"How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" – Henry James


There are a few lone voices willing to utter heresy. I am an avid follower of Ilusion Monetaria, a blog by ex-Bank of Spain economist (and monetarist) Miguel Navascues here.
Dr Navascues calls a spade a spade. He exhorts Spain to break free of EMU oppression immediately. (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard)

viernes, 5 de junio de 2015

¿La muerte del mercado?

Tyler Durden de nuevo nos pone sobre aviso, con datos recientes, de que las bolsas se están comiendo a sí mismas como una gigantesca serpiente.

The Stock Market Is Disappearing In One Giant Leveraged Buyout
Casi todas las operaciones, literalmente, son M&A: Mergers & Acquisitions, fusiones y adquisiciones: empresas que se devoran a sí mismas (compra de su su propias acciones, en las que las empresas se han gastado todos los beneficios) y a las demás.
Como se puede ver en el texto, un observador ha calificado esto de paso de un sistema de creación de valor a uno de extracción: los mercados no son más que la nueva clase extractiva. El primer dañado por esta dinámica es el empleo, porque toda operación de este tipo lleva al reajuste de plantilla para reducir costes, operación necesaria para paliar los costes de financiación.
 
El segundo damnificado es el salario. Está operativa, que empezó en los años setenta, puede haber sido una de las causas de la redistribución de la renta en contra de los asalariados.
Hay miedo a la inversión con riesgo, la que devuelve la inversión al cabo de mucho tiempo. Este desmadre esta pendiente de un hilo, que se cortará el día que la FED empiece a subir tipos. Tyler Durden dice que no va ser una hostia morrocotuda: será la muerte el mercado.
 
Anyone who is familiar with mergers and acquisitions knows what happens when a company is being slowly acquired. The price climbs higher, slowly yet relentlessly. Liquidity evaporates as offers are lifted. If the price moves up too quickly, buy programs are canceled. The buyer waits until the froth dies down a little before resuming purchases. Eventually, the bids reappear, and the process continues. Once the buyer acquires 5% of the company, a legal requirement is triggered: the SEC requires the buyer to file Schedule 13D, otherwise known as a "beneficial ownership report." Once this report is filed, everyone can see the buyer, and the stock price will usually jump.
This same process has been underway in the stock market over the last 6 years. The market is up well over 200%. Liquidity has evaporated in the S&P 500 futures market, and the central banks themselves are buying S&P 500 futures. Companies are spending nearly all of their profits on stock buybacks. Just recently, Wendy's announced they would buy back half of their stock.
All of this activity harms employees. William Lazonick discussed the negative effects in a Harvard Business Review article called "Profits Without Prosperity." According to Lazonick, the American economy has transformed from a system of value creation to one of value extraction. He explained,
From the end of World War II until the late 1970s, a retain-and-reinvest approach to resource allocation prevailed at major U.S. corporations. They retained earnings and reinvested them in increasing their capabilities, first and foremost in the employees who helped make firms more competitive. They provided workers with higher incomes and greater job security, thus contributing to equitable, stable economic growth - what I call "sustainable prosperity."
This pattern began to break down in the late 1970s, giving way to a downsize-and-distribute regime of reducing costs and then distributing the freed-up cash to financial interests, particularly shareholders. By favoring value extraction over value creation, this approach has contributed to employment instability and income inequality.
Tener dinero en bolsa sin ser muy experto es jugar a la ruleta rusa. Las últimas palabras de Tyler son apocalípticas:
This is the end game of unfettered capitalism. The signs are all here. When you cast aside reasonable restraints, the unscrupulous among us will rise to the top and exploit everyone else. What we have left is a new American feudalism where CEOs move around like a pack of ruthless Somalian warlords. Riding behind the banner of efficiency, they replace employees with robots, outsource their work to foreigners and tell their employees to train their own replacements, and collude with hedge fund managers to strip companies of their most valuable assets to temporarily boost the stock price.
As if all this weren't enough, now they are buying the entire stock market with money provided by the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policies. This is essentially the largest leveraged buyout in history, and it's being paid for by every American. If the IPO market continues to dry up and companies maintain their buybacks, eventually, they will run out of stock to buy, and the market will disappear.
Ahora bien, no es el único. Hay montones de artículos circulando por ahí. Vean este de al ultra-conservadora Gillian Tett:

This week America’s corporate world passed a milestone. The value of deals in US-bound mergers and acquisitions amounted to $243bn in May, according to Dealogic — a monthly record. The previous monthly peaks were in May 2007 and January 2000, when deals worth respectively $226bn and $213bn were struck.

Meanwhile, so far this year, $1.85tn deals have been done globally; if this continues 2015’s total could top the annual record of $4.6tn deals s in 2007.

What should policy makers and investors conclude? If you want to be optimistic, you might see this as a welcome return of animal spirits. In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, corporate executives were so scarred — and scared — that their priority was to cut corporate debt and costs. But now the C-suite feels more ambitious. And what is particularly striking is that the current M&A frenzy is affecting not just one industry, as during the tech boom, but a wide range, including retail, oil, pharma and tech.

But there is a second, darker interpretation of this trend: namely that the western financial system is drowning in excess cash and credit. History suggests such a scenario rarely ends well. After all, the crucial point about the two previous M&A peaks is that they coincided with equity and credit bubbles. Shortly afterwards, those bubbles burst — with painful consequences.

Y no olviden lo que decía Mohamed El-Arian, el gran experto de Pimco (antes de dimitir): "I'm mostly concentrated in cash".
 

7 comentarios:

Miguel E. dijo...

A ver, yo creo que no hay que ser tan dramático. Si hay sobrevaloración de empresas se entra en una caída correctiva y punto. Pero de ahí a matar al mercado...

Además, si hay empresas que se muerden la cola ya aparecerán otras que estén empezando y sean más atractivas para los inversores.

En cualquier caso, es lógico que si la economía está en Depresión se opte por optimizar dentro (automatizar procesos, etc.) en lugar de asumir nuevos riesgos.

www.MiguelNavascues.com dijo...

I ya, pero eso lo hacen endeudamdose

Pablo Bastida dijo...

Tyler Durden, ¿no era el protagonista de El club de la lucha?

www.MiguelNavascues.com dijo...

Quē es el club de la lucha?

Pablo Bastida dijo...

Una película de David Fincher; supongo que será un seudónimo.

Pablo Bastida dijo...

¡Ah! Se me olvidaba, ¡Forza Juve!

www.MiguelNavascues.com dijo...

Eso desde luego!