Vinyl has made a comeback. My almost 13-year-old daughter, like all the other cool kids, has a record player in her room and is collecting actual albums – lots of classics; she loves the Eagles (like her father), but new music too. I don’t think she has scratched any of them yet, but as soon as she does, she will be introduced to that wonderfully annoying repeat of the last note: the sound of a broken record.

Wall Street is also a broken record today. The Fed met this week and held rates steady, but indicated that they will keep them where they are for longer than they previously thought. The market reacted negatively, and the pundits are back out once again yelling, “Recession is coming, recession is coming!” But is it? They have been wrong for more than 18 months now, but could they be right this time?

We are not in a recession now, that is for sure. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNOW tracker says that, based on data thus far this quarter, the economy is growing at 4.9 percent. At the beginning of the quarter, the “Blue Chip” consensus view of economists was that we would grow at 0 percent; the most optimistic economist said we would be growing at just over 1 percent, while the most pessimistic said we would be shrinking with worse than negative 1 percent growth. As the quarter has gone on and data has come in – the data that indicates we are actually growing at 4.9 percent – the consensus has been forced to creep upward and is now just under 3 percent. There is more data to come, and it could bring down the 4.9 percent, but it would have to be pretty horrific to take it all the way down to 3, let alone the 0 where they started.

This has been the same pattern for a year now, on the heels of two negative quarters in a row of GDP growth…which, for some reason, was determined by the pundit class to not be a recession, even though that was the very definition of a recession forever. I tease, but this is an important point. I truly believe this denial of the recession that took place last year is what makes this otherwise intelligent group seem so incompetent. They look at the interest rate environment and believe that means we must have a recession; they just fail to admit that we had it, when in fact we had two recessions within two years, which is quite unique and not good.

Today we are still recovering – slowly for sure, but we are in the recovery phase of the economic cycle, and this is being ignored. The other thing that is being ignored is the growing evidence that central banks, including our Fed, simply do not have the power over the economy that they once did. Our economy today is driven by technology and services. These fields do not require the large-scale borrowing of money that the old manufacturing economy required and therefore are just not as sensitive to interest rates. We spoke about this in Episode 2 of our podcast.

Yes, the Fed was too slow to act when inflation began to rise, but the Fed had been historically loose with monetary policy for almost 20 years at that point without triggering inflation. It was the return to Keynesian stimulus through extraordinary government spending which caused inflation to spike, as it had done in the 1970s. It is energy policy, not interest rates, that is causing the high price of oil, as it did in the 1970s.

The focus on the Fed is misplaced. We need to focus on Congress, who needs to get its act together and actually pass a budget. If we do end up in yet another recession in 2024 it won’t be because of interest rates; it will be because of irresponsible fiscal policy.

In the meantime, the market should get back to being focused on what is actually happening in the companies whose stocks make up the market. While the S&P 500 index looks expensive, it is because of the undue influence of seven mega-companies. The price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 is 22.6, which is expensive, but the price-to-earnings ratio for our core portfolio is 16.6, which is pretty normal. The majority of stocks in the market are not overvalued. A growing economy means growing company earnings, so reality indicates we should be moving up. Why aren’t we?

The downside to vinyl records is that they are easy to scratch, and once they do, my daughter will soon learn that they get stuck and keep repeating until we manually move the needle. September is a historically bad month, and no one has the courage to move the needle, so we keep listening to this broken record. But October will come, and the needle will get moved. Until then, patience is in order.

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA
Managing Director

~Broken Record

Right now the market is “…Home on the range / Where the buffalo roam / And the deer and the antelope play / Where seldom is heard, a discouragin’ word….” Okay, that is probably the limit on this analogy. We hear lots of discouragin’ words from the pundits, however, we are frustratingly range-bound.

The recent worries have been about interest rates. The ten-year Treasury has climbed to more than 4 percent, and this has markets in a worry. After a rally in July, when the market finally broadened out from its AI craze, we entered earnings season with 80 percent of companies beating expectations, which is higher than the 77 percent average. The market has reacted by going down.

The bears are back and they sound like a broken record. “We are heading to a recession.” “Inflation is back, just look at oil prices.” The Fed is done (or almost done) raising rates, “…but they are going to keep these rates too high for too long.” Finally, they remind us that Fed policy has “long and variable” lags.

We know now that these experts have been dead wrong for a year and a half, but are they right now? Let’s take these points one at a time.

Are we headed to a recession? Through August 16 the Atlanta Fed’s GDP Now, which is a real-time measure of GDP based on the data that has been reported thus far, is saying that the economy is growing at 5.8 percent. Once again the “blue chip” consensus of economists predicted that we would grow at 0 as of the beginning of this quarter; they now have raised their estimates to 1.5 percent. This begs the question: How long can “blue-chip experts” be this wrong and still be referred to as “blue chip”?

Will GDP growth end the quarter at more than 5 percent? Not likely. There will be data points that come in weaker than that as the quarter goes on, but there is very little probability that we sink all the way to 1.5, let alone actually go to 0, as these experts projected. More importantly, in our opinion, than the astounding 5.8 percent number, is the trajectory: Data keeps getting better. The economy is improving, not going in the other direction.

Why are they so wrong? In my opinion it is because they are still denying that we had a recession last year. We had two quarters in a row of negative GDP growth – if that had been labeled a recession (as it had been every other time in economic history), then we would understand that we are in the recovery stage of the business cycle. It is a muted recovery, largely due to bad policy (that is for a future Perspective), but it is a recovery nonetheless.

What was supposed to bring on this recession in 2023? The Fed raising interest rates. This may be one of the most controversial views I possess, but it seems clear to me that the Fed does not have the power that so many just blindly believe they have. For more on that please watch or listen to our podcast episode 2. Anyway, as inflation has been dropping, the pundits grabbed onto oil prices rising this summer to argue that inflation is still rising and therefore the Fed, which has accomplished nothing by raising rates over 5 percent, will send us to recession by going another 0.25 percent.

There are two problems with this nonsense. First, the Fed largely ignores energy prices. They stubbornly cling to “core” inflation measures, which do not include energy or food, as those prices are very volatile. This argument was really grasping at straws. However, even if the Fed did look at oil prices, they are simply trading in a range. They have basically been in the $70s for some time now. They will drop to the high $60 range and creep to the low $80 range, but that is it. This summer oil moved from the low of this range up to the high and now, sure enough it has evened out, and if anything looks to be going back down. Oil isn’t going anywhere, it is trading in a range.

In light of this, will the Fed keep rates high? Probably, because as we have pointed out before, the Fed doesn’t have a good track record of returning to “normal” after a crisis. However, if their policy isn’t slowing the economy now, why would it do so later?

Their answer would be, “Milton Friedman taught us that Fed policy has long and variable lags.” This means that it is hard to predict the impact of Fed policy and that there is a delay in the impact taking place. Milton Friedman proved this. What they don’t say is that Friedman came up with that phrase in 1962, and it was based on research of the economy from 1890 until 1950.

To take the lag argument seriously, one has to believe that our economy in 2023 moves no faster than it did in 1950. Sorry, but that is absurd. If there is any lag at all in our modern economy, it is most certainly faster than in the past.

The bear arguments carry no weight. We had a strong rally in July, and as is the case with markets, we then take a step back to move forward once more. The economy is doing fine: 80 percent of companies have beaten financial expectations. The rally will resume, we just have to be patient and prudent. Meanwhile, the pundits will continue their discouragin’ words, but we are just stuck home on the range.

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA
Managing Director

~Home, Home on the Range

Last week, bond-rating agency Fitch Ratings downgraded the rating of the United States. Instead of the highest AAA, the U.S. now has a rating of AA+. Fitch grabbed some headlines, but they did not have the impact that S&P Global had when it downgraded the U.S. in 2011. I personally would like to thank Fitch for better timing; I was supposed to be on vacation in 2011 when S&P made their downgrade…as it was, my wife and kids enjoyed the beach and pool while I stayed inside working remotely with a better view than the one from my office. At least Fitch had the decency to wait for the Osbornes to get back from their summer vacation before throwing their bomb at the market.

In 2011, the downgrade made a big splash: We were just recovering from our own financial crisis, Europe was still having their financial crisis, and the market was on shaky ground. This time, the market took the news with hardly a shrug. I wonder how much this shrug played into Moody’s decision to downgrade banks five months after Silicon Valley Bank went under in the non-crisis that the financial media tried to create. They did this with the dire warning that it isn’t over.

There is no banking crisis. There is a difficult environment for banks, but a difficult environment is not the same thing as a crisis. One has to wonder about the timing of the downgrade. Where was the downgrade of banks before Silicon Valley failed? Why is the U.S. being downgraded now? The problem with rating agencies is and always has been that they view the world through the rear-view mirror. They react to what has already happened and do not, in my opinion, actually provide investors with forewarning as most investors believe. After their remarkable failure leading up to the 2008 Financial Crisis, it is a wonder anyone pays attention at all to the rating agencies.

How should one measure risk if not by looking at ratings? We believe that prudent investing is risk averse, and that risk is best measured by what Benjamin Graham referred to as the “margin of safety.” The margin of safety is the difference between the value of an investment and the current market price of an investment. Calculating the value is a subject beyond the scope of this Insight (at Iron Capital we use our own research and models to do this), but the end result does not need to be exact – we need to know only that the value is much higher than the price.

How can we do that? U.S. Treasuries and banks happen to be two great examples. The yield on U.S. Treasuries were extremely low in recent memory; for most of the last 15 years, the 10-year Treasury had a yield in the neighborhood of 2 percent. The prices of bonds are inversely related to the yield. In other words, low yields mean high prices, and high yields mean low prices. Treasuries are usually considered “risk free” because, regardless of the rating Fitch or S&P wish to bestow, the Treasury is not going to default on its debt. However, record-low yield means record-high prices, and any time something sells for record-high prices, the margin of safety is low. Sure enough, when rates finally rose in 2022, bond investors had the worst returns in the history of the aggregate bond index – with no warning from any rating agencies.

Banks offered the reverse. When Silicon Valley Bank failed and the pundits kept yelling “crisis,” we purchased two banks. That seems like the riskiest time to invest in banks, doesn’t it? It is amazing how often safety seems risky and risky seems safe. We purchased Western Alliance Bancorp and Truist Financial for appropriate portfolios. I name these for educational purposes only, so don’t just go out and buy them.

Both banks are well run and in solid shape. Both were selling for a price not seen since the Financial Crisis. The margin of safety was high. Western Alliance, which is a more aggressive investment, is up 50 percent in the short time we have owned it. Truist has not been as exciting, and is actually slightly down, but it is paying a 6.5 percent dividend and we are confident it will weather this difficult environment and do well over time. Meanwhile, our clients will gladly collect the 6.5 percent coupon.

Does this mean our timing is better than the rating agencies? Well, timing is a fool’s errand. No one can time the market, including the rating agencies. One can pay attention to price and value and the margin of safety. Prudent investing is risk averse, which often leads to counter-intuitive moments. No one knows the future of Treasuries, but at a 4 percent yield they have a better margin of safety than at a 2 percent yield, regardless of what Fitch says. One cannot predict the future of the entire banking sector, but the margin of safety on individual banks can be calculated and is often the most attractive when investors are the most nervous.

The rating agencies can say what they want. We will continue to invest prudently, and that largely means ignoring ratings.

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA
Managing Director

~Timing

It has been a strange year in the market. The headlines all seem good with the most-followed broad stock market indices all headed up, but as I always say, it is what is happening underneath the surface that tells the real story.

Those headline numbers have been skewed by a very small handful of stocks. It started in the beginning of this year with the stock of large technology companies rebounding from what was a bad year last year. Then the market became fixated with artificial intelligence (AI), and stocks like Nvidia and a handful of companies who are perceived as being on the cutting edge of AI have skyrocketed – especially in the month of May.

In the meantime, the majority of the stocks in the market are languishing, and several of the most solid and conservative stocks are actually getting beaten up. The excitement over AI is understandable, since this is cutting-edge technology that many believe will be bigger than the internet in terms of the change it brings to our society. A word of caution: Technological change never happens as quickly as the zealots believe, and it seldom happens in the ways predicted. This is likely a bubble, but bubbles are normal when new things come around.

What doesn’t make sense is the fact that the gains in AI stocks have seemingly come at the expense of everything else. Much of that still comes from the idea that the Fed will cause a recession, or at least that is the story. To a certain degree this makes sense, because one of the lessons of the last 15 years has been that technology companies can grow even when the economy isn’t, so they have counter-intuitively become defensive in nature. However, that doesn’t mean that actual defensive stocks – the stocks of companies that just chug along and deliver solid dividends come thick or thin – should have lost their recession-proof status. Yet, these have been beaten up this year, after holding up extremely well last year.

It is frustrating, especially when it is now becoming obvious even to Wall Street that the most-anticipated recession of all time isn’t coming. Inflation is dropping. The consumer price index came out this week, and inflation has grown at 4 percent over the past year – the lowest reading in a long time and less than half of the peak. The producer price index, which follows wholesale prices and usually is a leading indicator of where inflation is going, also came out this week:  negative month-over-month, and just 1.1 percent over the last year.

What does the Fed do? They finally stopped raising rates. Then, as we have complained in the past, they just had to talk. They are now saying they will raise rates two more times. That is a load of garbage and anyone paying attention knows it.

Can the market continue to go up with the Fed talking tough? That depends. It depends on the market rotating away from the AI bubble and toward the other 495-ish stocks in the S&P 500, just as an example. Regional banks are selling at valuations not seen since the financial crisis, and while the environment has gotten tougher, we are a long way from a crisis. Energy stocks have taken it on the chin and the most boring stocks of them all, utilities, have been mysteriously beaten down. If all of these various categories bounce back, then the second half of this year will be very strong.

On the other hand, if the market keeps fixating on a non-existent recession and AI, then we have probably gone as far as we can. We don’t think that is going to happen, but in the short term, anything can happen. That is why prudent investing requires patience. Strange times eventually work themselves out and patience is rewarded.

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA
Managing Director

~A Strange Year Thus Far

“Reason’s got nothing to do with it.” ~ Mr. Gibbs, “Pirates of the Caribbean”

Many years ago when I worked at Invesco, I transitioned from the trust company to the retirement division, where I was the director of investments. On one of my first days in my new office, two blocks farther down Peachtree in the Midtown area of Atlanta, the CEO of the retirement division stopped me in the hall and demanded that I explain why the market was down that day. I responded, “Well, Bob, the market is down because more people are selling than buying.” He didn’t like my answer.

If one listens to the financial media pundits, then she would probably believe that there is always some legitimate reason for market behavior and that the market is always logical and correct. Unfortunately, that is nonsense. The market does do a good job over the longer term in valuing various companies, but on any given day, it goes up when there are more buyers and down when there are more sellers, and why those people are buying and/or selling is anyone’s guess. Maybe an investor sells because he knows something about the company, or maybe he needs the money to pay his child’s tuition. There is no way to know.

Part of the art of investment management is being able to discern when price movement in the market means something from when there is a disconnect between the market and reality. We seem to be in one of those disconnect moments lately, and there are various reasons for it.

For more than a year now we keep hearing from Wall Street that a recession is right around the corner. Oddly, the same pundits who tell us this will also say that the two negative GDP growth quarters we experienced in the first and second quarters of 2022 somehow don’t count. Meanwhile, they keep telling us that the Fed raising rates will cause a recession, and we keep not going into a recession. The initial reading of GDP growth in the first quarter of 2023 was 1.1 percent; the biggest drag was a lack of inventory building. Consumption was closer to 3 percent. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow, which is a real-time measure of GDP growth, was 2.9 percent through May 17.

Yet, there are still very few who have been willing to admit they were wrong. Several talking heads have now shifted to claiming that we are in the late phase of the economic cycle – in other words, the business cycle runs from recession to recovery to boom to recession, and we are approaching the end of a cycle where the boom slows and we enter a recession. Cycles historically last five years, although recently they have been lasting longer. The problem with this narrative is that we have had two recessions in the last three years: We had the Covid recession, and then the recession last year that no one wants to call a recession. If anything, we should be at the beginning of a new cycle.

If this weren’t bad enough, the pundits keep screaming the word “crisis” every time a bank is mentioned. We do not have a banking crisis; what we do have is a difficult environment for running a bank, and this environment comes after a prolonged period of arguably the easiest era banks have ever had – they could borrow for free and make almost any loan they wanted and still be okay. They didn’t have to pay anything to depositors to keep them. As interest rates have risen, all of that changed. As the old saying goes, when the tide goes out, we find out who was swimming naked. Two very poorly run banks have gone under. That is not a crisis; that is a return to business as normal. Poorly run businesses are supposed to fail.

Now we have the debt ceiling to worry about. Like all of our politics today, this is mostly theater. Our politicians will play for the camera, telling us how reasonable they are being while the other guys are being careless. In the end, they will raise the limit. They will wait until the last minute because…why wouldn’t they? The drama, while bad for the country, is good for ratings.

While all of this noise is clanging in the background, the reality is that our economy is still growing. Companies reported earnings that were almost 4 percent better than forecast, and well-run banks are actually taking market share from poorly run banks. It is always frustrating when the market disconnects from reality, but this is precisely when opportunities are created.

In times like these, it helps to stay focused on prudent investing and remember the wisdom of Mr. Gibbs, “Reason’s got nothing to do with it.”

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA
Managing Director

~Disconnect