Six Reasons Inflation is So High

Several clients thanked us for the placidity of their portfolios in otherwise turbulent times and told us we should do a celebratory dance. I’d be lying if I told you that seeing our portfolio remain relatively stable while many “greater fools” stocks decline as much as 80% doesn’t bring us a certain satisfaction.

But I am not doing a celebratory dance, for several reasons:

First, there are real people with shattered hopes and dreams on the losing side of what I call the dotcom 2.0 burst bubble. I sincerely feel bad for them.

Second, the last thing I want to do is to let our relative success go to our head or suggest to us that I have got all of this figured out. I don’t want my teammates at IMA to become less vigilant and lose what one of our IMA clients, who has become a personal friend over the years, calls “Russian Jewish paranoia.” He tells me that he sleeps well at night because his money is run by a “paranoid Russian Jew.” Okay, there is only one “paranoid Russian Jew” on our investment team – yours truly. But this healthy dose of paranoia – looking not just at what is in front of us but thinking about risks lurking around the corner – has deeply embedded itself into IMA’s DNA.

As you’ll see later in the letter, the list of things to be worried (paranoid) about is only growing. In fact, when you are abuzz with feelings of either success or failure is when you want to tighten your process to make sure emotions (and over- or under-confidence) don’t mess with your head and decision making. I am constantly double, triple checking every stock I own to make sure our thesis on each is intact.

And third, the “greater fools” wreckage is likely going to turn a lot of ex-darlings, which investors could not get enough at much higher prices, radioactive. These stocks will have the stink of an un-investable asset class, at least for a while. Just as people confused great companies with great stocks on the way up, they’ll mistake bombed-out stocks for bad companies.

To be fair, some of the stocks that are crashing to mother earth today are bad businesses, while some are mediocre, and some are excellent. A massive change in sentiment usually waters down the distinctions between them and they all are treated equally as radioactive waste. Our job is to carefully go through the wreckage and identify great businesses that are trading at great prices (with a significant margin of safety). This recent pile-up has given us a larger universe of stocks to study – I welcome the opportunity.

Inflation is everywhere

The war in Ukraine will pour more gasoline on the already raging inflationary fire, threatening to send the global economy into stagflation. Stagflation is a slowdown of economic activity caused by inflation.

Before I go into the messy entrails of stagflation, let’s review what is going on in the US and global economies. I discussed some causes of inflation in previous letters, therefore let’s focus on the new culprits.

Oil

First, higher commodity prices. Even before the pandemic, the supply of oil and gas was getting constrained by a decline in investment caused by low oil and natural gas prices and petrocarbons falling out of favor with the ESG cult. The pandemic caused a further falloff of investment in the sector. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the world to excommunicate the third largest producer of petrochemicals from modernity.

The oil market has slightly different dynamics from the natural gas market. Oil is a fungible commodity and is easily transported by tankers, and thus it can be (relatively) easily redirected from one customer to another. For instance, if China used to buy oil from Saudi Arabia and now buys oil from Russia, the oil that China stopped buying from Saudi Arabia can now be bought by Germany. That said, Russia produces heavy crude and the Saudis light crude, so refineries need to be reconfigured, and that takes months.

Sanctions on oil will only have an impact on the Russian economy if everyone stops buying Russian oil. If all countries embrace sanctions, then about 8 million barrels of daily oil exports will be removed from the market. That is a lot of oil, considering that the world consumes about 88 million barrels a day.

It is unclear if China and India, the largest and third largest importers of oil, will go on buying significant amounts of oil from Russia, as doing so risks damaging their relationships with the West. Neither country wants to be told what to do by the West. They have their own economic interests to consider, but their trade with the US and Europe is significantly greater than it is with Russia.

Both countries have been slowly distancing themselves from Russia. For example, the Chinese credit card network UnionPay has quietly cut off its relationship with Russia. Though Russia has an internal credit card network called Mir, since Russia was cut off from the Visa and Mastercard networks and now from UnionPay, Russians have no easy way to spend money when they travel outside of Russia.

This war was a horrible infomercial for Russian weapons, and there is a good chance India may decide to switch to Western weapons, which would bring it closer to the West.

In the short term, the supply of oil from Russia to the world market will likely shrink; it is just hard to tell by how much. The demand for Russian oil has clearly declined, as the (Urals) price is down 30% while global oil prices are making new highs.

Long-term, the oil-supply picture from Russia looks even worse. There was a good reason why Western companies participated in Russian oil projects. A great love for the West was not the motivator that drove Russia to share oil revenues with BP and Exxon. Western companies brought much-needed technical expertise to very challenging Russian oil and natural gas fields. With the West leaving Russia, long-term production of oil and gas is likely to decline, even if China and India continue buying Russian oil and gas.

Gas

Let’s turn to the natural gas market.

Call me Mr. Obvious, but I will say it anyway: natural gas is a gas and oil is a liquid. Shipping gasses is much trickier than shipping liquids. Natural gas can be transported two ways: by pipelines (the cheapest and most efficient way, but they take years to build) and by LNG ships. LNG stands for liquified natural gas – the gas is cooled to -260F and turned into a liquid. Western Europe, especially Germany, is heavily reliant on Russian gas, which today is transported to Europe through pipelines.

Side note: In the future, when you put your livelihood in the hands of well-meaning politicians (especially if you are a resident of California), just remind yourself that German politicians, in their fervor to go green, abandoned nuclear power, which produces zero CO2, switched to intermittent “green” wind and solar (and fell back on dirty coal) and tied their future to a shirtless Russian dictator. I discussed this topic before – you can read about it here.

Some smaller European countries are already abandoning Russian gas. Germany and Italy, the largest consumers of Russian gas, promise that they can delink themselves from Russia’s gas in less than two years. This trend will continue; it just won’t happen overnight (or in two years). Call me a skeptic, but I think it will take a long time for Europe to completely abandon Russian natural gas, as building LNG terminals takes years, and so does increasing natural gas production.

Oil and natural gas prices will likely stay at elevated levels or even go higher over the next few years, and the US production of natural gas and oil will likely have to go up substantially. This will benefit some of the companies in our portfolio, which I’ll discuss in part two of the letter.

Food

The second new source of inflation is food. It’s a significant concern for us. Russia and Ukraine produce about 15% of the world’s wheat supply. They account for about one third of global wheat exports (or about 7% of global wheat consumption). Russia has slapped a ban on wheat exports. Ukraine’s planting season was likely disrupted by the war. The global wheat supply may decline by as much as 7%. This sounds like a large number, but it is not outside the historical volatility caused by droughts and other natural disasters, which have historically driven up wheat prices by a few percent.

This is not what worries me.

I am concerned about the skyrocketing prices of nitrogen and potassium fertilizers since the beginning of the war. Russia and Belarus are the second and third largest exporters of potash used to make potassium fertilizer (Canada is the largest producer). Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. Natural gas prices are up a lot. High fertilizer prices will lead to significant increase in prices of all calories, from corn to avocados to meat.

Food inflation impacts poor countries and the poor in wealthy countries disproportionately. US consumers spend 8.6% of their disposable income on food (down from 17% in the 1960s). In poor countries this number is significantly higher. For instance, the average Ukrainian spends 38% of disposable income on food. Food prices have been going up, but I am afraid that we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

Interest rates

The third new source of inflation is higher interest rates, which make all financed goods more expensive, from washers and dryers to cars to houses. Over the last decade we got used to cheap, abundant credit. If inflation continues to stay at elevated levels, cheap credit will become a relic of the past. Mortgage rates have almost doubled from the lows of 2021 – 30-year mortgages are pushing 5.1% as of this writing. The median home price is $428,000 (up from about $330,000 before the pandemic). The interest increase from 2.7% to 5.1% will cost the average consumer $7,000 a year, or 12% of the total median income of $61,000. About a third of the country doesn’t own a home but rents. Rents increased 11.3% in 2021 and continue to rise in 2022.

Now, if you add the increase in energy prices (gasoline and heating), food inflation, and the higher cost of anything that has to be financed, you’ll see how the consumer is being squeezed from every direction. Government-massaged inflation numbers show a 7–9% increase in prices. These numbers are low, despite having set multi-decade records. A more realistic number is much higher, as is suggested by import and export inflation numbers, which are not adjusted by the government and are running 12–18%.

Supply chain problems

Another culprit responsible for higher inflation is supply chain issues. China is going through another partial shutdown of its economy. Putin made us forget about the coronavirus, but the coronavirus did not forget about us. China – the initial source of Covid-19 – has suffered among the lowest per capita numbers of infections and deaths from Covid. The downside of this is that China has very low herd immunity. And though China has locally made vaccines, they are not very effective, and China refuses to import Western vaccines.

Chairman Xi banked his reputation on a “zero Covid” policy. Today this policy is being sorely tested. China is shutting down cities that are the size of sizeable European countries to keep the virus from spreading. Since China makes a lot of the stuff we consume, they’ll make less of it. “Transitory” supply issues from China will persist and add to inflation.

Deglobalization

Finally, the War in Ukraine has accelerated deglobalization. Globalization was a great deflationary tsunami. The pandemic exposed the fragility of our vaunted just-in-time inventory and global supply system. The war in Ukraine reminded the West that the global trade system is built on the assumption that we don’t go to war with our trading partners. The war in Ukraine broke that assumption and accelerated the pace of selective deglobalization, which will lead to higher prices of everything in the long run.

This brings us to stagflation, which I will discuss in an upcoming article.

Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA is the CEO at IMA, an investment firm that designs all-terrain portfolios that survive the worst markets and thrive in good ones. (Get our company brochure here, or simply visit our website).

In a brief moment of senility, Forbes magazine called me “the new Benjamin Graham.”

I’ve written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. (I’m working on a third - you can read a chapter from it, titled “The 6 Commandments of Value Investing” here).

Read more articles by Vitaliy Katsenelson