Sleight of Hand
This week, we speculate as to what the FCA is really after in their Practitioner Survey. Â How closely do their actions follow their words, with the new Consumer Duty laws? And we also look at Huntâs budget and the likely forthcoming non-impact on stock markets.
FED UP FEEDBACK
Periodically member firms get quizzed on how we see the FCA; this time they promised a shorter form. Well, if thatâs shorter, Iâd hate to see the long one. Take a look here. Thirty-nine questions, but so many cover multiple topics, it feels more like a hundred.
It is typical of such surveys designed by marketing advisors: a few soft questions, how are you today type guff, a few âhave you stopped beating your wifeâ ones, just to check you are actually awake, then a lot of navel gazing on SICGO. They really despise it.
This is purportedly about promoting competition. Which actually makes the regulatorâs job harder â encouraging more firms and lowering the barriers to entry for new firms. The FCA does not like that idea much; so, note, it is a SECONDARY International Competitiveness and Growth OBJECTIVE, get the Secondary stress, minor, icing on the cake stuff. Objective, so just an aspiration, not real. Their minutes (above) even admit that.
Then we have more âare you happy questionsâ, then some tiresome back scratching ones, just how great are we at seminars? answering the phone? sending you flowers? You get the picture.
Then a few global ones, how good are we at promoting world peace and intergalactic harmony? By this stage you are probably wondering what this is, I am. And the idea creeps in that it is nothing to do with the poor regulated mugs, anyhow. So probably not much to do with the consumer either.
Meanwhile I see a landscape of poor consumer outcomes, vast sales driven peddlers of half-truths, a fair bit of market abuse, absurd barriers to entry, the insiders and regulators getting fat, the savers, investors and users of capital paying for it all.
NEW LAW OLD RULES
They also published âA new Consumer Duty Feedback to CP21/36 and final rulesâ more terribly exciting stuff, a mere 70 pages of it. They make much of the âRisk of Retrospectionâ, saying âwe were clear that the Duty would not have retrospective effect and would not apply to past actions by firmsâ.
OK, this is a key political input; the industry has had enough of new rules, looking back. So, I take it that we wonât see big attacks on UK listed finance firms this time?
Not so, you guessed it, the entire financial sector is suddenly seeing bigger provisions, because, it seems, of the new rules. It looks very much like the damaging hits on SJP Close, Lloyds, are exactly this, retrospective application of laws, an action so vociferously foresworn by the regulator.
And this helps competition how? Well not at all. But do remember it is a secondary aim and applies only to âcompetition in the interests of consumersâ so not real competition, but one where the mechanism (competition) and the outcome (interests of consumers) get muddled up.
So, for instance destroying UK financial services firms is fine if done âin the interests of consumerâ and what could be more in their âinterestsâ than getting money back on a contract they willingly (and legally) signed ten years ago?
And thatâs why choice and consumer outcomes are being lost in box ticking and adverts of fluffy kittens, sunsets on beaches and the like. Just look at the UK ISA advertisements, do they tell you anything? Beyond heavy hints at nirvana with no work.
HUNTâS LAST HURRAH
The budget? Well, it is so dull, you feel it is simply what the HMRC nerds wanted. More complexity, a few free hits (non doms), more CGT breaks for landlords, for the rentiers not the creators, less employee NI, but no change to employer NI, that actual tax on jobs remains as harsh as ever.
We are well into Q1 now, so I guess the intriguing thing is more this firm Treasury conviction, adopted by the OBR, that inflation will fall towards 2% in Q2. Given their prior errors, that is very bullish, and does not support base rates at 5.25%, frankly not even at 3.25%.
It is all circular, despite commentatorsâ child-like obsession with margins for error. If inflation stays high, tax raised stays higher, covering higher public sector spend. So low inflation is (oddly) a cautious model prediction.
The market does not believe it. Nor do we. Not quite chapeau consumption time, but I donât see 2% this year. I am not sure where this recession is, but not in any of the streets I walk down.
If interest rates are really about to fall off a cliff, the FTSE looks oddly stuck, miles behind the US indices, and sterling also looks curiously strong. If saving rates are about to be pummelled, the yield stocks that fill the FTSE will suddenly look very cheap. Which suggests the markets are not buying it, not yet.
A 500-point rally might even be plausible, if the OBR is right, but it is not, and talk of headroom is nonsense. This remains an expansionist fiscal mind set, but of quite limited duration, hence the market caution.
Elsewhere we are in âriding-the-tigerâ time: if you are onboard, how and when do you get off it?
Skipped - what will 2024 look like?
May I say we told you so? In "Skipping Along" before the summer break we called the end to rate rises, and by the November Fed meeting, we were well on board for a "rip your face off" rally. Feeling ripped? Anyone coming to the equity party in December, has just not been paying attention.
And our powerful MomentuM model had investors buying Japan and European Indices LAST December, so they have milked that entire rally. It also signaled buying back into the NASDAQ from May, arguably a bit late, but still very effective.
Jerome Powell said nothing new this week, and the New Year still looks bright for the beaten-up stocks, regions and sectors, as rates decline. I suspect prospects for the perennial winners to keep on winning are not too bad. Although economic growth will suffer (and so will earnings), but valuations still have some space to catch up amongst a lot of this year's losers, as discount rates keep swinging lower and bond yields dwindle.
A RED CHRISTMAS â Looking forward a year.
A year ahead, politics looks more interesting: so, what will the newly elected British House of Commons do next Christmas? What are the choices and likely outcomes?
The new Labour prime minister will care relatively little about political opponents, and quite a lot about holding party discipline.
Nor, we are told, will he seek early solutions to some of the more intractable constitutional problems (Second Chamber, Proportional Representation, Party Funding etc.), as based on his predecessor's experience, that just wastes precious time.
For all that, when it comes, his manifesto will (at last you may say) be festooned in clear deliverables, a plan to govern, at least for the next year. Â Â While Rachel Reeves is influential, the drive will be legislative, not economic. But as ever The Chancellor will have to then deliver the possible.
A DOLLOP OF BORROWING
So, more debt, extra tax, spending cuts are the options facing her, to fund that manifesto along with a cursory fig leaf for growth. The latter is needed (like the absurd Tory public spending targets) to get the Office for Budget Responsibility on side. Albeit responsibility is what you take, whereas the OBR offer simply a comptometer's sign off on specious forecasts.
For all that the Treasury thinks Gilt markets pay attention to the OBR, although I doubt it. So very early on, the rather too stringent self-imposed spending and funding restraints the Tories have adopted, will be quietly reconfigured. The rise again of a few PFI like schemes to keep stuff off the books is likely; Labour does not do fiscal hawks.
Falling interest rates and lower indexation provide small windfalls, and binning the 'irresponsible' Tory promises of tax cuts, won't hurt the numbers either. So yes, more debt, low tens of billions at least will be used.
A SPLASH OF TAX
What of tax? Can the pips be made to squeak. Yes, again, I am sure they will be, although not really on income tax, and I think for employed staff not on NI either. Labour has no love of the entrepreneur, who is too poor to hire lobbyists or to make donations. So, a bit more squeezed there off the self-employed and small business owners.
I expect a big hike in fuel tax, especially petrol and aviation fuel, under a green cloak, generating another ÂŁ10 billion. Consumption taxes remain rewarding: VAT rates, thresholds, and exemptions are all likely targets. And if they are inflationary, just adjust them away in your numbers. Nothing new â claiming them to be a 'one off' (of course).
UK property taxes are low in the South East, due to a long-standing failure to re-rate, so there is some scope there. With more housing coming, this will likely be punitive. But there are other enduring loopholes, that make little sense: REITs, Limited Liability Partnerships, a lot of EIS, VCT, Freeport stuff, albeit none of that is big ticket. I guess some simple populist tariffs may arrive as well. Labour is at heart protectionist.
All in all, I expect Labour to get enough from extra debt and taxation to provide a budget to tackle (rather than just top up deficits in the funding of) some long-standing reforms. I'd also expect seizures of assets. The Treasury seems to have a taste for balancing the books illegally, and there is little judicial protection.
PRESENTS FOR SOME
I don't expect infrastructure or defense budgets to be much loved â that's some of the cuts. The undoubted green spend will likely benefit (or keep on benefiting) China's manufacturers, more than the UK, but do still expect energy prices to go on up. They are the modern sin tax.
But higher tax, debt and spending can be pretty good for the economy, as Biden has shown, it all depends on how long you can get others to fund you for, and at what price.
Much as I am sure Labour don't want to crash the pound, they normally eventually find a way to do so, and for all my glib assumptions, they will be starting far closer to the edge than most new governments, for some while.
THE HANGOVER
How useful is that analysis? Well don't expect the FTSE to collapse, this will be a spending regime, but do expect stock specific damage, although arguably a lot of that is in the price of impacted sectors, or indeed the long standing (and ongoing) flight from UK equities overall.
The FTSE is mired in a twenty-year stagnation, from 7,000 in 2000 to well, 7,000 now, although not to altogether discount the medium-term Tory inspired rally. Note what Labour, even Blairite Labour, gives you.
On the other hand, sitting, duck-like, waiting to be hit, or worse buying into vulnerable areas, feels quite high risk.
The election outcome is (and has been for a while) clear. Nor is this a safe European coalition of the sane and less sane. Â It will be red through and through.
Given so many other options, and that some of the pain will be direct on pensions and property, it seems a good time to start planning on the investment side.
The MP's pension fund invests only 1.7% in UK listed equity. Do they know something?
Have a magnificent Christmas and thank you for reading.
We will be back on January 14th.
Charles Gillams
17-12-2023
By their works . . .
The November bounce in markets was a bit of an illusion, as interest rates may no longer matter, but foreign exchange still does. Inflation in commodities is probably sorted.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt tinkers.
EQUITY MARKETS and the FABLED FIRST RATE CUT
The dramatic November rally, only looks that way if you are a dollar investor and for some weird reason the archaic Gregorian calendar matters to you. Sticking with the even older Julian one would have made October's performance much better and leave us ten days more of November to enjoy. Plus, lots more shopping days to Christmas.
While it was great for the big US indices, almost (but not quite) hitting the year's highs, in the UK, it was rather less so; the FTSE hit 8,000 in March and has slid down since, back to pre-COVID levels around 7,500.
The November US rally was also dented for sterling investors by a dramatic 4% slide in the dollar.
So, while it feels attractive, the fascination with the first rate cut date is pretty spurious. That is not the market driver. Markets have so far given us nothing this year for avoiding a global recession and seeing the last rate hike of the current cycle.
Surely that is worth something?
AND LONG BONDS
In a like fashion long dated bonds are giving us very little for having nailed inflation, and having (at least in the US) a credible inflation fighting stance again. So those, if you trust the US Government's credit, are not looking bad. This patch of inflation may have stretched the meaning of transitory, but it clearly remains just that, not a 30-year phenomenon.
Instead we see the recent fall in yields as being more driven by relief that rates have topped, and a desire to lock in nice returns in the global reserve currency, attributes which seem likely to overwhelm domestic US worries about high levels of issuance.
COMMODITIES
Commodities are where economics in the raw is most visible, especially soft commodities. High prices will always bring in marginal land, and there is no shortage of land on the planet. It may take a planting cycle or two, but food inflation always was transitory. Corn is now below pre COVID prices, let alone pre-Ukraine.
We believe the same is true for energy, for two long standing reasons: the first is that sanctions don't work, certainly not against enormous blocks like China and Russia. The second is that high prices create supply and in a highly tradeable commodity, they do so quite fast.
So, the idea of shutting in energy to manipulate the market price, is in the end self-defeating. It has to be. So however much the anti-carbon lobby and OPEC desire high prices, they are not sustainable. Indeed, it feels as likely that we get one of those crushing late spring drops in prices designed to flush out over-geared operators. That weapon works best, when interest rates are high and storage tanks are full. So why not use it? Â I remain far more nervous about the oil patch than most, it has yet to see the post COVID, overstocking crisis, that has rippled through so many sectors. Held off by the Ukraine war, oversupply is still around.
The World Bank October commodities forecast base case is for continuing declines.
Look at Healthcare stocks, still suffering from the COVID bubble deflating, despite new wonder drugs.
A stock like Worldwide Healthcare Trust, peaked in summer 2021 and has then slid remorselessly lower.
A LOOK AT HUNT'S TAX FANTASIES
Well, why bother, his tax give back is rightly mocked as trivial. His vague attempts to get welfare under control are painted as draconian, when they are anything but. While his games around a set of unrealistic self-defeating assumptions that he gives the OBR to produce nonsense projections in return are just absurd.
Full expensing for corporation tax is clever in only one sense, it is certainly not a tax cut, whatever he says, it is just bringing forward deductibility from after the next election, so off his watch. It is not changing what is deductible at all, and there will be loads of complex rules against deductions still, as ever.
While to most sensible cap ex modelling, the tax treatment remains damaged by last year's massive corporation tax hike. The long-term tax profile simply does not change, so it does not encourage investment, whatever he claims.
Oddly the real tidying up, as ever, is handled by Gove, quietly putting in place critical and very welcome new political funding measures, which reverse some of the long slide into democratic absurdity inflicted by inflation.
And he pops up in odd places as the fixer still, like Dublin trying to get the Ulster Assembly back in action - a vital if unpleasant piece of plumbing too.
Those are late but worthy actions, as a career ends.
The efforts on investments, while welcome and overdue are still tinkering, and the games with ISAs are as boring as ones with capital allowances. We see no real effort to simplify matters for domestic investors. The joke slashing of capital gains allowances (far from indexing or freezing they are still going down) shows a profound dislike of investors and investment.
Instead, a we get a work round to help UK investors buy fractions of Nvidia, - really?
Charles Gillams
3-12-23
Stop Making Sense
The benign Powellâs fireside chat has left us all very happy, while I have been pondering the Yanis Varoufakis saga from afar. So how did Greece survive the doom and gloom after the Euro crisis?
An apposite topic, as high state debt, unproductive spending, and uncertain or burdensome credit, pretty much all over the West, apparently beckons once more.
The Song of Chairman Powell
We start with Chairman Powell in his recent Q&A: he could hardly have been nicer, the equity markets loved him, the bond markets sweetly retreated, and the dollar fell away.
It was not so much the repetition of âdata dependentâ, a seemingly meaningless phrase, or the deft swerves around repeated questions about the path of rates.
It was more the extra lengths he went to, to dismiss the data outliers, particularly on much faster GDP growth (4.9%) in the US economy, for Q3 and the sharp upward shift in longer term inflation expectations. The bond markets had found both metrics spooky.
The GDP number was dismissed, rather airily, as related to strong consumption, which in turn was linked to high employment and rising real wages on the one side, but more importantly to COVID savings balances. Although he admitted no one really knew what these were, but somehow, they were still contributing.
The inflation expectations got dissed even faster: Powell thought it an outlier, more recent data was far more consistent. Suddenly the evil portents were gone.
It would be wrong to think he knows what he is talking about (why start now?) but right, to know how he is feeling; thatâs it. Sure, he keeps the rate rise out in the open, like an old dog, but the chain is lax and rusted, the beast benign.
It would take a lot to make the US raise rates again and he was happy with tighter monetary policies. Even nicer for the long end, while Powell is not sure where the âneutralâ funds rate was (who is?), it was certainly a lot lower than where we are now. You might even choose to quantify a gesture; Iâd say his was in the 3% area.
So, I feel like crisis-driven prices should not really apply. While the VIX? Â Down 25% in five days. Â Game over?
Search Results from MSN
Yanis, Right or Wrong?
Politically Yanis got lured by the old trap of supporting a party without a history, after sudden promotion, as a technocrat.
A rookie error.
But how does History see the Global Financial Crisis?
I looked at GDP from 2007 to 2022, for Bulgaria, Greece, France, Germany, UK, and the US. Here is the World Bank Chart of GDP growth rates. You can see Greece tumble out of the bundle, but it was also gathered back in, quite fast.
By 2007 the Eurozone was apparently out of control, spending was too high, it needed debt write downs, balanced budgets, selective privatisations and a war on tax evasion.
And Yanis felt Greece was being unfairly picked on to trial that medicine.
Size Counts
So, it is perhaps more instructive to look at levels, not growth rates. Here the damage is clearer, Greece has a GDP still substantially below the 2006 level. Bulgaria a neighbouring Balkan state, has doubled (and more) in the time. So Yanis has a point there.
Elsewhere France grew a shade faster than the UK, but from a slightly smaller base, so really little change.
But the US added almost twelve trillion dollars to its economy, which is like bolting on a new economy the size of the UK, France, Germany and Italy in just two decades.
We could adjust for currencies, population, different data points, calculation bases, of course and it is non-linear, inevitably. But we are looking big picture here.
Was The Left Right?
Gordon Brown was quite keen on the Yanis theory, and to some extent that adoration survived the subsequent dilettante Tory rule. Seizing big banks, attacking tax evasion at any cost, and aiming to balance budgets (Yanis was big on the primary surplus then) all crept into UK policy. The first two are oddly very non-Tory, especially when used to destroy economic growth by over-regulation. The third is quite sensible by comparison, but it was ignored.
Greece has since taken its medicine, with a steady swing to the Centre Right. Yanis finally lost his seat (for his new party) early this summer.
If the pain was indeed all inflicted to help the struggling IMF, no one told the US. If it was all done to save the Euro, I ask myself why did France go nowhere fast? It didnât obviously hurt other Eastern European countries.
So, Greece remains an outlier, vastly reduced in wealth by the whole episode. It saved the Euro; it did not save Greece.
Where Next?
In the end, all national budgets work better with a growing economy, and in the long term that is essential. Flat or declining economies are the real crisis, especially without flat or declining state spending.
My highly selective period â (2007 being the pre-crash high) finds considerable upsides in both Trump and Bidenâs expansion and in Obamaâs reconstruction.
While if you need to know why the US stock market dominates in that period after the GFC, it is because GDP growth was twice that of Germany, and on course to double from 2007 quite soon.
Elephants canât dance, they say, but when they do, the world shakes.
Insert Media here
Although Yanis, indeed has stopped making sense.
Charles Gillams
4.11.23
Sweet Dreams
Here we talk about the delights of the Conservative Party Conference in rainy Manchester, the failure of the in-built two-year time horizon in inflation models, and what may happen to interest rates.
FANTASY IN BLUE
At times in Manchester, it felt like everyone was looking for something. As government steps up spending initiatives, and empowers regional governance, and drives big spending on not achieving net zero, the chorus of demands for more taxpayersâ cash grew deafening.
There was utter silence on efficiency or capital allocation; it was all just âa good thingâ to spend more.
And oddly too, with so much lip service to the long term and reducing debt and halving inflation, the âhowâ of those was also ignored. Surely halving inflation is not even a government task? It was devolved to Bailey of the Bank - yet we heard not a word of criticism. If ever an eight-year commitment to a disastrously run project needed cancelling, his appointment looks to be just that.
This would spare him (and us) those endless letters on why heâs failing to control inflation.
For all that Conference was oddly cheerful - quite a bit of steel on show, from Suella of course, the only natural politician involved - some guts from Steve Barclay at Health, and Stride, a little less convincingly, at work and pensions - else, all rather wooden and on autocue. Although you could not help but notice that Farage still charms the fringe crowds.
COMPETENT DELIVERY?
The abiding issue remains competent delivery. It was odd to hear the government on HS2 arguing for accountability by sacking their own Euston delivery team. As if the failure of HS2 is not theirs, and theirs alone.
Instead of penny packet incrementalism, government needs a holistic delivery view - perhaps why France can build a TGV, and we simply cannot.
From this report of the Institute for Government
The Maude/Osborne âreformsâ destroyed half our domestic contractors, by a short-term focus and ceaselessly moving the goalposts. As a result, home grown firms are in the minority on the HS2 contractor list, and giant multinationals with more lawyers than bulldozers were the main bidders.
They want top dollar to take on the risk of a lazy, indecisive government machine - no wonder.
THE CHANGE PRIME MINISTER?
We have been very clear since 2019, that the Tories canât win another term, none of that changes, but the scale and composition of the anti-Tory majority next year is rather less clear.
In many ways, the best case for a Labour defeat, at the next election, is that the Tories have done it all already. They have blown the bank on out-of-control spending, splurged on unaffordable welfare, and raised taxes to unsustainable levels.
From this website
This government also crashed the pound, let inflation loose, let rhetoric overtake sense and has gone in hock to foreign debtors. I suppose they have yet to invade a sovereign country without a UN mandate, but they are working on that too.
So? Well oddly Starmer is still slightly boxed in, and in terms of polling data, not really getting much help from the weak Lib Dems, in those critical three-way marginals in the South. While Scotland clearly has had enough of the SNP running Scotland, it is less clear that they donât want the cause of independence to be heard in London. The Rutherglen by-election could be sending both messages, but in a general election voters only send one. I would not assume that genie is back in the bottle just yet.
JITTERBUG BLUES
We continue to see US rates above inflation, which is very different from UK rates which are still below.
So exactly what Powell (and Bailey) are doing with selling down the Central Banks balance sheets at a time of maximum new issuance, is not clear; it solidifies vast paper losses, creates new losses on the rest, so seems to be quite a pricey warning shot to politicians. But it is a plausible reason (along with super high levels of new issuance) for current bond market nerves.
We have always felt the Central Bank models, where whatever the question the answer is âit will be fine in two yearsâ are a fiction. The awareness that rates and inflation are staying high, is long overdue. But we have been in no doubt about it, for two years, nor have we ever flinched in our aversion to bonds, we were never being paid enough for the risk.
The jitters in the bond market feel more like a turning point, the sudden chop as the tide turns. The dollar has risen; people want to be there; if there is enough demand, that will lower bond yields again. So, I am not looking at US rates rising, so much as at the battle switching back to fiscal policy. Although in the end if Biden really wants 7% rates, I guess he can try to have them.
The UK and Europe are less contested, the labour market in Europe at least is not that tight, although still at record low unemployment levels, but with a lot of surplus workers in France, Spain, and Italy, and especially amongst the young. Euro interest rates are also really quite low still and are not yet looking restrictive.
So, it looks like another round of softening currencies, stagnant inflation and rate rise pressure. Central Banks still hope they have done enough. Even so it is quite odd that UK long rates are only just touching the level of a year ago, logically they should be two points higher. As for oil, we have seen this autumnal spike as a little surprising but transient, and as ever at this time of year, the short-term path is weather related.
Overall if the start is any guide, October yet again could be rough for markets, but longer term still looks brighter.