Monetize this.  The Treasury Department announced Monday that it projects $947 billion in debt issuance over the next three months, up 40% from a $677 billion forecast issued in May.  The fourth quarter should see still more supply, with estimated marketable debt issuance of $1.216 trillion, or a further sequential increase of 28%.  

Depending on the outcome of the congressional stimulus negotiations currently underway in Washington, those figures could increase further. The Congressional Budget Office pencils in a $3.5 trillion budget deficit in the 12 months through Sept. 30, compared to just under $1 trillion in fiscal 2019. 

Of course, all that debt will need to find a home, and the Federal Reserve has pulled back from its feverish buying during the height of the pandemic. Between March 4 and June 10, the Fed bought roughly $1.6 trillion in Treasury debt, equal to more than half of the net $2.5 trillion increase in total government debt outstanding over that period. From the March peak of $75 billion a day in Treasury purchases, the Fed has since scaled back its buying pace to about $80 billion per month.  

The composition of future supply is shifting, as Treasury announced yesterday that the increased issuance will be concentrated at the back end of the curve.  Thus, while two-, three- and five-year note auctions will each rise by $2 billion through October, the 10- and 30-year auctions will increase by $6 billion and $4 billion, respectively. 

That shift toward longer-dated issuance will surely attract notice within the Eccles Building. “The Treasury is increasing pressure on the Fed to extend the duration of their purchases,” Priya Misra, global head of rates strategy at TD Securities, tells the Financial Times. “It is almost a necessity now. Without that, we could have a messy Treasury market both in terms of functioning and auctions.”

Jon Hill, rates strategist at BMO Capital Markets, noted the central bank’s shifting goals from the height of the financial panic earlier this year. “Back in March and April the Fed was focused on market functioning. Now things have calmed dramatically but we still need quantitative easing to compress long rates and lower borrowing costs.” 

In his June testimony on Capitol Hill, Fed chair Jerome Powell declared that the Fed’s government bond purchase program “wasn’t in any way about, you know, meeting Treasury’s supply. . . we really don’t think about that.” 

That proclamation may be soon put to the test. The Treasury’s Borrowing Advisory Committee noted in May that roughly 30% of outstanding Treasury debt would mature within the next 12 months. 

Trouble flows uphill in 2020.  The pandemic and lockdown are taking a severe toll on the retail realm, as Moody’s predicts that operating income across the sector will plunge by 25% to 30% from a year ago. 

Bloomberg reports today that pandemic-related pain among brick and mortar retailers is now taking a wider toll. With at least 25 retailers filing for bankruptcy so far this year and many others forced into survival mode, a number of outlets including J. Crew Group, Inc., Neiman Marcus Group, Inc. and Men’s Wearhouse parent Tailored Brands, Inc. have opted to file for Chapter 11 instead of renegotiating with their landlords. Data from Trepp show that 16% of retail property loans packaged into commercial mortgage backed securities were delinquent at the end of July, compared to 3.8% in January.  

 “This is now black-letter law – a debtor can cram down a landlord,” said Melanie Cyganowski, partner at law firm Otterbourg P.C. and a former bankruptcy judge, told Bloomberg. “If this becomes a tsunami of retailers rejecting their leases, it’s going to trigger another part of the sea change – the mortgages held by the landlords.”

Fallout is already visible. Retail carnage was front and center in the second quarter for commercial real estate giant and Grant’s pick-to-not-click (see the Nov. 29, 2019 issue) Brookfield Property Partners, Inc. (BPY on the Nasdaq). Brookfield reported a net loss of $1.51 billion for the second quarter, compared to a $23 million profit in the same period a year ago.  Perhaps most alarmingly, the company disclosed that retail rent collections stood at just 34% in the second quarter.  Recall that last week, the company struck a deal with its lenders to relax certain covenants governing leverage limits and fixed charge coverage ratios, in exchange for a higher interest rate and limitations on restricted payments, including dividends. 

New highs look to be in the offing, as another top-heavy advance pushed the S&P 500 to 3,350, within 150 basis points of its Feb. 19 high-water mark.  Treasurys were modestly bid with the 10-year yield slipping back to 54 basis points, while WTI rallied to near $42 a barrel and gold jumped to $2,074 an ounce.  The VIX closed below 23 for the first time since Feb. 21. 

- Philip Grant

In the wee hours Friday the overnight 10-year Treasury yield fell to 0.52%, its lowest ever beyond an intraday spell during whipsaw trading on March 9.  Deutsche Bank research strategist Jim Reid put it this way: 

The U.S. has been through depressions, deflations, wars, restrictive gold standard regimes, market crashes and many other major events and never before have we seen yields so low back to when the Founding Fathers formed the country.

The belly of the curve has likewise plumbed new depths, with the five-year Treasury yield finishing Friday at just 21 basis points, comfortably within the upper end of the overnight Fed Funds policy rate range of 0 to 0.25%. 

Those diving nominal interest rates are even more notable because inflation expectations, as measured by the 10-year breakeven rate, have swiftly retraced most of their March collapse.  On Friday, the real 10-year yield (the nominal 10-year yield less the inflation rate implied by 10-year breakevens) fell to negative 1%, down from minus 68 basis points on July 1 and the lowest since at least 1995. 

 
10-year TIPS breakeven rate.  Source: The Bloomberg

Real rates may move still deeper into negative territory, if our monetary mandarins have their way.  The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Fed “is preparing to effectively abandon its strategy of pre-emptively lifting interest rates to head off higher inflation, a practice it has followed for more than three decades.” Last year, Fed chair Jerome Powell declared that a too-low rate of inflation was “one of the major challenges of our time.” 

On the other side of the equation, some high-profile Fed alums bang the drum for more overt price controls. On May 27, New York Fed president John Williams declared that the central bank was “thinking very hard” about rolling out yield curve control, in which the Fed would pledge to buy unlimited quantities of certain Treasury maturities to ensure that rates did not exceed target levels.  On July 17, former chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen penned a blog post for the Brookings Institution expressing their approval of the even-lower-for-even-longer rate regime:

We expect low rates will spur spending in sectors like housing as the economy reopens. And the Fed may well do more in coming months as re-opening proceeds and as the outlook for inflation, jobs, and growth becomes somewhat clearer. 

In particular, to maintain downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, the Federal Open Market Committee likely will provide forward guidance about the economic conditions it would need to see before it considers raising its overnight target rate.  

Artificially low borrowing costs are boon (or lifeline) to Uncle Sam as well as to Mr. Market.  On Friday evening Fitch Ratings cut its outlook on U.S. sovereign debt to “negative” from “stable,” citing “the ongoing deterioration in the U.S. public finances and the absence of a credible fiscal consolidation plan.”  The rating agency pencils in a deficit equating to 20% of GDP in fiscal 2020 (ending Sept. 30), followed by an additional 11% GDP shortfall next year.  That’s despite a decline in the effective interest rate on the government debt stock to 1.75% in June, down 75 basis points from a year prior. 

The gaping shortfalls are likely to be chronic, as Fitch calculates that even with real growth rates rising back to 2%, stabilized deficits would remain at 3% to 4% of GDP by 2024. For context, the federal deficit equaled 5.1% of output in fiscal 2019, up from 3.5% two years earlier and the highest since World War II outside of the 2008-era financial crisis.  By Fitch’s reckoning, a 1% rise in the effective interest rate would add an extra 1.2% worth of GDP to the annual bill. 

The May 1 edition of Grant’s summarized this peculiar moment in monetary history:

The financial risks attached to the still more radical policies of the Powell Fed are twofold. The first is the risk that the policies prove inadequate to support either the stock market or the economy. In which case, as the Fed itself has pledged, there would be more of them.

The second risk is that the policies succeed—both the economy and the financial markets emerge hale and hearty from the government- ordered lockdown. What, then, could stay the hand of the next central banker in the face of even a garden-variety downturn? The precedent would be in the books. One’s first response, it would say, is to throw the kitchen sink.

Implicit in the world’s Covid-19 policy response is that inflation (besides posing a less consequential risk than death by a novel virus) is not merely dormant but kaput. Count us in the dormant camp. The post-lockdown world—may it soon arrive! —will be one of reduced trade, stunted productivity growth and, if current trends hold, super-abundant monetary growth. And all of that in the context of the lowest interest rates in 4,000 years.

In other words: Yield curve, controlled.  For now.

Correction:

The rise in June pending home sales data mentioned in Thursday’s edition of Almost Daily Grant’s was on a sequential basis, rather than year-over-year as characterized. 

Another strong day for stocks left the S&P 500 at its best close since Feb. 21, up 2% for the year and 47% from its March 23 nadir.  Treasurys came under some modest pressure with the long bond yield rising to 1.23%, while gold rose to $1,990 an ounce and WTI reversed early losses to finish near $41 a barrel.  The VIX held at 24.5, far above its closing level of 17 when the S&P 500 was last seen at these levels on Feb. 21. 

- Philip Grant

Will the last person to leave New York City turn out the lights? According to the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, overall foot traffic across the Big Apple is down 46% from its pre-pandemic levels.  As of last week, only 8% of employees at downtown office buildings managed by CBRE Group had physically returned to work. 

Instead of pounding the NYC pavement or hunkering down, residents are skipping town in droves. Pending home sales leapt higher by 54.4% in the Northeast in June sequentially, compared to roughly 12% across the West, Midwest and South. Meanwhile, the median home price in the Hamptons jumped to $1.08 million in the second quarter according to the July Elliman report, up 27% from a year ago. 

On the West Coast, one-bedroom rental prices in formerly red-hot tech mecca San Francisco sank by 11.8% in June from a year ago, accelerating from a 9.2% decline in the 12 months through May. 

While urban migration reshapes the residential housing market, the commercial side of things has gone into deep freeze. According to data from Real Capital Analytics, nationwide commercial real estate transactions fell 68% in the second quarter compared to a year ago.  

“The buyer and seller expectations are not aligned,” Simon Mallinson, an executive managing director at RCA, told Bloomberg last week. “Sellers aren’t being forced to the market because there’s no realized distress and buyers are sitting on the sidelines thinking there’s going to be distress.”

With the pandemic and lockdowns continuing to ripple, signs of stress are plentiful. 

The Real Deal reported Wednesday that a consortium of Chinese investors under the EB-5 immigrant visa program (which allows foreigners who invest at least $900,000 in a U.S. business a path to a green card) sent a letter to the CEO of New York-based real estate developer and landlord Related Companies demanding an onsite inspection of Related’s financial records, after the company had halted payments on its Hudson Yards project (one of the largest in the city) to those EB-5 creditors in June. As the contract fine print indicates those payments are discretionary, “the investors fear that you have tricked them into a perpetual state of nonpayment,”  Douglas Litowitz, the group’s lawyer, wrote to Related. 

That follows a July 14 dispatch from the New York Post relaying that developer Harry Macklowe had stopped paying the $200,000 monthly rent for his company headquarters at the GM building on 5th Avenue as the coronavirus swept through the city in March.  

Things are looking particularly grim on the retail front, as a July 21 report from S&P Global predicted that retail landlords cannot expect a return to pre-virus credit metrics until 2022.  An April 28 analysis from Green Street Research concluded that “more than half of all mall-based department stores will close by the end of 2021.” 

“It’s becoming clearer, especially with the resurgence in [virus] cases across the country, that a three-month forbearance is not really going to satisfy the situation,” Lisa Pendergast, executive director of the CRE Finance Council, told Bloomberg last week. “So there are other things that can be done. A lot of that has to do with loan modifications.”

Retail landlord Brookfield Property REIT (BPYU on the Nasdaq), which, along with parent company Brookfield Property Partners, L.P. (BPY on the Nasdaq), was the subject of a bearish analysis in the Nov. 29, 2019 edition of Grant’s, exemplifies the trend. 

In August 2018, BPY dove headlong into the now-fraught shopping mall realm, snapping up the remaining two-thirds stake it didn’t already own in mall-based real estate investment trust GGP, Inc. for $15 billion.  Those assets now constitute the entire BPYU portfolio.  

Yesterday, Brookfield REIT disclosed that it had agreed on amended terms with its lenders in roughly $2 billion worth of term loans related to that deal, including eased covenant restrictions governing total debt levels through June 30 of 2021 and a reduced fixed charge coverage ratio.  In return for those lender concessions, Brookfield will pay a higher interest rate (300 basis points above Libor, compared to 225 basis points before), and will face restrictions on incurring additional debt, the use of proceeds under a revolving credit facility and on making restricted payments.  

Importantly, that final stipulation appears to include dividends, which would be capped at the company’s cumulative net income as well as realized gains. That change is potentially significant as the pair (which trade in near lockstep and are fungible, despite differing asset bases) offer dividend yields of more than 11%.  

Then, too, on July 2 Brookfield REIT announced a tender offer for $110 million worth of common stock at $12 a share, news which spurred a sharp rally and has since helped shares climb to near that offer price.  Might the more restrictive legal language imperil those shareholder-friendly uses of cash? 

Reserve Bank credit (i.e. the sum total of interest-bearing assets at the Fed) edged higher to $6.92 trillion, $4 billion above last week’s reading.   With that modest increase, the three-month annualized growth rate has slowed to 44%, from 72% last week and 217% three weeks ago. 

This morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that second quarter GDP fell to an annualized $19.4 trillion from $21.6 trillion in the first quarter.  That diminished denominator increases the ratio of Reserve Bank credit to 36% of GDP, while total public debt outstanding now foots to 137% of output.  

A modest pullback in stocks left the S&P up a bit less than 1% for the week so far, while Treasurys rallied across the board to leave the 2- and 30-year yields at 0.12% and 1.2%, respectively.  Gold ticked lower to $1,945 an ounce, WTI crude slipped to near $40 a barrel, and the VIX rose to 25.  

- Philip Grant

Penalty flag on the field. Athletic apparel producer Under Armour, Inc. (class A shares: UAA on the NYSE) disclosed in a filing yesterday that founder Kevin Plank, chief financial officer David Bergman and the company itself received Wells Notices from the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that the regulator may soon file a civil suit regarding the company’s revenue recognition policies in 2015 and 2016.  The notices referenced allegations that the company pulled forward future sales to bolster quarterly results in the years in question. 

By way of response, a UAA press release contended that its accounting was “appropriate” and that it would “engage in a dialogue with the SEC staff to work toward a resolution of this matter.” 

The announcement follows an admission last fall that the company was under investigation. “Not every Wells Notice leads to an enforcement action,” former Department of Justice prosecutor Eric Beste tells the Baltimore Sun. “Having said that. . . it’s a significant event and escalation in the process.”   

Not every UAA bull is concerned.  Predicting that the probe will lead to a fine and restatement of those years-old financials, analysts at Jefferies conclude that the “SEC inquiry matters, but it doesn’t matter.”  Then again, the investigation colors the tail end of an extraordinary run for the company, which included 26 straight quarters of annual revenue growth of at least 20% through the third quarter of 2016. With the SEC now on his company’s case, Plank may regret the following quip from the April 2016 first-quarter earnings call, referring to two-time NBA most valuable player, Davidson College man and Under Armour pitchman Stephen Curry:

Our first-quarter revenues grew 30%, with the growth coming from every facet of our business.  And to be clear, that 30% number was no accident. When Stephen Curry decided to average 30 points this season to take the scoring title while wearing the number 30, we thought that putting up 30% growth on our end was the best way for us to demonstrate our pride and support of Stephen and the Warriors.

Since then, operating problems have been front and center (as has heavy turnover in the c-suite), with $5 billion in revenues and $477 million in Ebitda over the 12 months through March 31 compared to $4.8 billion and $587 million, respectively, in calendar 2016. Shares are down 73% from an initial bearish analysis in the June 12, 2015 issue of Grant’s.  

That jarring price correction hasn’t yielded a cheap multiple, as UAA shares trade at more than 100 times consensus 2021 earnings per share, with an enterprise value quoted at 20 times next year’s Ebitda estimate. 

By way of response, the company has undertaken a series of cost-saving initiatives, including ending a series of high-profile collegiate sponsorships and a lacrosse equipment licensing deal, as well as a timely February announcement that it would forego a planned flagship store in New York City. Analysts at BTIG, who rate UA shares “sell” with a $5 price target (compared to just over $11 currently), wrote last week: 

UAA appears to be making deep, across-the-board cuts to its business, cuts that our industry contacts suggest are now starting to hit bone. . . While some might view these actions as an attempt to improve profitability and shore up its cash position, we view them as a sign of a company in distress. 

The failure to adequately monetize past investments exacerbated by a weak product engine and diminishing brand value among its core consumer has resulted in a shrinking business with no discernable strategy to return it to sustained top-line growth. We have seen too many companies attempt to cut their way to prosperity only to fail and accelerate the decline of its sales base. 

The bond market is starting to show some concern, as the Under Armour’s double-B-rated senior unsecured 3 ¼% notes due 2026 change hands below 93 cents on the dollar, for a 463 basis point spread over Treasurys.  For context, the double-B-rated portion of the Bloomberg Barclays High Yield Index trades at a 347 basis point pickup. 

Risk aversion reigned as stocks came under late selling pressure to push the S&P 500 back into negative territory for the year, while Treasurys caught a strong bid with the 30-year yield falling to its lowest since April at 1.22%.  Gold shook off early weakness to set a fresh closing high at $1,952 an ounce, WTI crude held near $41 a barrel and the VIX ticked back above 25. 

- Philip Grant

Traditional folklore, with a modern twist. Bloomberg reports that the state of Washington U.S. Attorney’s office recently charged  executive Mukund Mohan with fraudulently procuring $5.5 million under the Payroll Protection Program.  Mohan, an Amazon and Microsoft alum who is currently chief technology officer at BuildDirect.com Technologies, Inc., claimed that one of his companies had paid out $2.3 million in payroll last year, yet the concern actually had no employees and Mohan had only just taken ownership in May.  

Instead of paying employees, the entrepreneur had another use of funds in mind. Prosecutors claim that Robinhood Markets, Inc. has records showing that Mohan transferred $231,000 of the stimulus money to the stock-trading app.   

This morning the five-year Treasury yield sank to an all-time low 0.255%, hardly above the Federal Reserve’s overnight funds rate of between zero and 0.25%.  At the same time, the nominal 10-year yield of 58 basis points is again approaching the record low of 49 bps set in early March, while the real yield (the nominal 10-year yield less the yield on 10-year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities) has fallen to negative 92 bps, the lowest on record going back to 1996. 

“Low real yields represent a barometer for liquidity being injected into the market,” Jim Caron, senior portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, told the Financial Times yesterday. “It is no doubt supportive for financial assets and supportive for growth.” 

Rhetoric from the monetary mandarins certainly supports that view. In June, Fed chair Jerome Powell declared that the Fed “is not even thinking about thinking about raising rates.”  

Economists at Deutsche Bank led by Matthew Luzzetti estimate that in using asset purchases to attempt to stimulate the economy (rather than taking rates as low as minus 5%), the Fed would need to hoover up an additional $12 trillion in assets.  For context, total assets at the Fed currently stand at $6.96 trillion, up from $4.2 trillion as the pandemic began wreaking havoc in March, while Luzzetti estimates it would take eight years of QE at the current run-rate to hit his target. 

As an alternative, perhaps Jay Powell et al. could further broaden their purchase criteria? 

“For most of these big [distressed] funds, there is no longer credit investing, there is just creditor-on-creditor violence,” declared Adam Cohen, managing partner at Caspian Capital, in an interview with Bloomberg. “It’s just people hiring enough lawyers to figure out a way to steal value from another creditor.” 

Triple-C-plus-rated Community Health Systems, Inc. (featured in the Feb. 7 edition of Grant’s) is one example of a potential bondholder scrum in the making.  The hospital operator, which is the ninth-largest holding in the iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (ticker: HYG), carries long-term debt of more than $13 billion including some distressed issues such as the senior unsecured 6 7/8% notes due 2028, which last changed hands at 36.5 cents on the dollar for a yield-to-worst of 26.6%.  Other CYH bonds, such as the first-lien 6.25% notes due 2023, remain above par. 

Covenant Review analyst Ross Hallock warns that Community Health’s credit documents allows the company to shift assets into subsidiaries that are out of creditors’ reach in the case of a debt restructuring. “Investors have to read the underlying documents to find out how,” Hallock told Bloomberg Wednesday. 

Meanwhile, potential future battlegrounds continue to emerge.  U.K.-based hospitality company Stonegate Pub Co. came to market today with a £950 million ($1.2 billion) junk offering, the largest sub-investment grade sterling denominated bond deal since 2013. 

Would-be creditors would be well served to review the fine print. CreditSights analysts note that the assets guaranteeing the new debt do not cover those of a subsidiary, which represents almost 40% of the group’s holdings and 30% of the combined earnings. Indeed, those assets “will be out of reach of bondholders.” 

A second straight selloff in stocks left the S&P 500 modestly lower for the week and pushed the broad index back into the red for 2020, while Treasurys gave back early gains to finish mostly flat. Gold topped $1,900 an ounce intraday before settling at $1,898, while WTI crude continued to consolidate near $41 a barrel.  The VIX fell below 26. 

- Philip Grant

Chart of the day, courtesy of Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab:

Bloomberg reports that Epicor Software Corp. is set to sell $2.75 billion worth of leveraged loans. Proceeds from the sale will include a $560 million dividend for its private-equity owner KKR & Co.  The loans, which are indicatively priced at a 425-basis point premium to Libor for the first-lien tranche and between 775 and 800 basis points over Libor for the second-lien, will increase Epicor’s leverage to 8.6 times last year’s Ebitda from the current 6.9 times. 

The deal looks like a success, as investors have already placed orders in excess of the offering size. “This opens the door for other opportunistic deals,” Ron Launsbach, senior portfolio manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, tells Bloomberg. “There’s demand for loans and limited supply in the near term.” 

Indeed, loan issuance has remained in the dumps, with just $8.4 billion in new supply month-to-date, compared to $44.6 billion in July of last year.  By comparison, the high-yield market has seen $15.2 billion in primary supply so far in July, roughly equal to its monthly pace a year ago.   That’s something of a reversal, as the loan market grew at a 10.2% compound annual rate from 2010 to 2019, nearly triple that of junk bonds.  The mushrooming loan growth has served as a key cog in the private equity boom (which included a record $361 billion in fundraising last year for buyout funds), as p.e.-sponsored companies account for nearly 60% of leveraged loan issuance since 2005.  

Of course, the coronavirus fallout promises to lay bare all sorts of corporate vulnerabilities, and the loan market is no exception. Thus, the trailing 12-month default rate on leveraged loans rose to 3.7% in June from 2.02% in March, while Wells Fargo & Co. forecasts that such defaults will climb to 12% by the end of 2020. In addition, more than one-third of the loan market has received a rating downgrade this year according to S&P’s LCD unit, while the rolling three-month ratio of downgrades to upgrades in June stood at 18.4-to-1, more than double the financial crisis-era peak. 

That spreading corporate contagion underscores the princely prices paid by p.e. in the run-up to the current recession.  Bain and Co.’s 2020 Global Private Equity Report finds that deals last year featured a median purchase multiple of 11.5 times Ebitda, well above the 9.9 times seen in 2007.  To pay those fancier prices, p.e. titans added an extra dollop of debt: Bain reports that nearly 75% of buyout deals last year featured net debt in excess of six times reported Ebitda, up from about 60% in 2007.  When adjusted for so-called add-backs (the now-prevalent use of credit for hypothetical future cost savings), those leverage figures are likely higher still. 

Might operational improvements under p.e. ownership help offset those daunting valuations and aggressive capital structures?  Not likely.  From the Bain report:

When we analyzed 65 fully realized buyout deals invested in 2009 through 2015, the average margin was well below the deal model forecast, and the majority failed to meet their projected margin expansion. Even more worrisome: For the deals where margin improvement was a critical factor in the value-creation plan, more than three-quarters did not meet the margin target.

Then, too, the proliferation of so-called covenant-lite legal structures (now accounting for roughly 80% of the loan market compared to 17% in 2007) is another prominent risk within the leveraged loans that have facilitated the p.e. boom.  

Those loosey-goosey vintages are now being tested, as a new report from Moody’s notes a “surge” in covenant-relief amendments, indicating that “borrowers are exhausting significant covenant cushions and are worried about breaching their maintenance covenants.” The rating agency also reports that revolving credit lenders “are demanding increased compensation, minimum liquidity requirements and enhanced covenant packages in exchange for financial covenant relief.”  

Pushback from some corners of the market is perhaps helping to spur p.e. operators into other creative maneuvers.  A recent survey from the Institutional Limited Partners Association found that 71% of LP respondents reported that general partners have altered or eliminated contractual fiduciary responsibilities in the past year, representing more than 50% of the funds in which the LPs were invested. 

“That language is not there to ensure the GP does the right thing when things are going well,” an anonymity-seeking LP told industry publication Buyouts Insider last week. “Rather, that language is there to protect LPs when a fund goes south [and] maybe even reaches zombie status. At that point the LP/GP dynamic can often become a zero-sum game, and it is at that point when an investor would take comfort in the protections of the agreement. So yes, it is a concern.”

For more on p.e., including a pair of ways to potentially profit from a change in industry conditions, see the May 29 and July 10 editions of Grant’s. 

A sharp selloff in the greenback pushed the broad Dollar Index to its lowest close since early March, spurring another rally in the precious metals with gold moving out to $1,844 an ounce and silver to $21.6 an ounce.   Stocks gave back their early gains to leave the S&P 500 modestly higher, while Treasurys remained well bid, with the 2-year-yield falling below 0.15% and the 10-year slipping under 0.6% intraday.  The VIX rose to just below 25.  

- Philip Grant

“We should consider forgiving all small loans,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin tells reporters today on the government’s next move under the Paycheck Protection Program.

Uncle Sam has thus far doled out $518 billion under the PPP, equivalent to 11% of the federal budget for fiscal 2021 that the Trump administration released in the pre-pandemic days of early February. 

Here’s Oksana Aronov, head of market strategy for absolute return fixed income at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, on Bloomberg Television today: 

Market valuations are entirely fabricated – or synthetically generated – by all the central bank liquidity and do not reflect fundamentals of the securities that they represent. 

[Mr. Market remains] locked in this collective hallucination. . . Central banks continue to run the show and investors need to be really cautious here.
 

Authorities including the Federal Bureau of Investigation have opened probes into the Wednesday hack of social media platform Twitter, which compromised more than 100 high profile accounts. 

The hack targeted figures such as Joe Biden, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, who posted similarly worded Tweets promising followers a two-for-one return on any bitcoin deposited into a specific “wallet.”  In addition to disrupting service for so-called verified Twitter users, the scam netted its masterminds some $120,000 worth of bitcoin, according to media reports. 

Some industry members believe that Twitter will receive the brunt of bad press and regulatory backlash over the incident, rather than bitcoin. Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association, tells Coindesk: 

I would say 99% of policymakers are not thinking about blockchain or cryptocurrency [as a culprit]. And so anytime that you have national headlines that deal with a hack of this size and magnitude, and bitcoin is sort of involved in the process, for the uneducated it’s a bad association because they then think that bitcoin is sort of a preferred tool of criminals. Those of us that work in the industry and know it, study it, the policymakers who spent the time to learn about it, know that that’s not the case.

There is some dissent from that view. Regarding the hack, an account affiliated with digital currency research firm OXT Research concluded via tweet: “This is peak crypto.”

While political and legal fallout from the hack unfolds, mounting legal and regulatory pressures on a key cog in the crypto food chain known as stablecoins (i.e., digital scrip that is supposedly backed by hard currency), and particularly tether, which has long claimed to be backed on a one-for-one basis with U.S. dollars, could prove far more impactful. 

As the oldest and largest of such stablecoins, tether is the straw that stirs the crypto drink. Most exchanges do not perform know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks (KYC and AML, respectively) and thus can’t get access to bank accounts.  

Accordingly, the stablecoins serve as a crucial conduit for turning fiat dollars into bitcoin (or its peers) and back again: In the last 24 hours, tether has seen trading volume of $17.2 billion, equivalent to nearly double its total capitalization of $9.2 billion.  Bitcoin, which is worth $169 billion in total, has seen just $14 billion in trading volume over that period. 

Regulators are taking notice. On July 7, international watchdog The Financial Action Task Force released a report for G-20 finance ministers calling for global regulation of tether and other stablecoins, to ensure compliance with KYC and AML laws.  Under the proposed rules, stablecoins would be compelled to establish processes for transaction monitoring and investigations, among other requirements. 

In addition, tether itself has attracted unwanted interest from the law.  Last spring, New York State Attorney General Letitia James accused iFinex, Inc., which operates both Tether and Bitfinex, of “engaging in a cover-up to hide the apparent loss of $850 million of co-mingled and corporate funds.”

On July 9, the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division declared that the A.G. can move forward with previously announced investigations into Tether and the closely affiliated crypto exchange Bitfinex.  The ruling is significant as the A.G.’s investigation is taking place under the wide-ranging Martin Act. Attorneys from BakerHostetler wrote in an analysis yesterday on JD Supra that the case will reverberate:

Given this decision, the New York A.G. now may be emboldened to use these powers to more actively police the emerging industry by seeking asset freezes and other preliminary injunctive relief against potential bad actors outside of the Empire State.

Even insiders appear to be hedging their bets. In an interview with Bloomberg last Friday, Tether(the company) co-founder Brock Pierce declared that his stablecoin “is, I think, one of the most important innovations in currency, but it also seemed like one of the higher risk businesses.”  

The entrepreneur has himself moved on to greener pastures. On July 4, Pierce, who played the role of young Gordon Bombay in the 1992 Disney film “The Mighty Ducks,” announced he is running for President. Why not? 

Stocks finished slightly higher, as the S&P 500 continues to tread water near the unchanged mark so far this year, while modest steepening in the Treasury curve pushed the long-bond yield to near 1.33%. Gold rose back to the top end of its recent range at $1,812 an ounce, WTI crude held just below $41 a barrel, and the VIX fell below 26. 

- Philip Grant

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) plans to allocate up to 17% of its total portfolio to China by 2025, Suyi Kim, senior managing director and head of Asia Pacific for CPPIB, reveals today in an interview with Caixin.  That’s up from 13% currently and from less than 5% in 2016.   The fund reported C$410 billion ($303 billion) in assets under management at the end of March. 

That growing investment focus in the Middle Kingdom may cause some awkward situations in the halls of power. Canada-focused website iPolitics reported on July 5 that the House of Commons cybersecurity team emailed a warning to Parliament members and their staff not to use messaging app WeChat on account of “potential cybersecurity risks.”  

The email noted that “messages continue to reside on servers even after users have deleted them, with information pertaining to users’ locations saved as well” and, as WeChat’s servers are located outside of Canada, “rigorous protections of user data cannot be assured.”  WeChat is a subsidiary of Shenzhen based, Hong-King listed Tencent Holdings Ltd. (ticker: 700), which is the CPPIB’s largest portfolio holding at C$3.05 billion as of March 31. 

Then, too, Canada’s 2018 detention of Huawei Technologies Co’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, on a U.S. arrest warrant further complicates the matter. The Meng case has spurred Chinese retaliation, including restrictions on canola imports and the imprisonment of Canadians on patently trumped-up charges.  On the official government website, Ottawa warns Canadians in China to “exercise a high degree of caution due to the risk of arbitrary enforcement of local laws.” 

The debate over yield curve control (i.e. de facto caps on selected government bond maturities) continues at the Federal Reserve, with a pair of senior officials offering contrasting views yesterday.  “There may come a time when [YCC] is helpful to reinforce the credibility of forward guidance and lessen the burden on the balance sheet with the addition of targets on the short-to-medium end of the yield curve” declared Fed governor Lael Brainard.

Speaking to The Economic Club of New York, St. Louis Fed president James Bullard dissented: “I don’t see [YCC] as being terribly necessary at this point because expectations are already low as for the outlook for interest rates.”

While Brainard, unlike Bullard, is currently a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, the minutes of the FOMC’s most recent meeting indicated broad skepticism over yield curve control: “Nearly all participants indicated they had many questions regarding the costs and benefits of such an approach.”  Investors seem to agree, for now at least, as Bank of America’s Fund Manager Survey for June found that 54% of respondents predict that the Fed will not take the YCC plunge at its September meeting.  

What might we expect if and when the Fed decides to throw its weight around in the Treasury pit? One such clue resides Down Under, where the Reserve Bank of Australia in March implemented a 25-basis point cap on the 3-year government bond and those under the thumb of YCC attempt to profit from the price-administration regime. “Yield-Curve Control Turning Australia into Carry-Trade Haven,” a Bloomberg headline today declares.  

As the RBA targets only the short end of the curve, the 2- vs. 10-year spread sits at a princely 61 basis points, the steepest such spread among major economies (10-year U.S. Treasurys currently command a 49 basis point premium over twos). With short-term rates seemingly locked in, investors have piled into trades in which they borrow at the short end then invest the proceeds into the longer dated, higher-yielding securities.  The so-called “carry and roll” strategy, designed for a relatively inert curve, is particularly popular, Bloomberg notes.  

By contrast, the Bank of Japan’s yield curve control policy, which extends out to a 0% target on the 10-year JGB, has left the Japanese 2-  vs. 10-year spread at a meager 17 basis points and sent Japanese investors Down Under in search of return. “Investing in a bond market where the curve is steep like Australia generally turns out to be a winning bet,” Akira Takei, fund manager at Tokyo-based Asset Management One, tells Bloomberg.

Just the right amount of control, in other words. 

Almost back to the promised land, as another near-1% gain on the S&P 500 pushed the broad index to the cusp of unchanged for the year, and less than 5% below the all-time highs set in February. Gold closed at $1,814 an ounce on the August contract for another post-2011 high, WTI crude rose to near $41 a barrel, and the VIX tumbled below 28. 

- Philip Grant

A sign-of-the-times three-pack:

Yesterday, health care concern MultiPlan, Inc. announced it will go public via an $11 billion billion merger with Churchill Capital Corp. III, a so-called special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) managed by former Citigroup executive Michael Klein.  The private-equity owned MultiPlan has enjoyed a steadily rising valuation over the years, attracting a $1 billion price tag from the Carlyle Group in 2006, followed by a $3 billion sale to BC Partners and Silver Lake Partners in 2010. In 2016, Hellman & Friedman paid $7.5 billion for the business.

That’s not the only dedicated acquisition vehicle coming down the pike.  Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management announced today that it will upsize its offering for a “blank check” SPAC to $4 billion from a previously planned $3 billion. The acquisition vehicle hasn’t identified a particular sector of interest, but rather noted in the filing that it will target “mature unicorns” for a potential deal. 

The appeal of public markets is understandable, considering recent price action in speculative names. An intraday jump of as much as 14% pushed Tesla shares to a cool 329% year to date, while CEO Elon Musk’s net worth rocketed to an estimated $70.5 billion, up $43 billion for the year according to data from Bloomberg.  That’s good for the seventh richest on planet Earth (the Mars billionaires list has yet to debut), ahead of Warren Buffett at $69 billion.  The Oracle of Omaha has seen his wealth fall by $20 billion this year. 
 

The Senate Banking Committee announced Friday that it will hold a July 21 vote on the nominations for a pair of candidates to the Federal Reserve’s seven-member board of directors.  

While one of the hopefuls, Christopher Waller, boasts a conventional resume including head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the candidacy of economist and former Trump campaign advisor Judy Shelton has proved far more controversial inside the Beltway.  Shelton had previously advocated for a return to a gold-based monetary system, among other transgressions against contemporary orthodoxy.  

On Friday, a coalition of the 12 Democrats on the committee sent chairman Mike Crapo (R-ID) a letter requesting a second hearing, as the group is “deeply concerned that the situation we are in today would have been worse if Dr. Shelton were already sitting on the board of governors.”  

While Republicans hold a one vote majority and can approve Shelton along a party-lines vote, political skepticism is bipartisan.  Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) noted in February that “I don’t think she’s a mainstream economist,” a perhaps unintended compliment to which Shelton readily agreed. “Nobody wants anybody on the Federal Reserve that has a fatal attraction to nutty ideas,” declared Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) at the same hearing.  

What sort of nutty ideas?  Let’s hear from the candidate herself: 

I keep going back to the fact that the power to regulate the value of U.S. money was granted by our Constitution to Congress. It’s in Article 1, Section 8. And in the very same sentence Congress is given the power to define the official weights and measures for our country, because money was meant to be a measure, to be a standard of value. I think that money has to work the same for everyone in the economy, and it’s important that it serve that purpose as a reliable measure, so that people can plan their lives.

I don’t see how you can have a free market economy if people can’t rely on the most vital tool that makes markets work. It’s through money that we transmit market signals. And you need clarity of those signals or supply and demand can’t figure out what’s the optimal solution. So ... at the Federal Reserve is a responsibility to remember that money has to work for everyone and that in a sense it’s a moral contract between the government and the citizens.

Meanwhile, the Fed has turned on the jets in hopes of supporting the economy and asset prices through the pandemic, including a 63% jump in balance sheet assets since early March. 

In addition, M2 money supply grew by $1.02 trillion from late April to early June, more than the $921 billion expansion across all of 2019.  In April, Fed vice president Richard Clarida declared in a television interview that: “I think we have the tools to keep the economy out of deflation.” 

Discussing Shelton’s candidacy, the Feb. 21 edition of Grant’s summarized the current mainstream monetary platform:

It’s the body of beliefs that upholds the authority of the central bank to treat the value of money and the rate of interest as instruments of public policy. Members of the mainstream deprecate price discovery, warm to price administration, especially in the matter of interest rates. They are dismissive of moral hazard and clinically indifferent to the great fundamental monetary question: What’s money, and who says so?

Nutty ideas, indeed. 

A sharp late selloff left the S&P 500 1% in the red, erasing gains of as much as 1.5% which would have completed the broad index’s journey back into positive territory for the year.  Treasurys were mostly bid with the 10- and 30-year yields falling to 0.62% and 1.32%, respectively.  Gold edged higher to $1,805 an ounce, WTI crude pulled back below $40 a barrel, and the VIX jumped above 32, up 18% on the day. 

- Philip Grant