Category: Market Action

The regulators’ crack-down on European banks is having the intended effect:

Ignoring the rules has never been so pricey for European lenders, spurring them to hire more people to ferret out wrongdoing and offer salaries more in line with the bankers they police.

“It’s actually a very hot market right now,” said Mike Roemer, who became head of compliance at London-based Barclays Plc (BARC) in January. Today the role is seen “as an integral part of how companies manage the overall risk of the organization,” he said.

After the U.S. extracted almost $12 billion in fines in settlements with France’s BNP Paribas SA (BNP) and Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) since May, European firms say they’re overhauling culture and boosting pay for compliance staff faster than for revenue-earning bankers.
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The average annual salary for a compliance employee in London rose 12.9 percent to 80,538 pounds ($138,000) in 2013, according to a survey by London-based recruitment firm Astbury Marsden & Partners Ltd. That compares with a 6.1 percent increase to 90,669 pounds for a revenue-generating banker.

No real surprises in the BoC rate announcement:

Total CPI inflation has moved up to around the 2 per cent target in recent months, sooner than expected. Core inflation has also increased but remains below 2 per cent. Recent higher inflation is attributable to the temporary effects of higher energy prices, exchange rate pass-through and other sector-specific shocks, rather than to any change in domestic economic fundamentals.
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Given the downgrade to the global outlook, economic activity in Canada is now projected to be a little weaker than previously forecast.
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For the inflation target to be achieved on a sustained basis in 2016, the economy must reach and remain at full capacity. Closing the output gap over the time frame described above is reliant on continued stimulative monetary policy and hinges critically on stronger exports and business investment. Meanwhile, the risks associated with household imbalances, while evolving in a constructive way, are still elevated. Weighing these considerations within the Bank’s risk-management framework, the monetary policy stance remains appropriate and the target for the overnight rate remains at 1 per cent. The Bank is neutral with respect to the timing and direction of the next change to the policy rate, which will depend on how new information influences the outlook and assessment of risks.

Today’s PrefBlog Wingnut of the Day Award goes to the authors of a new book:

In their new book, House of Debt, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi argue that out-of-control housing prices tend to inflict long-lasting pain on a country’s economy, but much of that distress can be avoided. The key? Forcing banks and other lenders to share in the ups-and-downs of the real estate cycle by requiring them to bear part of the cost if a housing boom implodes.

The authors, who teach at Princeton and the University of Chicago, respectively, are mostly concerned with the U.S. housing debacle, but their work deserves attention in any country that suspects it, too, may be suffering from real estate dementia.
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The two professors propose an idea with far more teeth. They suggest rewriting mortgage contracts so that a homeowner’s payments and principal shrink if an index of local home prices declines. In effect, their system would shove part of the losses onto the shoulders of the mortgage holder. (Yes, in Canada that would be mostly you, Big Six banks.) In return, the lender would get a 5-per-cent slice of any capital gains on the house when it is sold or refinanced.

Wondderful. So my mortgage rate will go up if the bank figures the market will go down, and vice versa. Classic negative convexity, just for starters. I continue to advocate a gradual withdrawal of the government from mortgage insurance and countercyclical capital requirements when the proportion of mortgage assets to financial system assets deviates significantly from historical norms.

There’s some cheerful news for those in the investment management business:

Net flows into U.S. investment accounts were just 1 percent last year. That could create problems when, inevitably, stocks cool off. And if a bear market comes along, managers of funds may face a true reckoning.

The hardest hit will likely be traditional active money managers. They’re being underpriced by cheap passive strategies that hold stocks and bonds based on indexes in mutual funds or exchange-traded funds. Managers of mutual funds are also getting squeezed by a variety of new, more sophisticated strategies, which BCG calls “solutions.” These are options like target-date funds, income funds and global asset allocation funds that operate pretty much on autopilot.

The result is that an elite group of big asset managers, who provide such alternatives, are winning the lion’s share of new dollars. In the U.S., Vanguard Group, famous for its cheap index funds and ETFs, and BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, together get two of every five new dollars that get invested in the U.S. BCG says the top 10 asset managers make up almost three-quarters of new investment flows.

Short selling is a dangerous game:

A Wall Street trader said Cynk Technology Corp.’s (CYNK) 36,000 percent stock surge cost him his job, and he blames a short squeeze and regulators who didn’t halt the shares before the company’s value shot past $6 billion.

Tom Laresca, a market-maker at Buckman Buckman & Reid Inc., said he was among traders who thought they spotted a scam as the shares jumped to $2.25 last month from pennies. He sold it short last week around $6 — which means selling stock you don’t own with a plan to buy it cheaper soon, pocketing the difference. Laresca figured the Securities and Exchange Commission would suspend trading, sending the price toward zero. Cynk has said it’s a social-network service with no revenue and one employee.

“The stock looked worthless, if there’s even a company behind it,” Laresca said. “My 10-year-old knew it was a scam. It was a complete joke.”

Instead of falling, the price more than doubled the next day, July 9, starting the squeeze. Market-makers who had sold the shares short got nervous and scrambled to buy them to close their positions, driving the price even higher, Laresca said. The SEC stopped trading two days later, citing concerns about the accuracy of information in the marketplace and “potentially manipulative transactions.” That was too late, Laresca said.
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Only 500,000 of those shares were authorized to trade publicly, according to Cynk’s transfer agent, Pacific Stock Transfer. About $12 million of stock changed hands during the past month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The low volume meant that market-makers couldn’t find shares to cover their short positions, Laresca said.
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Kevin Kelly, chief investment officer at Recon Capital Partners LLC, which manages about $150 million and issues exchange-traded funds, said Laresca took a risk by shorting Cynk even if he thought it was sketchy.

“He should know that markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” Kelly said. “He’s a professional.”

The video interview makes one thing clear: he’s got a great accent!

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 14bp, FixedResets off 11bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 4bp. Volatility was nothing special, but comprised entirely of FixedReset losers. Volume was below average.

I was sent a link to an article from 2007 by Keith Ambachsheer and Rob Bauer titled Losing ground: Do Canadian mutual funds produce fair value for their customers?:

The study specifically compares the net excess returns produced by a large sample of Canadian mutual funds with domestic equity mandates against the net excess returns produced by a large sample of the domestic equity components of Canadian pension funds. An important study finding is that, over the nine-year period from 1996 to 2004, the Canadian equity components of Canadian pension funds outperformed their Canadian equity market benchmark by an average +1.2% per annum, net of expenses. Over the same nine-year period, Canadian equity mutual funds with domestic mandates underperformed their Canadian equity market benchmark by an average -2.6% per annum, net of management fees, but before any applicable sales charges. Any such sales charges would reduce mutual fund net returns even further.

Very sweet, but nowhere does the article attempt to attribute reported outperformance of Canadian pension funds, which I suggest was due to enormous post-Tech-Wreck outperformance overcompensating for pre-Tech-Wreck underperformance. In addition, it does not attempt to address the outperformance itself, which any first-year B-School student will be pleased to tell you cannot be persistent.

The authors then ask:

Why would Canadian mutual fund investors subject themselves to an average wealth-loss of 3.8% per annum relative to implementing the same basic investment policy through Canadian pension funds? Or equivalently, why would Canadian mutual fund investors pay an average 2.75%(or more including sales charges)for an investment service that is available to Canadian pension fund participants for an average 0.25%, and which produced inferior investment results even before the far greater expenses?

… but of their four hypotheses, only one seems plausible:

Mutual funds are sold, not bought: the market for investment management services is highly asymmetric, with the buyers of these services knowing far less about what they are buying than the sellers know about what they are selling. Information economics predicts that in such a market buyers will pay too much for too little. Research results from the field of behavioural finance support this conclusion. This research shows people to be generally unsophisticated, inconsistent, hesitant, and even irrational regarding financial matters, which creates the opportunity for the for-profit financial services industry to proactively step in and sell their products and services at too-high prices.8 The veracity of his third explanation is supported by the findings of a recent survey of 1865 Canadian mutual fund investors. When asked why they had bought mutual funds, 85% said they were persuaded by “someone who provided me with advice and guidance.”9 In our view, it is the combined effects of informational asymmetry and behavioural dysfunction on the part of the customers, and opportunistic acuity on the part of the suppliers, that best explains the findings summarized in Table 1. Mahoney(2004)reaches similar conclusions in a paper titled “Manager-Investor Conflicts in Mutual Funds.”

This emphasis on prices is reasonable, but there is no attempt to reconcile the fees charged with the performance gap. In addition, the authors conveniently ignore the investment environment of the first half of their period: tech sold! Dividends were old-fashioned; managers had a choice between throwing a good portion of their mutual fund assets into tech or, alternatively, just stay home and catch up on sleep. Without tech on offer, nobody would come to the office and the ‘phones wouldn’t ring.

All this is meant to tout the idea of Government Investment Management:

We favour a middle way: the “paternalistic libertarian” approach currently in the process of being adopted in the UK. The basic idea is to create a number of arm’s-length, expert, pension delivery organizations, and then to automatically enroll the entire non-covered part of the workforce into one of them. People can elect to opt out if they do not wish to participate.
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A key assumption in these calculations is that the pension delivery organizations operate in the sole best interests of plan participants, with expense ratios of 0.3%.

I wonder if Mr. Ambachsheer is involved with the proposed Ontario Pension Plan? It sounds rather similar …

The battle to make life easier for incompetent bond investors is heating up:

The Canadian Securities Administrators, a coalition of the country’s provincial and territorial securities regulators, announced last month it’s starting a review of transparency in the $390-billion corporate bond market. The CSA questioned whether the private sector-led transparency model currently in place is working, and if more active regulation is needed.

The move comes as bond trading falls under closer scrutiny worldwide with the top regulator in the U.S. calling for more public information on private trading, and the European Union seeking to build a system to publicly disclose prices in real time.

Unlike stocks, bonds aren’t traded on public exchanges but as private transactions with securities dealers acting as middlemen, giving the brokerages — many of whom are owned by banks — an informational advantage.
It’s historically been more profitable for firms to trade bonds than stocks because the debt markets are less transparent, making it easier for brokers to take a bigger fee for each exchange.

“We have a sort of oligopolistic banking system where the banks kind of set their own rules, and there’s been a lack of transparency in the bond market forever,” said Ed Waitzer, chairman of the Ontario Securities Commission from 1993 to 1997 and a senior partner at Toronto-based law firm Stikeman Elliot LLP. “It sounds like the commission is feeling a little bit of heat again because the rest of the world is kind of shining a light on dark markets.”

Yellen is still dovish on rates:

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen told lawmakers the central bank must press on with record monetary stimulus to combat persistent job-market weakness.

“There are mixed signals concerning the economy,” Yellen said in response to questions during testimony to the Senate Banking Committee today. “We need to be careful to make sure that the economy is on a solid trajectory before we consider raising interest rates.”

While her “overall view is more positive,” Yellen said low wages are one sign of “significant slack” in labor markets, even after the jobless rate fell to an almost six-year low.
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In prepared testimony, Yellen repeated that interest rates are likely to stay low for a “considerable period” after the Fed ends its asset-purchase program, which she said could happen following the October meeting.

“A high degree of monetary policy accommodation remains appropriate,” Yellen said in her semi-annual testimony. “Although the economy continues to improve, the recovery is not yet complete.”

She also commented on irrational exuberance:

Ms. Yellen delivered her observation during off-script Congressional testimony on Tuesday. Well, sort of: She was actually singling out social media and biotech stocks – along with lower-rated corporate debt – as pockets of the market that look frothy and are vulnerable to setbacks, particularly when the Fed starts raising its key interest rate.

The fact that a Fed chair would discuss stock valuations of any kind is highly unusual and should push investors into evaluating market conditions after a 190 per cent rally by the S&P 500 over the past five-and-a-half years.

Dubai’s making an effort to attract the hated hedge funds:

When Ahmad Zuaiter started a frontier-markets hedge fund, the former Soros Fund Management LLC money manager chose Dubai over New York and London.

Zuaiter’s Jadara Capital Partners LP and VY Capital Management Co. Ltd. opened in the emirate in the past year, bringing to three the number of hedge-fund firms in the Dubai International Financial Centre, according to Dechert LLP, a law firm that helped establish both companies in the sheikhdom.

“If you want to run a boutique model, the best way is to be located in a centrally positioned hub like Dubai and use it as a nexus to travel extensively and frequently to your target markets,” Zuaiter, 46, said in an interview in his office, close to celebrity chef Marco Pierre White’s Wheeler’s of St James’s restaurant.

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For Dubai to rival London as a finance and hedge-fund capital, it must overcome concerns about political instability in the region and 50 degree Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatures that drive residents to seek refuge in Geneva and other European cities during the summer. Still, zero tax, office rents one-third the price of London’s West End and an airport that connects with 90 percent of frontier markets make it attractive to startups, Zuaiter said.

It was a good day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts winning 19bp, FixedResets up 13bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 8bp. Volatility was reasonable, highlighted by FixedReset winners. Volume was low.

Fitch is urging government micromanagement of housing:

Canadian home prices remain overvalued relative to historical macroeconomic fundamental drivers, Fitch Ratings says. Despite government efforts to moderate growth, home prices rose 7.1% in May (on a year-over-year basis) according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. In addition, both property sales and building permits for residential construction have picked up in recent months. Home prices also continue to be supported by historically low interest rates and a lack of supply in the major metropolitan areas; these factors have propped up affordability and drive demand. According to Fitch’s sustainable home price model, which measures home prices relative to long-term fundamentals, Canadian home prices remain approximately 20% overvalued in real terms.
We believe high household debt relative to disposable income has made the market more susceptible to market stresses like unemployment or interest rate increases. The ratio reached a high of 164.1% in third-quarter 2013 before declining slightly in the following two quarters. Fitch projects unemployment will likely remain in its current 7% range. But low interest rates are unlikely to fall further. Rising interest rates could pressure the market more than others given high borrower leverage and the short-term structure of Canadian mortgages.

Fitch believes the Canadian government has taken several proactive steps in recent years to mitigate some of the risks to the housing market. The underwriting guidelines for loans insured by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) have been tightened. CMHC has also pulled back on the amount of low-ratio portfolio insurance offered to lenders and limited securitization of insured mortgages to CMHC-administered programs. Furthermore, The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions has issued a guideline for prudent bank underwriting that must be adhered to for bank originations as well as those purchased from nonbank lenders. However, the long-term impacts remain unclear, and policy makers may be required to take additional steps over the short term to engineer a soft landing.

Sadly, there is nothing in today’s Ontario budget about buying us all new houses. They missed that one:

Most of the budget, however, lays out long-term plans for new spending.

It provides for $29-billion in new funds for transit, roads and bridges over the next decade, plus tens of billions more for other capital costs, including schools. The budget puts more than a billion dollars into various social programs, with raises for personal support workers and more funds for programs for people with developmental disabilities.

A new $2.5-billion fund for businesses is meant to help lure corporations to the province and encourage existing operations to expand.

The plan also allocates a billion for a new road or rail link to the Ring of Fire, a Northern Ontario mineral deposit that the government estimates will yield $60-billion worth of economic activity.

The document further introduces the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan, a pension system for people who do not already have one through their employer, that aims to double the benefits of the Canada Pension Plan for retirees.

There have been an interesting couple of articles lately on US employment trends. The first approves of extreme pickiness when hiring:

Since the recession, many employers halted widely distributed cost-of-living raises. Instead, they’re giving big bonuses and salary boosts to a select few. The average pay raise might be 2 percent, but the extra cash is shared among a small group of employees who have leverage, says Thomas Gimbel, chief executive officer of Chicago-based staffing company LaSalle Network. For them, he says, “Things are better than they’ve ever been.”

These wily pay strategies may also explain why there are so many open jobs. According to data released July 8, there were 4.6 million job openings in the U.S. in May, up from 3.9 million a year before. For key positions, companies are letting job openings stay open until they find exactly the right person, Gimbel says. In the meantime, existing employees must work harder to fill the gap. Then, for the perfect job candidate, they’ll pay up, he says. For example, a job listed for a $125,000 salary might be vacant for a year but then filled by someone who demands — and receives — $140,000.

The second one blames it on algorithms (beloved of Human Resources departments):

Expanding use of technology that uses ultra-specific criteria to screen and winnow candidates may be perpetuating one of the most unusual features of the slow rebound in the U.S. labor market: Despite a steady increase in openings since the recession ended in 2009, these positions are being matched with job seekers less efficiently than in the past. For each 100,000 new openings, for example, companies have hired about 48,000 people, compared with about 54,000 following the 2001 recession.

Software provided by Taleo, a unit of Oracle Corp. (ORCL), allows recruiters to conduct “precision matching” through a “profile-based recruiting system” that uses “advanced search and artificial intelligence to find and short list top talent,” according to a brochure on Oracle’s website.

For workers and job-seekers with exactly the right skills industries need today, the software programs can be a boon, filling their e-mail with notes from recruiters, talent scouts said. There’s also a benefit for companies in lower talent-acquisition and training costs.

There are also disadvantages for other job prospects: A candidate with some, but not all, of the required attributes may be eliminated or moved down the list. This may be one reason why people out of work for 27 weeks or more still represent about a third of the total unemployed, compared with an average of 19 percent between 2004 and 2007. The share is down from about 37 percent in June 2013.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and I would be loathe to pontificate about the evils of HR algorithms. But I will bet a nickel that over the long run, it is more costly for a company to be too lean than it is for it to be slightly over-staffed, with guys who are familiar with InventoryMaster 8.0, but – critically – unfamiliar with InventoryMaster 9.1.

Housing pundit Will Dunning, who I featured in the post How to Dissect a Housing Bubble, is in the news again, criticizing government micro-management of housing:

“If and when there is a correction in the condo market, the severity will have been aggravated by the actions of the federal government, which elected to depress demand at a time when demand was already beginning to weaken organically and a wave of supply has been developing,” Mr. Dunning writes in a new research note.
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He sketched out a scenario in which Toronto’s condo prices would fall by about 10 per cent, as a result of rising supply and falling demand.

“I believe that the federal mortgage insurance policy changes of the past few years will continue to weigh on demand, for both owner-occupants and investors,” Mr. Dunning writes.

His 10-per-cent-price-correction scenario also assumes that job creation does not bounce back to a healthier rate in Canada’s most populous city, and that interest rates remain constant.

“The timing of this process is highly uncertain – it probably won’t start for at least a half-year, and if there are further delays in (condo construction) completions, it could be a long way off,” he writes.

But micro-management is all the rage:

Banks shouldn’t count on a fresh round of European Central Bank cash to trade sovereign debt and reap big profits, Mario Draghi said.

“The convenience to use the ECB cheap money to buy government bonds is much less” than in a previous funding round which started in 2011, the ECB president said in testimony to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France yesterday. “The general situation is such that these carry trades are going to be much less profitable.”

As spreads on government debt from Spain to Italy over similar German securities have fallen to record lows, a carry trade that was lucrative two years ago may now yield less, Draghi said. In a liquidity drive that pins cash to banks’ performance in extending loans to the economy, the Frankfurt-based ECB could extend as much as 1 trillion euros ($1.36 trillion) in its so-called TLTRO program starting in September.

A condition of that program is that banks have to meet a benchmark on lending to businesses and households, excluding mortgages, or else hand back the money in 2016.

“If banks don’t lend to the non-financial private sector, they’ll have to repay,” Draghi said.

It was a good day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts winning 13bp, FixedResets up 9bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 8bp. Volatility looks pretty good at first – until you realize it’s half Floaters, which always bounce around a lot. Still, the Performance Highlights table is comprised exclusively of winners! Volume was low.

Tammy Schirle of Wilfrid Laurier writes a good piece titled Six questions Ontario must answer before it starts a pension plan (although the headline writer confused ‘exhortations’ with ‘questions’):

• 1. Be clear about the market failures you are trying to address.
• 2. Be precise about the policy target.
• 3. Be clear about any redistribution that will occur.
• 4. Notice that low-income families won’t benefit from a simple expansion of benefits
• 5. How are you going to deal with interprovincial migration and interprovincial employment arrangements?
• 6. Enhancing the CPP remains the Ontario government’s preferred solution.

It was mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts gaining 1bp, FixedResets off 7bp and DeemedRetractibles up 2bp. Volatility was minimal. Volume was extremely low.

And now it’s time to start work on the July PrefLetter!

Looks like Canadian shadow banking is picking up:

Canada’s banks developed their commercial banking arms over decades by lending to companies that typically generate annual revenue of $50-million or less, nurturing scores of client relationships. Since the financial crisis, however, private equity firms have been scooping up smaller companies, shaking up their historical banking relationships.
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Anatol von Hahn, Bank of Nova Scotia’s head of personal and commercial banking, said he would be “be very surprised if we don’t have double, triple” the number of small Canadian companies that are owned by private equity firms twenty years from now. Because they are flush with cash that they simply can’t sit on, private equity firms are often willing to pay big multiples to buy small businesses. “They’re playing a huge role,” he said.
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To adapt to the changing dynamics, Scotiabank has gone so far as to invest in certain private equity funds in order to get access to the companies they acquire, according to Mr. von Hahn, allowing the bank to pitch itself as a potential banking partner.

The trend isn’t playing out in Canada alone. U.S. firms are looking for mid-market acquisitions north of the border. In May, New Jersey-based private equity player Swander Pace Capital acquired Montreal’s Recochem, marking its 10th acquisition north of the border in the past decade. More acquisitions could come because the firm recently raised a brand new $350-million fund.

Could we be heading towards European banking crisis redux?

Shares in Banco Espírito Santo SA … were suspended from trading Thursday after falling an additional 17%. Shares of the lender’s controlling shareholder, Espírito Santo Financial Group SA, were also suspended because, it said, of “ongoing material difficulties” at its parent company, Espírito Santo International. “ESFG is currently assessing the financial impact of its exposure to ESI.”

A spokesman for Espírito Santo International declined to comment.

This week’s downward spiral has knocked 32% off the bank’s market value and has dragged down Portugal’s main stock index with it.

On Thursday, the turmoil spread elsewhere in Southern Europe, illustrating how investors remain nervous about the fragility of the continent’s financial system. In Spain, a bank and a construction company each called off planned bond sales. In Italy, a drug company pulled its stock offering. In Greece, a government-bond sale came in smaller than expected. And stock markets across the continent fell, along with the euro.
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It has been more than a year since fears about the health of a European bank rattled markets. Lately, after years of crisis, investors, bankers and regulators have been growing more confident about the stability of the continent’s financial system. Regulators hoped the banking industry’s improving health would be on display in coming months as they conduct so-called stress tests on more than 120 large banks.

Instead, Espírito Santo’s rapid descent, and the collateral damage in other European markets, suggests that conditions remain precarious.

Critics of Espírito Santo’s complex corporate structure have worried for years about the linkages among companies within the conglomerate. Among the concerns: whether the group’s nonfinancial companies—including a hotel chain and a hospital operator—were using the bank and its customers to raise funds.

Here in Ontario, our wise masters are protecting us from lower prices:

Ontario’s governing Liberals say they want to remove barriers to interprovincial trade, but suggest they’re reluctant to lift some restrictions that give Ontario companies an advantage.

Finance Minister Charles Sousa says there are a number of sectors within Ontario’s economy that are strong because they’re protected.

Sousa says he’s open to talks on how to grow the economy, but he doesn’t want to jeopardize the livelihood of Ontario companies.
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Sousa’s comments come after the leaders of three western provinces called for the removal of trade barriers to reduce the cost of doing business and help provincial economies grow.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Sousa did not explain why strong companies need protection.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts down 4bp, FixedResets gaining 14bp and DeemedRetractibles off 3bp. Volatility was average, but uniformly positive. Volume was below average overall, and concentrated in a handful of issues.

The National Securities Regulator has just gotten a little more national:

Two more provinces have agreed to join a voluntary national securities regulator expected to begin operations in the fall of 2015, bringing the total number on board to four and giving the upcoming capital markets watchdog a more pan-Canadian scope.

Sources say Saskatchewan and New Brunswick will sign on to the Cooperative Capital Markets Regulator Wednesday in a ceremony in Ottawa with federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver, embracing a plan backed by Ontario and British Columbia last September.

Marketwatch has a nice chart on market trends:

This chart shows how much money is flooding into investment vehicles — index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds — that track stock indexes. These two types of funds have grabbed about 24% of the U.S. mutual fund and ETF market, down from less than 5% in 1998, according to Deutsche Bank data.

Big full-service brokerages, “which control 50% of all invested household wealth in America, have successfully pushed the majority of their advisors’ practices toward more hands-off investing approaches,” said Josh Brown of The Reformed Broker in a recent blog post, referring to charging a flat percentage fee on assets, rather than commissions. “At the same time, do-it-yourselfers have made Vanguard, State Street and BlackRock’s iShares three of the world’s largest asset managers — and they are primarily purveyors of passive indexing products.”

There were modest gains for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts winning 7bp, FixedResets gaining 1bp and DeemedRetractibles up 2bp. Volatility was minimal. Volume was average.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.17%, equivalent to 6.72% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield about 4.3%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) is now about 240bp, a slight (and perhaps spurious) narrowing from the 245bp reported July 2.

Banks engage in maturity transformation and this sometimes gets them in trouble. Many mutual funds and ETFs engage in liquidity transformation, and this is getting some people worried:

Junk-loan funds harbor a significant, structural risk that’s been masked by a three-year rally: Managers may struggle to raise enough cash to meet investor redemptions if too many try to get out at once.

While investors have plowed into the loan market by purchasing mutual-fund shares that trade daily, it typically takes more than two weeks for a money manager selling loans to get cash in exchange for the debt. The concern is that this discrepancy will make it difficult for fund investors to leave the $750 billion leveraged-loan market, where individuals have been playing a bigger role than ever.

“Should investor flows reverse, the mismatch in bank-loan funds could pose a material risk,” Moody’s Investors Service analysts led by Stephen Tu wrote in a July 7 report. “Methods to address sizable investor redemptions in bank loan funds are inadequate.”

In the US Regulation NMS is coming under attack:

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules for a national market system have come under scrutiny as lawmakers examine whether high-frequency traders have exploited changes introduced by regulators, exchanges and brokers. The SEC’s rules require all exchanges and brokers to connect to one another to ensure that investors receive the best available prices when they buy shares.

The Senate Banking Committee’s hearing today could intensify pressure on the SEC to change rules it enacted over the past decade. SEC Chair Mary Jo White has said the agency will examine whether its rules have pushed trading away from public markets in favor of private venues such as dark pools.

“The costs associated with maintaining access to each venue, retaining technologists and regulatory staff, and developing increasingly sophisticated risk controls are passed on to investors and result in unnecessary systemic risk,” exchange operator Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE) Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Sprecher told lawmakers.

Certainly, requirements that everybody connect everywhere are ridiculous; antithetical to the entire concept of competition. It will be quite enough if brokerages disclose the names of the exchanges to which they connect directly and those to which they are indirectly connected by virtue of jitney arrangements with other brokers.

It was an off day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts and DeemedRetractibles both off 2bp and FixedResets down 16bp. The Performance Highlights table is dominated by losing Enbridge issues (which saw yet another new issue announcement today) and winning Power Financial issues (which went ex-dividend). Volume was low.

For all the recent hope about the US – given its recent jobs number – the rest of the world isn’t doing all that well:

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde signaled a cut in the institution’s global growth forecasts, saying investment is still weak and that risks remain in the U.S. even as its rebound accelerates.

“The global economy is gathering speed, though the pace may be a bit less than we previously predicted because the growth potential is lower and investment” spending remains lackluster, Lagarde told the Cercle des Economistes conference in Aix-en-Provence, France.

The remarks underline the threats to global economic growth at a time when the U.S. Federal Reserve is trimming stimulus and the European Central Bank is fighting inflation that is less than half its targeted level. The IMF is preparing to update its economic forecasts this month after predicting April 8 that the global economy will expand 3.6 percent this year and 3.9 percent in 2015.

In the meantime, all the new rules are disrupting the repo market:

The Federal Reserve’s bond purchases combined with demand from banks to meet tightened regulatory requirements is making it harder for traders to easily borrow and lend certain desired securities in the $1.6 trillion-a-day market for repurchase agreements. That’s causing such trades to go uncompleted at some of the highest rates since the financial crisis.

Disruptions in so-called repos, which Wall Street’s biggest banks rely on for their day-to-day financing needs, are another unintended consequence of extraordinary central-bank policies that pulled the economy out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. They also belie the stability projected by bond yields at about record lows.
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Negative rates happen when certain Treasuries are in such high demand or short supply that lenders of cash are actually paying collateral providers interest so they can obtain the needed securities. Traders said that is a big reason why repo rates on desired Treasuries have recently gotten as low as negative 3 percent.

Now, more repo trades are going uncompleted, or failing, because it’s either too difficult or expensive for the borrower to obtain and deliver Treasuries. Such failures to deliver Treasuries have averaged $65.6 billion a week this year, reaching as much as $197.6 billion in the week ended June 18, Fed data show.

Uncompleted trades averaged $51.6 billion in 2013, and $28.8 billion in 2012, according to the Fed.
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“The effect of all the collateral issues we see now is an indication of not so much how things are, but how bad things will be when you really need liquidity,” said Jeffrey Snider, chief investment strategist at West Palm Beach, Florida-based Alhambra Investment Partners LLC, in a telephone interview June 30. “That’s when you get into potentially dire situations.”

The conditions for repo stress were on display last month. The 2.5 percent note due in May 2024 reached negative 3 percentage points in repo in the days preceding a June 11 Treasury auction of $21 billion in notes to finance government operations.

Repo rates have been most prone to go negative, a situation known as specials in the market, in the days preceding an auction as traders who previously sold the debt seek to buy the securities to cover those positions.

Those fascinated by the topic might want to read the New York Fed paper Key Mechanics of The U.S. Tri-Party Repo Market.

League Assets Corp. and its IGW REIT have given us what may well be a foretaste of the market’s next disaster – private equity:

League made a name for itself by telling investors that their money was safer within a private REIT because it wouldn’t be subject to fluctuations in the public markets. However, cracks started to show over the past few years, and major caution flags were raised in 2013 when League tried to restructure itself by going public. Some investors worried that tapping new, unknowing public investors for fresh funds was the only way League would be able to resolve its cash crunch. (The detailed story of League’s rise and fall was reported in Report on Business Magazine earlier this year.)

Since League filed for protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, PwC has tried to untangle the company’s complex structure and determine who would get paid what. Through this process, the firm concluded that the following were the main problems that led to League’s undoing:
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At the time of its CCAA filing, League hoped it would be able to restructure itself and continue operating. PwC disagreed. Instead, all of the buildings are being sold off, and only two have yet to be sold. While this process has generated funds to help pay back creditors and investors, it has only generated $235-million because League had to sell its properties in what has quickly become a weak commercial property market.

Norm Cham of the SEC had this to say about Private Equity recently:

There is no single methodology for determining the fair value of a security or other asset because fair value depends upon the facts and circumstances of each situation. As a general principle, however, the fair value of a security or other asset held by a fund would be the amount that the fund might reasonably expect to receive for the security or other asset upon its current sale. When determining the fair value of a security or other asset held by an alternative mutual fund, all indications of value that are available must be taken into account.[6] One key to effective valuation is the development of robust valuation policies and procedures. Issues that alternative mutual fund managers may consider addressing in their policies and procedures include: (1) the requirement that the fund monitor for circumstances that may necessitate the use of fair value prices, (2) the provision of a methodology by which a fund determines fair value, (3) the process for price overrides, (4) assurance that controls are in place to review, monitor and approve all overrides in a timely manner, and (5) the prompt notification to, and review and approval by, persons not directly involved in portfolio management to mitigate conflicts of interest.[7]

In other words … “tick the box”. And the blind led the blind into the abyss.

Japan has learned nothing from the western solar energy boondoggle:

The Japanese government’s subsidy program originally paid about triple the amount Germany extended for its solar industries.

Japan approved a cut in tariffs for solar power as a building boom meant the technology made up 97 percent of new renewable capacity since it offered incentives.

The tariff was reduced in April 2013 to 37.8 yen per kilowatt hour from 42 yen. Japan’s method of subsidy for the industry is similar to the program Germany, Spain and the U.K. implemented, offering an above-market rate for solar power.

Japan gave final approval in March for the 11 percent cut to 32 yen a kilowatt-hour for the 20 years from the fiscal year starting April and offered 36 yen for offshore wind, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said in a statement.

The recent Ontari-ari-ari-Owe election has brought with it the promise of a new fund that will provide citizens with extra pension income – provided, of course, that all the Ontario Bonds this fund will buy doesn’t go bust! The US Treasury has other ideas:

Retirees with 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts will have more flexibility to purchase annuities that don’t start paying out until age 80 or 85, under final rules from the U.S. Treasury Department.

The rules announced today provide a new way for retirees to limit the drawdowns of their account balances that are now required starting after age 70 1/2. Instead, under the rules, they could use as much as 25 percent of their account balances up to $125,000 to purchase deferred annuities.
…
The Treasury Department’s final rules give the government’s blessing to the concept of longevity insurance, which hasn’t taken hold in the market, in part because of the required distribution rules and because of relatively high fees that deter potential purchasers.
…
In 2013, deferred income annuities were a $2.2 billion market, less than 1 percent of all annuity sales, according to the Limra Secure Retirement Institute. Deferred income annuity sales have more than doubled for each of the past two years.

A man who purchases a deferred annuity at age 60 for $50,000 can receive $17,614 in annual income for life starting at age 80, according to New York Life.

And that’s with today’s rates!

There was little overall movement in the Canadian preferred share market today, with PerpetualDiscounts and FixedResets both up 2bp and DeemedRetractibles flat. Volatility was minimal. Volume was average.

Nothing happened today.

The Canadian preferred share market pulled back today, with PerpetualDiscounts losing 10bp, FixedResets off 2bp and DeemedRetractibles down 4bp. Floaters did quite well, but apart from them there was little volatility. Volume was pathetic.

Moody’s has assigned a negative outlook to Ontario:

Moody’s Investors Service has today changed the outlook on the Province of Ontario’s debt and issuer ratings to negative from stable, and at the same time affirmed the Aa2 ratings. This affects approximately CAD 250 billion in debt securities. Moody’s P-1 rating on Ontario’s commercial paper program remains unchanged.

The change in the outlook reflects Moody’s assessment of risks surrounding the province’s ability to meet its medium term fiscal targets. After several years of weak to moderate economic growth, and higher than previously anticipated deficits projected for the next two years, the province is facing a greater challenge to return to balanced outcomes than previously anticipated. Although the province has exceeded fiscal targets in recent years, consolidated deficits have shown little change over the period 2011/12-2013/14, averaging -9.9% of revenues. The required revenue growth, in an environment of continued slower than average economic growth, and necessary operating expense control to achieve fiscal targets will require a considerable shift from recent trends. The province also continues to face large, ongoing capital expenditures which also places pressure on the province’s fiscal position.
…
Ontario’s rating could be downgraded if the province fails to provide clear signals of its ability and willingness to implement the required measures to redress the current fiscal pressures. Furthermore, if medium-term debt affordability were to deteriorate due to higher-than-expected increases in debt levels or a significant rise in interest rates, the province’s fiscal flexibility would be reduced, exerting downward pressure on the rating.

The outlook could return to stable if the province demonstrates through concrete measures that it will be able to achieve the very constrained expenditure growth rates and expected revenue growth over the term of its fiscal plan.

Oh well. I’m sure the new Ontario Retirement Pension Plan will be a big investor in Ontario bonds.

The political response is standard:

But top cabinet ministers said they were unconcerned about the note from Moody’s.

“The bankers aren’t freaking here,” Finance Minister Charles Sousa said as he headed into a cabinet meeting at Queen’s Park Thursday. “We have controlled our spending, we have taken the necessary steps and we’re not done just yet. We’re still finding more savings in the system.”

Deputy Premier Deb Matthews , who was appointed President of the Treasury Board last week with the task of balancing the budget in three years, brushed off Moody’s warning and said another credit downgrade would not be particularly expensive.

Comrade Peace Prize has taken a firm stand against merit pay:

President Barack Obama criticized the bonus-driven culture of financial trading desks at Wall Street banks as a risk to the stability of the financial system.

Obama said in an interview to be aired tomorrow on American Public Media’s Marketplace radio program that an “unfinished piece of business” is to address banks that “take big risks because the profit incentive and the bonus incentive is there for them.”

Obama said banks need to change “how they work internally” to alter incentives for traders.

“Right now, if you are in one of the big banks, the profit center is the trading desk, and you can generate a huge amount of bonuses by making some big bets,” Obama said. In the event of “a really bad bet,” he added, “you might end up leaving the shop, but in the meantime everybody else is left holding the bag.”

I’m not sure how he reconciles all that with the Volcker Rule, or with the concept of management risk controls, but never mind.

There was a superb US jobs number:

Employers who added 288,000 jobs in June showed they might be taking a more serious look at resumes from the long-term unemployed, who last month accounted for the smallest proportion of U.S. jobless ranks in five years.

Those out of work 27 weeks or longer made up 32.8 percent of unemployed Americans as the overall unemployment rate dropped to an almost six-year low of 6.1 percent, according to Labor Department data released this morning in Washington.
…
The share of long-term unemployed remains more than twice the historical average of 15.1 percent in data going back to 1948. Other measures of labor market health, including underemployment and participation rates, haven’t returned to pre-recession levels, according to a dashboard of indicators that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has said she monitors to judge the economic outlook.

About half of the drop in unemployment in the past year is due to the decline among the long-term jobless.

I love it when guys pull a fast one:

A man exploited the perks of business -class travel to feast for free 35 times in a year at Deutsche Lufthansa AG (LHA)’s Munich airport lounge — without ever taking off.

The man used the flexibility of the one-way fare to Zurich to repeatedly reschedule his travel plans after gaining access to food and drink, Munich district court said in a statement. Lufthansa canceled the ticket after more than a year and refunded the price, only for the man to purchase a replacement.

The court ruled that lounge services are provided on the assumption that travelers will seek to fly, and ordered the man to pay Lufthansa 1,980 euros ($2,705), equal to about 55 euros per visit or more than twice the cost of the 744.46-euro ticket. Lufthansa pursued a prosecution only after the man bought the second ticket with the intention of resuming his foraging raids.

Clearly, the Germans have no sense of humour.

And the Mexicans are getting more auto investment – for good reasons and bad:

Mexico has won new auto investments worth $2.4-billion (U.S.) in one week, just $800-million less than the $3.2-billion invested by auto makers in Canada since 2010.

BMW AG said Thursday it will spend $1-billion to build a new plant in Mexico, on the heels of an announcement last week by Daimler AG and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. that they will invest $1.4-billion to build luxury cars.
…
In addition to significantly lower labour costs than both Canada and the United States, Mexico is also an export powerhouse, boasting free-trade agreements with more than 40 countries and ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that operate year-round.

“The large number of international free trade agreements – within the NAFTA area, with the European Union and the MERCOSUR member states, for example – was a decisive factor in the choice of location,” BMW said in a statement announcing the investment.

Mexico’s foreign investment agency, ProMexico, is aggressively courting auto investments and offers generous incentives, industry sources have said.
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The federal and Ontario governments offer incentives to auto makers to locate in Canada. But a report issued last year by the Canadian Automotive Partnership Council, an industry-union group set up to advise the governments on the auto sector, complained about the way the Canadian funds are administered.

“In Mexico, for example, rarely will one see repayable contributions or restrictive covenants that can claw back co-investment programs,” the report said. “Through ProMexico, companies can secure cash grants with no strings attached.”

It was another positive day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts gaining 6bp, FixedResets winning 17bp and DeemedRetractibles up 10bp. Volatility was minimal. Volume was low.