A surge in the Japanese Yen is resulting in home repatriation of Yen-funded positions overseas, and close-out of Yen-funded positions abroad. While Google was found guilty of home bias anti-competitive search engine behavior, any judicial remedies may be worse for recipients of Google’s “shelf space” payments than for Google itself. Work-from-home trends have plateaued at ~30%, which has important implications for distressed office investors. Most distressed sales now require discounts of 60%+ vs pre-COVID levels; the fundamentals of the office sector explain why.

View video here

From 1930 to 2010, there were six extended periods of small cap outperformance as it dominated large cap over that entire period. But since 2010, small cap sits alongside value stocks and non-US stocks in the unholy trinity of underperforming portfolio strategies. While poor profit fundamentals argue against a prolonged period of outperformance vs large cap, small cap stocks are at their cheapest levels in the 21st century with potential market and political catalysts in their favor. First, a few words on the CrowdStrike outage.

View video here

A top ten list on what might happen… not what will happen, in honor of strategist Byron Wien

View video here

The impact of weight loss drugs on equity markets.

View video here

Falling US inflation and possible Fed easing are increasing talk of a soft landing rather than a hard landing and bear market. Our 2024 Outlook takes a closer look at equities, fixed income, China, Japan, antitrust, weight loss drugs and ten surprises for 2024.

View transcript

View the video here

A review on industry returns in private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, commercial real estate, infrastructure and private credit

View video here

Six questions and answers on the intersection between geopolitics, US politics and financial markets

View transcript

View video here

Comments on NYC compared to 21 other US cities with respect to urban recovery, commercial real estate, mass transit, crime, outmigration, work-from-home trends, tax rates, economic pulse, fiscal health, unfunded pensions, energy prices, industry diversification and competitiveness.

View transcript

View video here

View deck here

I asked Chat GPT-4 questions on economics, markets, energy and politics that my analysts and I worked on over the last two years. This piece reviews the results, along with the latest achievements and stumbles of generative AI models in the real world, and comments on the changing relationship between innovation, productivity and employment.

View transcript

View video and charts here

Global resilience to higher rates

View transcript

View video and charts here

The impact of underperforming 2020 and 2021 US IPOs

View transcript with chart references

Comments on mega-cap stocks and artificial intelligence. Then, it’s time for some of my unsolicited letters to Barron’s, MSNBC, “No Labels”, FHFA and more.

The Supreme Court vs the Regulatory State. Recent Supreme Court rulings may now usher in the largest pushback on the regulatory state since the Reagan Administration. A look at the end of Chevron deference, a revised statute of limitations for challenging government regulations, the Major Questions Doctrine, the right to a jury trial and a District Court injunction against Biden’s LNG export moratorium.

Time to retire the US/Emerging Markets barbell for a while

View transcript with chart references

Before getting into the US$ discussion, three quick things. First, despite strong US data in Q1 and Q2, the US still appears headed for a slowdown later this year. As shown below, many longer-horizon leading indicators point in that direction. Excess household savings are also being run down and should be 60%-70% depleted by the end of the year. Stable copper prices are one exception but its usefulness as a business cycle indicator is affected by China’s reopening and the copper intensity of the energy transition. Click here for a chart collection on these leading indicators.

Frankenstein’s Monster: banking system deposits and the unintended fallout from the Fed’s monetary experiment; commercial real estate, regional banks and the COVID occupancy shock; the wipeout of Credit Suisse contingent capital securities; a market and economic update; and an update on San Francisco, which has experienced the weakest post-COVID recovery of any major city in North America.

Renewables are growing but don’t always behave the way you want them to.  This year’s topics include the impact of rising clean energy investment and new energy bills, how grid decarbonization is outpacing electrification, the long-term oil demand outlook, the flawed concept of levelized cost when applied to wind and solar power, the scramble for critical minerals, the improving economics of energy storage and heat pumps, the transmission quagmire, energy from municipal waste, carbon sequestration, a whydrogen update, the Russia-China energy partnership, methane tracking and some futuristic energy ideas that you can just ignore, for now.

View transcript with chart references

The large language model battles begin: a look at the future of web search, conventional wisdom machines, hallucinating bears in space, some early application successes and how far they still are from humans.

View transcript with chart references

The Federal debt and how the Visigoths may try to break the system if no one fixes it

View transcript with the chart references

The affair with the market catalysts of the last decade is over now, and a new era of investing begins

View transcript with chart references 

Holiday Eye on the Market: the YUCs, the MUCs, FTX, the Gensler Rule and the Summers Rule

In the October Eye on the Market I wrote about how in 6 of 7 post-war recessions, equity markets preceded the decline in profits, employment and GDP by several months at least. I also mentioned that the best indicator to follow was the ISM survey, which tends to coincide with the equity market bottom +/- 2 months. So, in the interest of thinking about when equities could bottom, the first chart below projects the ISM survey by looking at new orders and inventories. Using this crude approach, the ISM would bottom in the mid-40’s in December. If so, 3570 on the S&P 500 Index reached in mid-October could actually mark the low for the cycle; such a scenario should not be discounted entirely, and would be consistent with market history.

Reruns: how equity declines precede the fall in earnings, growth and employment during recessions; new US semiconductor export policies on China and the clash of empires; and other press article extolling the renewable energy virtues of a country with little relevance for anyone else

Investing in professional sports leagues and related businesses. As rules around private equity ownership of sports leagues expand, we review team valuations and profitability, emerging sports categories, streaming and broadcast revenues, the decline of regional sports networks, drivers and comparisons of league parity, relegation and financial pressures in the English Premier League, stadium subsidies, sport betting and other adjacent businesses, antitrust issues, the esports winter, the worst teams that money can buy and the best basketball players of all time.

View video here

Arrested Development: the pressure on profit margins, the tightest labor markets in decades and whether “second chance” policies for those with criminal arrest records can expand the labor force

Three topics in this month’s Eye on the Market. First, an update on the Fed, inflation and corporate profits since we believe the June equity market lows may be retested in the fall. Second, a detailed look at what would have to happen for the climate bill’s projected GHG savings to actually occur; the answer matters given the implications for the US natural gas industry. And finally, will all the new IRS agents really stick to auditing taxpayers above $400k? Data from the GAO suggests there may not be enough of them to meet the Administration’s revenue targets.

Topics: A revised map of the United States; investing in equities before a recession; Russia’s natural gas squeeze on Europe leads to another rescue program for Italy; the high cost of pariah status for the oil refining industry

Hydrogen use cases may be much narrower than advertised, and the timeline is a very long one

Fossil fuel bans, heat pumps and electrification of winter heating: What will happen to transmission grids at times of peak loads if no backup heating systems are in place? And what about the pace of change if bans on fossil fuels only apply to new buildings?

The slowdown induced by central bank tightening is just starting. Be patient when adding risk to portfolios. Valuations have declined materially but the price paid for high earnings growth is still elevated.

We continue with two topics on electrification, which is the foundation of many deep decarbonization plans: electric vehicle adoption by gasoline super-users and the transmission quagmire

We start with a summary of the energy landscape, including the energy crisis in Europe, the recovery in the oil & gas sector and a warning label on industrial electrification and carbon sequestration

Surveying the Damage: Russia’s recurring war on Ukraine, equity market declines and the opportunity for bottom-fishing investors, the energy price surge/recession outlook in Europe, the impact of rising metals prices on EV battery costs, the COVID situation in Hong Kong and the latest on ivermectin

The bulk of this note is on China, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the surge in natural gas, oil, coal, electricity, wheat, copper, palladium and other prices which will probably drag Europe into recession, and impose a heavy growth drag on the rest of the world as well. But before getting into it, the chart below should hang in the offices of policymakers everywhere. Energy transitions are inherently slow moving, particularly when citizens of countries adopting them erect NIMBY barriers along the way (a topic we cover in this year’s forthcoming energy paper). As we have discussed often, capital spending by the world’s largest energy companies has fallen 75% from peak levels while global demand for oil, gas and coal are all at or above pre-COVID levels. Countries that reduced their supply of thermal energy at a much faster pace than they reduced their demand are paying a very stiff price for that right now. We expect some about-face movements on this in the days ahead.

With spring planting season having arrived in Zone 7, it’s a good time to review agriculture from an investor’s perspective. Topics include agricultural price inflation in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; public and private equity investments in agriculture, farmland ownership and the drivers of farmland returns; seed bio-engineering designed to reduce consumption of fertilizer, fungicide and water; and some satellite data on the immense agricultural damage occurring in Gaza and Israel. The Appendix addresses the avian flu’s impact on agriculture and the food supply.

View transcript

View video here

Listen to Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy, Monica Dicenso, Head of Global Investment Opportunities Group, and Kathryn Pasqualone, Client Advisor, North America Institutional, discuss the current situation in Russia and Ukraine, and the implications for investors.

Topics: Tracking the market risk unwind; Supply chain update; Ukraine; Invasion of the COVID Body Snatchers

On equity markets, the Lombards, SPAC investors, Bone-setters, George Washington, COVID bots and Omicron.

Some things just cannot be talked about. So in this year’s Thanksgiving piece, I wrote about something else.

“Help Wanted”. We expect semiconductor, vehicle and other goods bottlenecks to resolve themselves in the months ahead, and interpret declining business surveys as the result of a temporary supply shock and not a sign of inadequate demand. As a result, growth should rebound in 2022, and positions that benefit from reflation should benefit (energy, value and cyclicals). However, while goods bottlenecks will dissipate, the US will still face tight labor markets and rising wages that are at odds with current Fed policy

The global supply chain mess will require increased global vaccination and acquired immunity, semiconductor capacity expansion and the end of extraordinary housing/labor supports to resolve. We expect all three to occur over the next few months, leading to a global growth bounce in 2022

Topics: if people avoided SPACs instead of avoiding COVID vaccines, the US would be both wealthier and closer to herd immunity.  An update on our SPAC analysis from last February, and a look at the strange mathematical paradox that ends up understating some critical COVID vaccine efficacy data

 Politics, vaccination resistance and the Delta variant; US economic recovery update; big tech reliance on acquisitions to fuel growth

COVID and the Delta variant; the Fed as firefighter and arsonist; US-China economic divorce picks up steam; and the pig-snake inflation timetable (how long until we know if there’s a permanent wage/price rise).

Every two years, we take a close look at the performance of the private equity industry given its rising share of institutional and individual portfolios.  Our findings this year: the private equity industry is still outperforming public equity, but this outperformance narrowed as all markets benefit from non-stop monetary and fiscal stimulus, and as private equity acquisition multiples rise.  We examine manager dispersion, benchmarks, co-investing, GP-led secondary funds, the torrid pace of industry fundraising and manager fees in this year’s piece.

Cicadian Rhythms: the fading prospects of a US disinflationary boom; Japan’s structural reform/M&A emergence; and Eye on the Market mailbag responses to questions on Tesla/Musk, GLPs, housing, China, Truth Social and Meta’s latest open source model

View video here

Absent decarbonization shock treatment, humans will be wedded to petroleum and other fossil fuels for longer than they would like. Wind and solar power reach new heights every year but still represent just 5% of global primary energy consumption. In this year’s energy paper, we review why decarbonization is taking so long: transmission obstacles, industrial energy use, the gargantuan mineral and pipeline demands of sequestration and the slow motion EV revolution. Other topics include our oil & gas views, President Biden’s energy agenda, China, the Texas power outage and client questions on electrified shipping, sustainable aviation fuels, low energy nuclear power, hydrogen and carbon accounting.

Biden goes for broke on growth, driving coincident and leading indicators to all-time highs; the Value recovery and where it goes from here; COVID herd immunity, the path to normalcy and rising concerns about thrombosis risks from vector vaccines.

If long-term US interest rates stay below 2%, that’s a great sign for equity investors. But if they don’t… it’s amazing to see the pretzels that people contort into to convince themselves that rising rates are not a problem for equities. Also: an early look at the Zoom shock on commercial and residential real estate, and the diverging COVID trends in the US vs Europe.

Short stories on the global recovery, plummeting COVID infections, Larry Summers & the bond market, SPAC sponsors, renewable energy, the Texas power outage and the battle for the Republican Party.