Tag: news

As we predicted in April of 2012, the most important pillar of a self-sustaining, “virtuous” US recovery – investment in future growth through capital spending – has been missing and will be missing as long as the Fed’s intervention policies in the economy provide shareholders (and management teams) with a far quicker way of generating returns by using excess cash flow to buy back stock and boost dividends (in the process keeping activist shareholders happy). And who can blame them: in an age of instant gratification, shareholders care about cheap-credit funded cash now, not decades from now. Needless to say, employees end up suffering the most since without revenue growth, companies are forced to keep trimming overhead which explicitly means firing more workers just to match Wall Street’s (declining) EPS consensus.

Since that article our observations were proven correct, and now that the CapEx drought has become a mainstream topic, it bears reminding that this phenomenon will continue indefinitely, and certainly as long as CapEx hurdle rates are far greater than issuing a low-yielding bond and using the proceeds to reward shareholders: indeed, this shareholders friendly topic has been perhaps the dominant theme of 2013 when activist investors stormed to the forefront once again, most prominently in the face of Carl Icahn, and have managed to force even lower revenue growth prospects by levering companies with debt loads that are now greater than during the prior credit bubble peak.

Naturally, one after another bank has come out once again, as they did, and is predicting that the great deferred CapEx renaissance is upon us… any day now. Unfortunately, it isn’t. And just to confirm this, here is Archer Daniels Midland summarizing the company’s plans for its 2014 free cash flows. In short: they don’t involve any US growth CapEx spending at all.

“Our continued strong cash flow generation and our confidence in the future earnings power of our company allow us to significantly increase our quarterly dividend,” said Patricia Woertz, ADM’s chairman and CEO. “Historically, we have paid out approximately 20 to 25 percent of earnings; going forward we will aim for a range of 25 to 30 percent, thereby allowing shareholders to participate more directly in the earnings stream of the company.”

 

The company also announced that it intends to buy back from its shareholders 18 million shares of its stock by the end of 2014 to fully mitigate the dilutive impact of equity units converted in 2011 and compensation and benefit plan issuances in 2013 and 2014. At current prices, this would represent about $725 million. To the extent that ADM’s credit metrics improve throughout the year and the company receives significant proceeds from asset sales, the company will consider further distributions to shareholders later in 2014 in the context of its capital allocation strategy.

 

Woertz also provided some detail on the company’s 2014 business plans, noting that from the cash flows to be generated in 2014, it expects to invest about $1.4 billion in capital projects, with the majority of the growth capital invested outside the U.S., and will return about $1.4 billion to shareholders in the form of the higher dividends and the repurchase of 18 million shares.

 

“We will continue to take a balanced approach to capital allocation.”

So balanced that growth capital spending in the US is not even on the radar. Unfortunately, ADM is indicative of what the capital spending plans of the the vast majority of US-based companies for 2014 look like. But any day now though…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/D-dWDJHP_4Q/story01.htm Tyler Durden

As we predicted in April of 2012, the most important pillar of a self-sustaining, “virtuous” US recovery – investment in future growth through capital spending – has been missing and will be missing as long as the Fed’s intervention policies in the economy provide shareholders (and management teams) with a far quicker way of generating returns by using excess cash flow to buy back stock and boost dividends (in the process keeping activist shareholders happy). And who can blame them: in an age of instant gratification, shareholders care about cheap-credit funded cash now, not decades from now. Needless to say, employees end up suffering the most since without revenue growth, companies are forced to keep trimming overhead which explicitly means firing more workers just to match Wall Street’s (declining) EPS consensus.

Since that article our observations were proven correct, and now that the CapEx drought has become a mainstream topic, it bears reminding that this phenomenon will continue indefinitely, and certainly as long as CapEx hurdle rates are far greater than issuing a low-yielding bond and using the proceeds to reward shareholders: indeed, this shareholders friendly topic has been perhaps the dominant theme of 2013 when activist investors stormed to the forefront once again, most prominently in the face of Carl Icahn, and have managed to force even lower revenue growth prospects by levering companies with debt loads that are now greater than during the prior credit bubble peak.

Naturally, one after another bank has come out once again, as they did, and is predicting that the great deferred CapEx renaissance is upon us… any day now. Unfortunately, it isn’t. And just to confirm this, here is Archer Daniels Midland summarizing the company’s plans for its 2014 free cash flows. In short: they don’t involve any US growth CapEx spending at all.

“Our continued strong cash flow generation and our confidence in the future earnings power of our company allow us to significantly increase our quarterly dividend,” said Patricia Woertz, ADM’s chairman and CEO. “Historically, we have paid out approximately 20 to 25 percent of earnings; going forward we will aim for a range of 25 to 30 percent, thereby allowing shareholders to participate more directly in the earnings stream of the company.”

 

The company also announced that it intends to buy back from its shareholders 18 million shares of its stock by the end of 2014 to fully mitigate the dilutive impact of equity units converted in 2011 and compensation and benefit plan issuances in 2013 and 2014. At current prices, this would represent about $725 million. To the extent that ADM’s credit metrics improve throughout the year and the company receives significant proceeds from asset sales, the company will consider further distributions to shareholders later in 2014 in the context of its capital allocation strategy.

 

Woertz also provided some detail on the company’s 2014 business plans, noting that from the cash flows to be generated in 2014, it expects to invest about $1.4 billion in capital projects, with the majority of the growth capital invested outside the U.S., and will return about $1.4 billion to shareholders in the form of the higher dividends and the repurchase of 18 million shares.

 

“We will continue to take a balanced approach to capital allocation.”

So balanced that growth capital spending in the US is not even on the radar. Unfortunately, ADM is indicative of what the capital spending plans of the the vast majority of US-based companies for 2014 look like. But any day now though…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/D-dWDJHP_4Q/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by James Howard Kunstler of Kunstler.com,

The so-called Volker Rule for policing (ha!) banking practices, approved by a huddle of federal regulating agency chiefs last week, is the latest joke that America has played on itself in what is becoming the greatest national self-punking exercise in world history.

First of all (and there’s a lot of all), this rule comes in the form of nearly 1,000 pages of incomprehensible legalese embedded in what was already a morbidly obese Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform (ha!) and Consumer Protection (ha!) Act of 2012 that clocked in at 2000 pages, not counting the immense rafts of mandated interpretations and adumbrations, of which the new Volker Rule is but one. These additions were required because the Dodd-Frank Act itself did not really spell out the particulars of enforcement but rather left it to the regulatory agencies to construct the rules — which they did with “help” of lobbyist-lawyers furnished by the banks themselves. That is, the lobbyists actually wrote the rules for Dodd-Frank and everything in it, which means the banks wrote the rules. Does this strain your credulity? Well, this is the kind of nation we have become: anything goes and nothing matters. There really is no rule of law, just pretense.

The Volcker Rule was a lame gesture toward restoring the heart of the Glass-Steagall provisions of the Banking Act of 1933, which were repealed in 1999 in a cynical effort led by Wall Street uber-grifter Robert Rubin and his sidekick Larry Summers, who served serially as US Treasury Secretaries under Bill Clinton. Glass Steagall was passed in Congress following revelations of gross misconduct among bankers leading up to the stock market crash of 1929. The main thrust of Glass Steagall was to mandate the separation of commercial banking (deposit accounts + lending) from investment banking (underwriting and trading in securities). The idea was to prevent banks from using money in customer deposit accounts to gamble in stocks and other speculative instruments. This rule was designed to work hand-in-hand with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), also created in 1933, to backstop the accounts of ordinary citizens in commercial banks. The initial backstop limits were very modest: $2,500 at inception, and didn’t rise above $40,000 until 1980. Investment banks, on the other hand, were not backstopped at all under Glass-Steagall, since their activities were construed as a form of high-toned gambling.

The Glass Steagall Act of 1933 was about 35 pages long, written in language that was precise, clear, and succinct. It worked for 66 years. Banking during those years was a pretty boring business, commercial banking especially. It operated on the 3-6-3 principle — pay 3 percent interest on deposits, lend at 6 percent, and be out on the golf course at 3 p.m. Bankers made a nice living but nothing like the obscene racketeering profits engineered by the looting operations of today. Before 1980, the finance sector of the economy was about 5 percent of all activity. Its purpose was to allocate precious capital to new productive ventures.

As American manufacturing was surrendered to other countries, there were fewer productive ventures for capital to be directed into. What remained was real estate development (a.k.a. suburban sprawl) and finance, which was the enabler of it. Finance ballooned to 40 percent of the US economy and the American landscape got trashed. The computer revolution of the 1990s stimulated tremendous “innovation” in financial activities. Much of that innovation turned out to be new species of swindles and frauds. Now you understand the history of the so-called “housing bubble” and the crash of 2008. The US never recovered from it, and all the rescue attempts in the form of bail-outs, quantitative easing, zero interest rates, have turned into rackets aimed at papering-over this national failure to thrive. It is all ultimately linked to the larger story of industrialism and its relationship with the unique, finite, fossil fuel resources that the human race got cheaply for a few hundred years. That story is now winding down and we refuse to pay attention to the reality of it.

The absurdity of Dodd-Frank and the Volcker Rule in the face of that is just another symptom of that tragic inattention. The baroque prolixity of these statutes must have been fun for the lawyers to construct — thousands of pages of incantatory nonsense aimed at confounding any attempt to enforce decent conduct among bankers and their supposed regulators — but it does nothing to really help us move into the next phase of history.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/0M1I7ANIga4/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by James Howard Kunstler of Kunstler.com,

The so-called Volker Rule for policing (ha!) banking practices, approved by a huddle of federal regulating agency chiefs last week, is the latest joke that America has played on itself in what is becoming the greatest national self-punking exercise in world history.

First of all (and there’s a lot of all), this rule comes in the form of nearly 1,000 pages of incomprehensible legalese embedded in what was already a morbidly obese Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform (ha!) and Consumer Protection (ha!) Act of 2012 that clocked in at 2000 pages, not counting the immense rafts of mandated interpretations and adumbrations, of which the new Volker Rule is but one. These additions were required because the Dodd-Frank Act itself did not really spell out the particulars of enforcement but rather left it to the regulatory agencies to construct the rules — which they did with “help” of lobbyist-lawyers furnished by the banks themselves. That is, the lobbyists actually wrote the rules for Dodd-Frank and everything in it, which means the banks wrote the rules. Does this strain your credulity? Well, this is the kind of nation we have become: anything goes and nothing matters. There really is no rule of law, just pretense.

The Volcker Rule was a lame gesture toward restoring the heart of the Glass-Steagall provisions of the Banking Act of 1933, which were repealed in 1999 in a cynical effort led by Wall Street uber-grifter Robert Rubin and his sidekick Larry Summers, who served serially as US Treasury Secretaries under Bill Clinton. Glass Steagall was passed in Congress following revelations of gross misconduct among bankers leading up to the stock market crash of 1929. The main thrust of Glass Steagall was to mandate the separation of commercial banking (deposit accounts + lending) from investment banking (underwriting and trading in securities). The idea was to prevent banks from using money in customer deposit accounts to gamble in stocks and other speculative instruments. This rule was designed to work hand-in-hand with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), also created in 1933, to backstop the accounts of ordinary citizens in commercial banks. The initial backstop limits were very modest: $2,500 at inception, and didn’t rise above $40,000 until 1980. Investment banks, on the other hand, were not backstopped at all under Glass-Steagall, since their activities were construed as a form of high-toned gambling.

The Glass Steagall Act of 1933 was about 35 pages long, written in language that was precise, clear, and succinct. It worked for 66 years. Banking during those years was a pretty boring business, commercial banking especially. It operated on the 3-6-3 principle — pay 3 percent interest on deposits, lend at 6 percent, and be out on the golf course at 3 p.m. Bankers made a nice living but nothing like the obscene racketeering profits engineered by the looting operations of today. Before 1980, the finance sector of the economy was about 5 percent of all activity. Its purpose was to allocate precious capital to new productive ventures.

As American manufacturing was surrendered to other countries, there were fewer productive ventures for capital to be directed into. What remained was real estate development (a.k.a. suburban sprawl) and finance, which was the enabler of it. Finance ballooned to 40 percent of the US economy and the American landscape got trashed. The computer revolution of the 1990s stimulated tremendous “innovation” in financial activities. Much of that innovation turned out to be new species of swindles and frauds. Now you understand the history of the so-called “housing bubble” and the crash of 2008. The US never recovered from it, and all the rescue attempts in the form of bail-outs, quantitative easing, zero interest rates, have turned into rackets aimed at papering-over this national failure to thrive. It is all ultimately linked to the larger story of industrialism and its relationship with the unique, finite, fossil fuel resources that the human race got cheaply for a few hundred years. That story is now winding down and we refuse to pay attention to the reality of it.

The absurdity of Dodd-Frank and the Volcker Rule in the face of that is just another symptom of that tragic inattention. The baroque prolixity of these statutes must have been fun for the lawyers to construct — thousands of pages of incantatory nonsense aimed at confounding any attempt to enforce decent conduct among bankers and their supposed regulators — but it does nothing to really help us move into the next phase of history.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/0M1I7ANIga4/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Whether an unintended consequence of the push for over-consumption of the Chinese consumer or simply a man hitting his breaking point (as many Americans – we are sure – have considered in the last few weeks), 38-year-old Tao Hsiao lept to his death from a 7th story walkway in a Jiangsu mall after his girlfriend would not stop Christmas shopping. The 5-hour marathon ‘consumption’ ended badly after Tao’s girlfriend said he was “spoiling Christmas,” when he chided her that she “already had enough shoes…it was pointless buying more.” He died on impact, and no one else was injured. It is unknown if his girlfriend continued shopping…

 

Via Shanghaiist.com,

When his girlfriend insisted on prolonging their Christmas shopping marathon, 38-year-old Tao Hsiao leapt from a seventh-story walkway and killed himself in a Jiangsu shopping mall.

Tao and his girlfriend (whose name has not been released) had reportedly been in the Golden Eagle International Shopping Center, in Xuzhou, for some five hours before a rather routine relationship scuffle escalated drastically out of proportion.

Tao told his girlfriend that “she already had enough shoes, more shoes that she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying any more,” according to a witness. Tao was then accused of “spoiling Christmas,” and the shouting match likely would have continued had Tao not chosen that moment to hurl himself over the seventh-story balcony.

Tao fell through elaborate christmas decorations and crashed into a shopping stall on the mall’s ground level, injuring no one but himself in the process. He died on impact.

 

It brings a whole new meaning to the term “shop til you drop”…but Tao’s last words do ring horribly true in this age of over-consumption

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/psRYalyCks8/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Since we live in a connected world, in which the central bank “Flow” must, well, flow, one emerging line of thought is that with the Fed set to taper (even by a modest $10 billion per month driven by Treasury market liquidity constraints where the Fed is now monetizing 1% of the entire bond market in 10 Year equivalents every three weeks), the BOJ will have to step in and boost its own monetization by a comparable amount. And as we noted in November, speculation that the BOJ will do just this set off the latest Yen crushing move, which has seen the EURJPY surge higher by a massive 1000 pips all but pricing in any BOJ moves for 2014. However, to be able to do this, Japan will need to provide its central bank with the capacity to monetize as many Treasurys (or more) as possible: after all, Japan like the US is already soaking up a record 70% of all gross issuance.

And Japan is ready to comply: as Reuters reports, in the next fiscal year, Japan’s budget will exceed 96 trillion yen, or about $930 billion. With Japan’s GDP standing currently shy of half a quadrillion Yen (not to be confused with Japan’s debt load which is now over the one quadrillion mark), it means the budget will be about 20% of the country’s entire economic output.

More from Reuters:

The government is in final negotiations on the general-account budget for the year from April, which will exceed 96 trillion yen ($931 billion), the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

 

The draft budget, to be approved by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Cabinet on December 24, will be up from this fiscal year’s initial budget of 92.6 trillion yen.

 

Abe, elected a year ago Monday, has used heavy government spending as one of his main tools in a bid to end 15 years of deflation and sluggish growth for the world’s third-biggest economy. But with public debt of more than twice the size of the economy, Abe also aims to balance the budget over time, starting with a sales-tax increase next April.

 

With an economic rebound and a tax increase, tax revenues next fiscal year are tipped to clear 50 trillion yen, a seven-year high, while bond issuance will decrease from this year’s 42.85 trillion yen, the sources said.

So while the total spending framework has already been set, it remains to be seen if and how much tax revenues will indeed pick up providing the funding for about half of the spending needs. And if they don’t, so much the better: it means debt deficit-funding will only rise, giving the BOJ even more dry powder which to monetize and flood the global system with even more excess reserves.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/SUNcjaS83GE/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Since we live in a connected world, in which the central bank “Flow” must, well, flow, one emerging line of thought is that with the Fed set to taper (even by a modest $10 billion per month driven by Treasury market liquidity constraints where the Fed is now monetizing 1% of the entire bond market in 10 Year equivalents every three weeks), the BOJ will have to step in and boost its own monetization by a comparable amount. And as we noted in November, speculation that the BOJ will do just this set off the latest Yen crushing move, which has seen the EURJPY surge higher by a massive 1000 pips all but pricing in any BOJ moves for 2014. However, to be able to do this, Japan will need to provide its central bank with the capacity to monetize as many Treasurys (or more) as possible: after all, Japan like the US is already soaking up a record 70% of all gross issuance.

And Japan is ready to comply: as Reuters reports, in the next fiscal year, Japan’s budget will exceed 96 trillion yen, or about $930 billion. With Japan’s GDP standing currently shy of half a quadrillion Yen (not to be confused with Japan’s debt load which is now over the one quadrillion mark), it means the budget will be about 20% of the country’s entire economic output.

More from Reuters:

The government is in final negotiations on the general-account budget for the year from April, which will exceed 96 trillion yen ($931 billion), the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

 

The draft budget, to be approved by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Cabinet on December 24, will be up from this fiscal year’s initial budget of 92.6 trillion yen.

 

Abe, elected a year ago Monday, has used heavy government spending as one of his main tools in a bid to end 15 years of deflation and sluggish growth for the world’s third-biggest economy. But with public debt of more than twice the size of the economy, Abe also aims to balance the budget over time, starting with a sales-tax increase next April.

 

With an economic rebound and a tax increase, tax revenues next fiscal year are tipped to clear 50 trillion yen, a seven-year high, while bond issuance will decrease from this year’s 42.85 trillion yen, the sources said.

So while the total spending framework has already been set, it remains to be seen if and how much tax revenues will indeed pick up providing the funding for about half of the spending needs. And if they don’t, so much the better: it means debt deficit-funding will only rise, giving the BOJ even more dry powder which to monetize and flood the global system with even more excess reserves.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/SUNcjaS83GE/story01.htm Tyler Durden

While the ECB (and the Fed) continues to warn (danger of theft), threaten (asset-ize and tax it!), or de-bunk the idea of virtual currencies (despite two of the world's largest banks apparently seeing value in the idea), the Swiss Parliament is proposing a different angle. A postulate signed by 45 (of 200) members of parliament asks for bitcoin to be treated as any other foreign currency – and examine the potential bitcoin-related opportunities for the Swiss financial sector.

Via Coindesk,

The Swiss Parliament is considering a postulate that asks for bitcoin to be treated as any other foreign currency. The goal of the postulate, introduced by representative Thomas Weibel, is to eliminate ambiguities and increase legal certainty related to bitcoin.

 

…

 

The postulate petitions the executive branch to reply to four basic questions: whether or not bitcoin represents an opportunity for the financial sector, should bitcoin be treated as a foreign currency, what regulatory instruments should be used to establish legal certainty for bitcoin and similar currencies, and what sort of regulatory changes are needed and when can they be implemented.

 

The postulate was co-signed by 45 members of parliament (out of a possible 200) after they came to the conclusion that bitcoin can create new opportunities for the Swiss financial sector and that measures should be taken to regulate the application of VAT and the execution of money laundering controls.

 

…

 

Luzius Meisser, president of Bitcoin Association Switzerland, told CoinDesk: “This would be quite revolutionary, as it provides bitcoin with additional legitimacy and could serve as a precedent for other countries. Also, it would pave the way for businesses to use bitcoins without legal uncertainty in Switzerland.”

The crucial point here, of course, is if Bitcoin is 'deemed' an asset (as EU regulators appear to want), it can (and will) be taxed; but it seems the Swiss beg to differ with that definition.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/C1LhW-NCI0o/story01.htm Tyler Durden