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Value Versus Growth
by Bill Gross,
Value — defined by stocks with a low book-to-market ratio — handily beat growth by a minimum of 4% on average annually over the period 1927-2014, although surprisingly with a higher standard deviation. In today’s world, think Verizon versus the Magnificent Seven decades forward.
Credit Supernova! (Redux)
by Bill Gross,
Much like the universe, which began with a big bang nearly 14 billion years ago, but is expanding so rapidly that scientists predict it will all end in a “big freeze” trillions of years from now, our current monetary system seems to require perpetual expansion to maintain its existence.
August: Investment Outlook
by Bill Gross,
I’m finding that expressing an opinion or telling a joke in public company these days is most dangerous to one’s reputation, not that my past dustup with a Laguna Beach neighbor over Gilligan’s Island or planting a stink bomb going out the door in my ex-wife’s toilet haven’t sealed the deal for me already.
Bill Gross July 2017 Investment Outlook: Curveball
“Kill the Umpire”, the fan cried to open the 1996 baseball season in Cincinnati, and 7 pitches later, the man behind the plate, John McSherry, was dead, all 320 pounds of him screaming for more oxygen to feed his struggling heart. He’d been killed by his poor health, by a billion molecules of sink-clogging cholesterol that fed on his coronary artery and sucked up his life’s blood like a vampire at midnight.
Investment Outlook: How to Make Money
Because of the secular headwinds facing global economies, currently labeled as the “New Normal” or “Secular Stagnation”, investors have resorted to “making money with money” as opposed to old-fashioned capitalism when money and profits were made with capital investment in the real economy.
Brainteasers
A recent Internet blog posed the predicament of many medium/long-term relationships: At some point couples run out of historical stories or even topical things to say. After all, there are only so many Trump tweets you can talk about, and you've long since agreed to disagree about the meaning of life.
February 2017 Investment Outlook: "Happiness Runs"
I think a lot about happiness - what makes a person happy, whether or not happiness should even be a life's priority - things like that. A good high school friend stunned me at the early age of 17 by suggesting we should not necessarily try to be happy. Sacrifice, service, devotion to a cause were higher orders, he felt, although presumably, since those were choices, their pursuit could secondarily lead to happiness.
Increasingly Addled
Long ago and far away in the adolescent cauldron known as Los Altos High School,
I attended a senior U.S. history class with a man-child named Delos Roman. He was
appropriately christened it seems, because his body resembled that of Zeus, the God
of Thunder, and at 6’4”/230 pounds, he rumbled down the football sidelines like a
Mack truck on a downhill mountain road.
It's a Xanax World
The Romans gave their Plebian citizens a day at the Coliseum, and the French
royalty gave the Bourgeoisie a piece of figurative “cake”, so it may be true to form
that in the still prosperous developed economies of 2016, we provide Fantasy
Sports, cellphone game apps, sexting, and fast food to appease the masses.
Keep them occupied and distracted at all costs before they recognize that half of
the U.S. population doesn’t go to work in the morning and that their real wages
after conservatively calculated inflation have barely budged since the mid 1980’s.
Breaking News!
Tired of reading about the Kardashians? Sick of
egocentric politicians? Disgusted with endless war in
the Middle East? Getting bored reading these monthly
Outlooks? (not that bored or you wouldn’t be reading
this). Here’s some “breaking news” that I find really
interesting and I hope you will too. It’s a recent summary
of some things that scientists have discovered over the
last few decades. Prepare to be amazed.
It’s the Zero Bound Yield Curve, Stupid!
I have been increasingly suspicious since late 2011 that Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-1579) may be the modern John Maynard Keynes. I said as much in a Financial Times op-ed when I wrote in December of that year, that the famous “Gresham’s Law” needs a corollary. Not only does “bad money drive out good money” but “cheap money” may do harm as well. Just as Newtonian physics breaks down, and Einsteinian theories prevail at the speed of light, so too might easy money, which has invariably led to stronger economic recoveries, now fail to stimulate growth close to the zero bound.
Saved by Zero?
So the Fed has chosen to hold off on their goal of normalizing interest rates and the ECB has countered with the threat of extending their scheduled QE with more checks and more negative interest rates and the investment community wonders how long can this keep goin’ on. For a long time I suppose, as evidenced by history at least.
Say A Little Prayer
I’m not what you would call a “prayerful” type of guy. Even at 30,000 feet, when the air gets rough, I never invoke the “God” word, settling instead for promising myself that if I ever get back to terra firma, I will never fly again, which I promptly forget days or even hours later. It’s not that I’m a non-believer in prayer’s ultimate destination, but more of a cynical take on why the Lord would hand out party favors to everyone that asked, or to those that asked most intently.
It Never Rains in California
Ted Cruz recently suggested praying for rain in Texas, and apparently someone did a few weeks ago, producing a deluge resembling a modern day Noah’s Ark of sorts. California’s Governor Brown on the other hand, has taken a more secular approach. He believes that Mammon, not God, bears responsibility for the Golden State’s record drought and that I, we, all of us simple folk should cut back water usage by a minimum of 25%.
Mr. Bleu
“It’s a spectacle of excess at the highest level”, quoted an art consultant to the N.Y. Times. Perhaps it was. Christie’s, even not counting its archrival Sotheby’s, had bagged $1 billion in sales during its May auction week – rivaling even the frenzied bidding for Manhattan high rise condos. As with high flying stocks, the logic was that the money had to go somewhere and why not a wall instead of a monthly portfolio statement.
A Sense of an Ending
Having turned the corner on my 70th year, like prize winning author Julian Barnes, I have a sense of an ending. Death frightens me and causes what Barnes calls great unrest, but for me it is not death but the dying that does so. After all, we each fade into unconsciousness every night, do we not?
Time (and Money) in a Cellphone
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
Our modern age is becoming more virtual than physical, which I find increasingly depressing if only because Ive failed to keep pace. I dont even own a cellphone. Still, it doesnt take a Boomer to observe that the reality outside as opposed to inside a computer or a cellphone should be the preferred experience. Scientists claim we are all just bits of information with billions of 1s and 0s, glued together to form a beating heart. Even so, Im sticking with live chirping as opposed to Angry Birds for now. Virtual reality seems just a tad UNreal to me.
Bob
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
PIMCO recommends overweighting credit and to a lesser extent volatility and curve. Underweight duration. Although credit spreads are tight, they are not as compressed as interest rates, which are now in the process of normalization. While PIMCO agrees with Janet Yellen that such normalization will be a long time coming (the 12th of Never?), probabilities suggest that as the Fed completes its Taper, the 5?30 year bonds that it has been buying will have to be sold at higher yields to entice the private sector back in.
The Tipping Point
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
Ive spun a few yarns in recent years about my days as a naval officer; not, thank goodness, tales told by dead men, but certainly echoes from the depths of Davy Jones Locker. A few years ago I wrote about the time that our ship (on my watch) was almost cut in half by an auto-piloted tanker at midnight, but never have I divulged the day that the USS Diachenko came within one degree of heeling over during a typhoon in the South China Sea. Engage emergency ballast, the Captain roared at yours truly the one and only chief engineer.
Which Way for Bonds? Mapping a Path Forward
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
In 1980, the Federal Reserve, led by Paul Volcker, tightened the quantitative noose to tame double-digit inflation, fueling an unprecedented tailwind for bond prices. Thirty years later we find ourselves at the other extreme, as central banks print money in the trillions of dollars to stimulate economic growth, and inflation is abnormally low. While we are not likely to see a repeat of that type of bull market any time soon, we also do not believe we are at the beginning of a bear market for bonds.
Wounded Heart
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
Joseph Schumpeter, the originator of the phrase creative destruction, authored a less well-known corollary at some point in the 1930s. Profit, he wrote, is temporary by nature: It will vanish in the subsequent process of competition and adaptation. And so it has, certainly at the micro level for which his remark was obviously intended. Once proud, seemingly indestructible capitalistic giants have seen their profits fall short of everlasting and exhibited a far more ephemeral character.
There Will Be Haircuts
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
It has been the objective of the Fed over the past few years to make even more innovative forms of money by supporting stock and bond prices at cost on an ever ascending scale, thereby assuring holders via a Bernanke put that they might just as well own stocks as the cash in their purses. Gosh, a decade or so ago a house almost became a money substitute. MEW or mortgage equity withdrawal could be liquefied instantaneously based on a never go down housing market. You could equitize your home and go sailing off into the sunset on a new 28-foot skiff on any day but S
A Man in the Mirror
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
Am I a great investor? No, not yet. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingways Jake in The Sun Also Rises, wouldnt it be pretty to think so? But the thinking so and the reality are often miles apart. When looking in the mirror, the average human sees a six-plus or a seven reflection on a scale of one to ten. The big nose or weak chin is masked by brighter eyes or near picture perfect teeth. And when the public is consulted, the vocal compliments as opposed to the near silent/ whispered critiques are taken as a supermajority vote for good looks.
Rational Temperance
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
While the market was indeed moving in the direction of "dot-com" fever three to four years later, the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the time was a relatively anorexic 6,000, and the trailing P/E ratio was only 12x. For a central bank that was then more concerned about economic growth and inflation as opposed to stock prices, risk spreads, and artificially suppressed interest rates, the Chairman's query made global headlines, became a book title for Professor Robert Shiller and a strategic beacon for portfolio managers thereafter.
Credit Supernova!
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
They say that time is money. What they don't say is that money may be running out of time. There may be a natural evolution to our fractionally reserved credit system which characterizes modern global finance. Much like the universe, which began with a big bang nearly 14 billion years ago, but is expanding so rapidly that scientists predict it will all end in a "big freeze" trillions of years from now, our current monetary system seems to require perpetual expansion to maintain its existence.
Money for Nothin' Writing Checks for Free
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
It was Milton Friedman, not Ben Bernanke, who first made reference to dropping money from helicopters in order to prevent deflation. Bernanke's now famous "helicopter speech" in 2002, however, was no less enthusiastically supportive of the concept. In it, he boldly previewed the almost unimaginable policy solutions that would follow the black swan financial meltdown in 2008.
Strawberry Fields Forever?
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
As John Lennon forewarned, it is getting harder to be someone, and harder to maintain the economic growth that investors have become accustomed to. The New Normal, like Strawberry Fields will take you down and lower your expectation of future asset returns. It may not last forever but it will be with us for a long, long time.
Time To Vote!
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
So I pulled out my magic lamp that for some reason works only every October 22nd, and rubbed until the Genie appeared in his red and white checkered cloak with a 10-inch diameter Flavor Flav clock hanging ceremoniously around his neck. Being a rather forward, although not disrespectful Genie, he immediately said, "Mr. G, instead of the yield on the 10-year Treasury, perhaps this year you should wish to know who is going to win the Presidential election?"
Damages
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
How could the U.S. not be the first destination of global capital in search of safe (although historically low) prospective returns? Studies by the CBO, IMF and BIS (when averaged) suggest that we need to cut spending or raise taxes by 11% of GDP and rather quickly over the next five to 10 years. Unless we begin to close this gap, then the inevitable result will be that our debt/GDP ratio will continue to rise, the Fed would print money to pay for the deficiency, inflation would follow, and the dollar would inevitably decline.
The Lending Lindy
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
Our entire finance-based monetary system led by banks but typified by insurance companies, investment management firms and hedge funds as well is based on an acceptable level of carry and the expectation of earning it. In a New Normal economy where lenders dance to the Blue Danube instead of the Lindy, how should we move our own feet? Carefully, I suppose, and with recognition that historic returns are just that historic.
What's In A Name?
by Bill Gross of PIMCO,
Not only banks and insurance companies but sovereign nations as well cannot all be counted on to guarantee a return of principal, let alone a return on investment. An authentic debt crisis which the world is now experiencing can only be ultimately cured in two ways: 1) default on it, or 2) print more money in order to inflate it away. There are very few clean dirty shirts in this world. Timing in investment markets is critical and at the moment the U.S. is considered to be the cleanest.
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