We Are in a Post Financial Era

I think about investing a lot. I’m thrifty. I’m a value investor. I’ve read “The. Intelligent Investor” and “Security Analysis.” I’ve done all the practice problems in Newnan’s “Engineering Economic Analysis.” I’ve read Geraldine Weiss. I’ve done OK. Better than OK. But for the last two years none of the traditional value approaches to investing work.

I know that two year stretches do not a market make. I know that we are used to a reversion to the mean. I know there are short term trends. I think this is different. Here’s why it might be different.

Investing and business activity (investing is a business activity!) require rule of law. Business activity requires thousands of shared assumptions about how contracts work, what money is, who the parties involved are, and much much more. A lot of this stuff is defined in the Uniform Commercial Code. A lot of it is spelled out in case law. Most of it is tacit. If you buy lemonade at the lemonade stand you can see each other, neither of you has to explain what money is, how the money is exchanged for lemonade, why the lemonade is for sale, or thousands of other ideas that underpin the whole enterprise.

What if some of the tacitly understood underpinnings of the transaction changed unbeknownst to one or even both parties? What if money changed? What if unbeknownst to both parties the government loaned money to a competitor without the competition even filling out an application? This and more is happening.

This shifting business environment makes it impossible to be successful in business because of a rational set of decisions. (You can be successful with luck or being offered the ticket.) We’ve never had all the information when we made business decisions, but we’ve never had so little accurate information before. Don’t tell me about data mining or your CRM. It’s mining sewage.

Traditional money no longer exists. Federal reserve notes are an entirely new type of instrument. Because of this returns are no longer composed of a risk premium, cost of capital, and an inflation hedge. This breaks value investing. Old models don’t hold.

Because the Fed is actively buying S&P 500 bond funds, being the last AND first resort buyer of corporate debt, there is little or no reward for running a company debt free. Additionally, the consequences for taking on debt are minimized or maybe even completely absorbed by the Fed. We don’t know what corporate debt costs because the fed has it’s thumb on the scale. It’s been like this since Jekyll island and is getting worse. As a result pricing for debt and even retail goods is Fuxxored. This is leading to fuxxored supply chains. Lumber shortages and corn oversupply. It’ll lead to more.

Many investments (derivatives, CDO’s, others) are meta-assets. They are models that exhibit behavior based on what other assets do. What, precisely, are you buying when you buy a derivative? I’ll wait for your answer. Most answers I hear boil down to buying a magic incantation designed to throw off a certain yield. They damned sure aren’t concrete like 1/2 interest in a new Bridgeport mill.

Crypto is even whackier than that. As my readers know I’m pro-crypto currency. That doesn’t mean there aren’t serious questions about the thinginess of it. Metaphysically, what is bitcoin? What does it mean to own a hash of numbers? Where does it live? Don’t say blockchain. The blockchain has a number of physical locations. WHere are these locations? Whose property is it on? What consequences are there for parking your money on someone else’s hard drive? No one knows. I’ve read the papers. I’ve heard the nerds speak. The truth is no one knows and we won’t know until we’ve used it for at least 100 years.

AND ALL OF IT REQUIRES PETROLEUM.

Most investment instruments are now entirely social in nature. You aren’t going to be rewarded for investing prudently in companies who make a lot of money using very little. They are bets on the perceived efficacy of policy. Is the government going to back Tesla to the hilt? How much more money is going to be printed? When is mortgage forbearance over? These policies are certain to work until they don’t. So financial decisions are now reduced to:

  1. Betting with the fed
  2. Betting against the fed
  3. Kaczynski-ism

The first two come down to market timing. The last is means ostracism. Wat do?

Derp.

16 thoughts on “We Are in a Post Financial Era”

  1. I agree, but here is one thing. Money is what society chooses. Right now, it is in the process of choosing cryptos. If we collectively agree they have value, they do. QED.

    The unbacked fiat era is in the process of dying. You get it, but even Ray Dalio only seemed to get it this weekend. We are in a process to a new financial world. The billionaires are coming over, one at a time.

    Everything will turn over in the next 10 years. Danger=opportunity.

    Been on the case a long time. Twitter @Runyan99

    1. “Money is what society chooses.” I don’t think this is true. Money is money. It is not dependent on choice or judgement. A=A without respect to deciding or judgement. The entire fiat disaster is based on this assumption that “Money is what society chooses.” That is not true. If there is such a thing as truth, there is such a thing as objective money. Crypto ultimately won’t work either because it is metaphysically broken in precisely the same way fiat is, AND it is dependent on petrochemical.

      1. You are not quite right about this. Money is money is not an argument. So what is it. Is it dollars? does that mean it contains 375.64 grains of fine silver; on the 8th of August 1786 as per the Continental Congress? Or is it the un-redeemable stuff we have now?

        Definition of shell money
        : a medium of exchange consisting of shells The … Karok, and Yurok peoples of Northern California attached great cultural value to shell money … .— Ralph T. Coe, Lost And Found Traditions, 1986

        Is it shells? If congress mandated shells, we would be obliged to use them.

        The fiat disaster you describe is a disaster of government decree, not anything people or markets or society chose. The exciting thing about crypto is that it was market developed and market chosen. It has some potential, through networking effect, to overwhelm the extant system, which is in the process of destroying itself anyway. It is begging for it’s own replacement.

        You already know this, which is why you already own BTC.

        1. To be clear, the international market chose gold pre-1971. Since then money has been unredeemable American power. That isn’t going to continue to work, and the market is in the process of choosing the next workable alternative. We aren’t yet sure what that will be, but it ain’t greenbacks.

        2. It’s not an argument. It’s a metaphysical statement. A=A. Money is money. It is not an artifact of the mind. It cannot be what “people agree upon as a medium of exchange.” I’d argue the dollar, shells, and bitcoin are proxies for true money.

          Bitcoin is doomed in the same way. It is fiat. It is not real money. It’s MUCH better than federal reserve notes, but is metaphysically broken too. It requires too many externalities to work long-term. Semiconductors. Petroleum. Software. It’s too complex to work long term.

  2. I agree, in a way. I see quantum computing attacks eventually ruining the network. But what happens between now and 2025 is currently way more important to me.

  3. By 2025 stock to flow model designed by a guy named PlanB predicts the Bitcoin price between $1 million and $10 million. The same model seems to work for other commodities like gold and housing. I don’t see the flaw in the prediction.

    To update on the quantum thing, a recent article I read predicted the computing power to hack bitcoin will arrive in about 13 years.

  4. That’s one theory of why Value Investing has woefully underperformed the past 10 or 20 years—and I think the argument has merit. The moral hazard created by thinking the government is an inexhaustible backstop comes with a price tag payable at some point in the future. But the Malthusian approach to any question is always accompanied by equally impressive counter argument: growth covers a multitude of sins.

    I agree with Hayek that the boom contains the seed of its own destruction, but the sun still comes up in the east and history keeps on wobbling.

  5. Scott in one of your streams you mentioned a bunch of books to learn how to invest and read financial documents. What were those? I would watch it over, but I started a video and podcast fast.

    1. “Security Analysis” and “The Intelligent Investor” By Ben Graham
      Anything by Geraldine Weiss
      The Barons Dictionary of Financial Terms.
      The handbook for the HP 12C Calculator.

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