of the voting public is dependent on government spending, then they will vote to continue that spending regardless of its unsustainability, source or unfairness to those who will suffer most when the entire contraption collapses in a heap.
 
 
To the degree that government revenue is a form of public commons, then the siphoning of that resource to serve individual gain leads to the loss of the commons, as well as the loss of any notion of the common good.
 
With 60 of the 100 voting to continue the present course of State borrowing and spending to support their piece of the largesse, the ship is doomed to end up in pieces at the bottom of the waterfall, despite the utter obviousness of the catastrophe just ahead.
 
In other words, democracy functions when a sustainable equilibrium can be maintained with slight adjustments in course/policy. But when a dramatic change of course is required to save the system, a change that upends all the rentier skims and redistributes risk of loss to all those who reckoned they'd successfully offloaded all risk onto others, then there is no political support for the necessary radical change of course.
 
Those collecting a piece of State spending will vote to keep the ship firmly heading for the waterfall, because they fear the consequences of changing course or abandoning ship. Any radical change of course reintroduces the risk of loss that each self-interested participant offloaded onto the system itself.
 
Enterprises that haven't offloaded risk or secured guarantees from the State are forced to make radical changes when their survival demands it. Recent history is full of examples of corporations that were riding high and then failed to change course radically enough; those companies lost their way and were acquired for a sliver of their former value.
 
The political marketplace of democracy fails when the State has transferred risk and guaranteed the skim of enough voters.
 
The political marketplace of democracy also fails because self-interest is best served by influencing the State to protect one's private rentier skims and gains.The highest-leverage, highest-return investment is buying political favors and influence from politicos.
 
If average citizens could buy a semi-permanent escape from taxes for, say, a $20,000 "contribution" to the right politico, anyone with a tax burden of $10,000 or more annually would make this easy calculation: in a single decade, I'm going to pay $100,000 in taxes if I do nothing. If I buy the political favor for $20,000, I will save $80,000 over a decade.
 
That's a four-fold yield (400% return) on the initial investment. Where else can you reap that kind of guaranteed return?
 
It turns out to be remarkably easy to evade the transparency required to make democracy and the market function fairly. The political favor is buried in hundreds of pages of legalese jargon in a legislative bill or regulatory statutes. No one will ever discover the favor unless they know where to look.
 
Self-interest is intrinsically self-liquidating on a systemic level, something I analyze in depth in Resistance, Revolution, Liberation, for without an understanding of the distorting mechanisms of self-interest, we cannot understand why people will continue supporting a visibly imploding Status Quo: they will do so as long as they are getting a piece of that Status Quo that is free to them.
 

This is how systems collapse: those who have offloaded risk (a.k.a. skin in the game) to the system itself and guaranteed their job, income, pension or rentier skim via the State will continue to support the Status Quo that has benefited them so handsomely even as the ship tumbles over the waterfall to its destruction.

 




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Caught On Tape – Terrorist Attacks Hit Jerusalem, 2 Dead

With Netanyahu pulling troops back and claiming the Gaza tunnels operation will be over soon, it appears attention has been refocused on Jerusalem as two terrorist attacks have occurred this morning. The first, near Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, saw gunmen riding a motorcycle open first at by-standers, seriously injuring one Israeli soldier. The second, caught on tape below, saw a young Palestinian man take control of a construction vehicle and use it to attack a bus and killed a pedestrian. The attacker was shot and killed by police. Police have not confirmed if the two attacks are related.

 

With Israel pulling back its forces…but…

  • *ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU SAYS GAZA OPERATION CONTINUES
  • *NETANYAHU SAYS ISRAEL STRUCK A HARSH BLOW AGAINST HAMAS

 

2 Terrorist incidents have hit Jerusalem this morning…

 

The first incident…

As Bloomberg reports,

  • *ONE WOUNDED FROM SHOTS FIRED NEAR JERUSALEM’S HEBREW U.: TV
  • *ISRAEL POLICE SAY SHOOTING DIRECTED AT SECURITY OFFICIAL

Shots fired at by-standers by gunmen riding motorcycle, one Israeli seriously injured, Channel Two TV says.

 

 

An IDF soldier was shot in the stomach by a suspected terrorist in a tunnel in Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus Monday afternoon.

 

“Multiple shots were fired, one man was hit in the stomach and rushed to the hospital in serious condition,” said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. “Police units are now searching the area for the vehicle the suspect drove and hope to make an arrest shortly.”

The second incident…

 

 

A construction vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian and overturned a bus on a main street in Jerusalem on Monday in what police suspect was a Palestinian attack, which ended when policemen shot dead the driver of the yellow excavator.

 

There were no passengers on the bus, in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of the city. Surveillance video broadcast on Israeli television showed the excavator’s mechanical arm tearing into the side of the bus as it lay on the sidewalk.

 

Israeli media said the driver of the digger was a Palestinian from East Jerusalem.

 

Video footage shot by a bystander in Jerusalem showed the exact moment that a construction vehicle was used to carry out a terror attack in Jerusalem on Monday.

 

 

Source: JPost

 

One person was killed in the attack, and the driver of the construction vehicle, Mohammad Jabbis – a resident of the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood, was shot and killed by police.

Police did not confirm if the two terrorist attacks are related.

*  *  *
Sounds like Super-Kerry is needed to calm things down again…




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Russia Launches Massive Bomber, Warplane Drill On Ukraine Border As Over 400 Ukraine Soldiers Defect

It has been a while since Russia flexed its military “drill” muscles along the Ukraine border as a reminder of just who would win a pissing contest that involves military intervention.  Which is probably why earlier today Russia announced new military exercises involving bombers and fighter jets in a show of strength near the border with Ukraine. As Reuters reported, “an air force spokesman was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying more than 100 planes and helicopters would take part in the manoeuvres from Monday until Friday in its central and western districts.” Expect some very dramatic footage of Russian Su-34s and Mi-28Ns hitting YouTube later today.

From Reuters:

The spokesman, Igor Klimov, said the exercises were the first in a series to improve coordination in the military and made no mention of Ukraine, where pro-Russian rebels are fighting Ukrainian government forces.

Sure: all purely coincidental.

The move is likely to alarm Western powers which have accused Russia of beefing up the number of troops along its border with Ukraine and arming the rebels in eastern Ukraine. Moscow denies supplying the rebels with weapons.

 

Klimov said aircraft such as Su-27 and MiG-31 fighter jets, Russia’s newest frontline bomber Su-34, and Mi-8, Mi-24 and Mi-28N helicopters would be used in the exercises and the aircraft would conduct missile practice.

The aircraft will be testing “aircraft weapons on land and air targets on new ranges, and will be conducting real and electronic launches of anti-aircraft missiles in Ashuluk (Astrakhan region in southern Russia) which is specifically designed to aide the coordination between aviation and anti-missile defence”, he was quoted as saying.

 

Russia’s Defence Ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.

Cure more hashtags, redlines and maybe even sanctions, although not against Gazprom. Never against Gazprom. And then the logical countersactions as Putin clearly could care less about the west at this point.

And in other news, an official from Russia’s FSB security service in the Rostov region, said that more than 400 Ukrainian military personnel requested refugee status from Russian border guards on Monday and Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has opened a corridor for the soldiers, according to RIA Novosti. “Overnight 438 Ukrainian military personnel turned to Russian border guards with a request for refugee [status],” the head of the FSB’s border control in the southern Russian region of Rostov, Vasily Malaeyev, said.

This follows the Sunday defection of 12 soldiers from the Ukrainian Armed Forces into Russia, who applied for asylum at Gukovo checkpoint in Russia’s Rostov Region, saying they had run out of food and ammunition.




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Lessons in investment warfare

winston churchill Lessons in investment warfare

“Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

“Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations – all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.”

– Winston Churchill, ‘My Early Life’, quoted by Charles Lucas in a letter to the FT, 23rd July 2014.

And there is a war being conducted out there in the financial markets, too, a war between debtors and creditors, between governments and taxpayers, between banks and depositors, between the errors of the past and the hopes of the future. How can investors end up on the winning side ? History would seem to have the answers.

For history, read in particular James O’Shaughnessy’s magisterial study of market data, ‘What Works on Wall Street’ (hat-tip to Abbington Investment Group’s Peter Van Dessel). O’Shaughnessy offers rigorous analysis of innumerable equity market strategies, but we are instinctively and philosophically drawn most strongly towards the value factors highlighted hereafter.

The chart below shows the results accruing to various strategies across the All Stocks universe – all companies in the Standard & Poor’s Compustat database with market capitalisations above $150 million, a dataset which comprises between 4,000 and 5,000 individual companies. The analysis takes in over half a century’s worth of data.

Making the (fairly reasonable) assumption that the data in this study is sufficiently broad to mitigate the effects of shorter term market “noise”, the results are unequivocal. Buying stocks with high price-to-sales (PSR) ratios; buying stocks with high price / cashflow ratios; buying stocks with highprice / book ratios; buying stocks with high price /earnings (PE) ratios; all of these are disastrous strategies relative to the performance of the broad index itself. Caution: these all happen to be ‘growth’ strategies.

Graph842014 Lessons in investment warfare

But the converse is also true – in spades. Buying stocks with low price-to-sales ratios; buying stocks with low price / book ratios; these are both outstandingly successful strategies over the longer term, converting that initial $10,000 into over $22 million in each case. Buying stocks on low price / cashflow ratios is also a winning strategy. The relatively simple ‘high yield’ and ‘low p/e’ strategies also comfortably outperform the broad market. Note that these are all ‘value’ strategies.

This leads O’Shaughnessy to question the legitimacy of the so-called Capital Asset Pricing Model, in which investors are compensated for taking more risk:

“..the higher risk of the high P/Es, price-to-book, price-to-cashflow, and PSRs went uncompensated. Indeed, each of the strategies significantly underperformed the All Stocks Universe.”

Perhaps the market is indeed less efficient than certain academics would have us believe. The world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett, would seem to think so. As he was quoted in a 1995 issue of Fortune magazine,

“I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.”

And note that careful addition of the word “always”. Buffett wasn’t even going so far as to suggest that the markets are never efficient, but rather that the patient investor can take advantage of Mr. Market’s occasional lapses into the realms of absurdity, whether in the form of bullishness or outright despair.

O’Shaughnessy frames the returns from these various ‘growth’ and ‘value’ strategies more explicitly in the chart below.

Graph2842014 Lessons in investment warfare

Special pleaders on the part of ‘growth at any cost’ might argue that the time series is insufficient. But if 52 recent years – easily an investor’s lifetime – taking in at least two grinding bear markets are not enough, how much would be.

Again, the conclusions are clear. Buying stocks on low price-to-sales ratios is a winner, tying with stocks on a low price-to-book ratio with an annualised return over the longer term of 15.95%. Low price-to-cashflow is also a stellar performer. Buying stocks with a high yield also beats the broad market, as does buying stocks with low price / earnings ratios. Again, these are all explicit ‘value’ strategies.

Since we appear to be living through something of a speculative bubble (a bubble inflated quite deliberately by explicit central bank action), it is worth recalling one prior instance of ‘growth’ outperforming. As O’Shaughnessy points out.

“Between January 1, 1997 and March 31, 2000, the 50 stocks from the All Stocks universe with the highest P/E ratios compounded at 46.69 percent per year, turning $10,000 into $34,735 in three years and three months. Other speculative names did equally as well, with the 50 stocks from All Stocks with the highest price-to-book ratios growing a $10,000 investment into $33,248, a compound return of 44.72 percent. All the highest valuation stocks trounced All Stocks over that brief period, leaving those focusing on the shorter term to think that maybe it really was different this time. But anyone familiar with past market bubbles knows that ultimately, the laws of economics reassert their grip on market activity. Investors back in 2000 would have done well to remember Horace’s Ars Poetica, in which he states: “Many shall be restored that are now fallen, and many shall fall that are now in honour.”

“For fall they did, and they fell hard. A near-sighted investor entering the market at its peak in March of 2000 would face true devastation. A $10,000 investment in the 50 stocks with the highest price-to-sales ratios from the All Stocks universe would have been worth a mere $526 at the end of March 2003…

“You must always consider risk before investing in strategies that buy stocks significantly different from the market. Remember that high risk does not always mean high reward. All the higher-risk strategies are eventually dashed on the rocks..”

This might seem to imply that there is safety simply in the avoidance of explicitly high-risk strategies, but we would go further. We would argue today that central bank bubble-blowing has made the entire market high-risk, with a broad consensus that with interest rates at 300-year lows and bonds hysterically overpriced and facing the prospect of interest rate rises to boot, stocks are now “the only game in town”. We concede that by a process of logic and elimination, selective stocks look way more attractive than most other traditional assets, but the emphasis has to be on that word “selective”. We see almost no attraction in stock markets per se, and we are interested solely in what might be called ‘special situations’ (notably, in ‘value’ and ‘deep value’ strategies) wherever they can be identified throughout the world. We note, in passing, that markets such as those of the US appear to be virtually bereft of such ‘value’ opportunities, whereas those in Asia and Japan seem to offer them in relative abundance. In this financial war, we would prefer to be on the side of the victors. If history is any guide, the identity of the losers seems to be self-evident.

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