Friday, 23 September 2011

OF MUSIC AND MONEY, ‘ENLIGHTENED INVESTMENT’



No thing on earth to nought can fall,
The Eternal onward moves in all;
Rejoice, by being be sustained.
Being is deathless: living wealth,
With which the All adorns itself,
By laws abides and is maintained.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Testament)



I have just reread Peter Boerner’s portrait of the Almighty, Goethe…

His achievement, I will not attempt to eulogise. One should see and read for oneself…
However, I noticed the musicality that inheres in his attitude to Nature, life and being. As a successful businessman and lawyer who also inspired Beethoven and Schubert, there is a cadence and rhythm to his thoughts, which may transfer to enlightened investment.  


Goethe had his Theory of Colour; I shall venture a hesitant Theory of Enlightened Investment.


THE THEORY

Like Goethe’s approach to nature (and the art and science thereof), there is a music to capital investment.

We are caught between the contrary tendencies of ‘Stability’ and ‘Mobility’ of money and wealth. Goethe spoke of ‘polarity’ and ‘enhancement’ ever-present in nature and living.

This contrariety, however, need not lead us to strife.

As with the music of Beethoven and the music of the spheres, we ought to adapt to the Investment Continuum: Between saving and consumption, capitalisation and reinvestment.

To this end, one should have a purpose: to life, love and money. This entails fixity, not rigidity, of Investment objective: facility, not debility..

Schiller complimented Goethe, that he worked from the simplest organisms to the most complex thought-processes. In music, the composer deduces cell to cell, phrase to phrase from note after note. The same is true, I contend, of share and dividend, saving and consumption, financial interest and risk appetite/objective..

According to Schiller, ‘your [Goethe] intellect binds together the rich aggregate of its concept in a Beautiful unity’.


And one’s overall purpose: Goethe would answer -

The True, The Good and The Beautiful.

(A wider argument to follow).



WEALTH AND SPIRIT MANAGEMENT: MY IDEAL VALUE PROPOSITION


I have tried to step back from my endeavours, spiritual, material and professional. What would be my ideal value proposition in an ideal world? Obviously, none such exists, yet..

From my limited vantage point, I would propose the following:


‘To be an ideas man, who is service oriented and service-inspired’.


To “ANALYSE, SYNTHESISE AND SYMPATHISE”..


To encourage and employ focus, clarity and vision


Generating wealth, which translates into true prosperity

Through a faith in CULTURE and COOPERATION.


To be ethical, thereby helping clients and people become the key to their own interests.. (Cf Tocqueville on Democracy in America and Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist)



To realise tomorrow, today

To be unique and exciting!!


To facilitate self-awareness through ‘other’-awareness. (Compare the legal philosopher, Costas Douzinas).

To be vigilant of my own and others shortcomings and weaknesses through risk management of psychological bias

Producing GROWTH

And sharing in the Gift of Civilization..


For myself, this might be the ideal Agora, the Ideal Marketplace..


(On the other hand?)…

Monday, 19 September 2011

MORE VALUE FOR MONEY: SOME WAVES OF FORTUNE


While preparing future posts, I have reflected on the Market's past fortunes and Fortuna's beckoning winds of change.. 

Thus I have just read an interesting paper by Louis Lowenstein, Rifkind Professor of Finance and Law at Columbia University on the fortunes of the top-ten value investment funds in relation to the S&P 500. The paper is titled 'Searching for Rational Investors in a Perfect Storm'. Lowenstein's paper claims the value funds outperformed the Index 11% year-on-year with purchases limited to 34 stocks or so with low churn.

Regarding the 90's runup of the NASDAQ and the mutual fund industry's 'speculative pyrotechnics', Lowenstein claims that EMT enthusiasts and tenured scholiasts had very little to support their position on 'homo economicus'. According to Professor Lowenstein,

' Obviously the theory was wrong – woefully so. In the late 1990s, stocks soared to levels out of all proportion to their underlying values, indeed to levels well beyond even the excesses of the 1920s. If the NASDAQ Composite Index, for example was right at 1200 in April 1997, it surely wasn’t right at 5000 in March 2000, and then right again at 1100 two years later. (The
rise and then almost 50% decline of the broader based S&P 500, though widely noted, was also stunning)'.

Assessing value performance against the market average, Lowenstein lined up the ten value funds against the declining S&P 500 between 1999-2003. With negative annualised return of 0.57%, Lowenstein suggests all ten value funds were healthily up, a five-Sigma event for the quants. The ten funds are as follows: Clipper Fund, Mutual Beacon, FPA, Capital Oak Value, First Eagle Global, Oakmark Select, Longleaf Partners, Source Capital, Legg Mason Value and Tweedy Browne American Value. Not one of these funds held 'hot stocks', Cisco, Nortel and Enron! 

The returns map as follows:

Clipper 11.9%
FPA Capital 15.29
First Eagle Global. 17.02
Legg Mason Value 4.43
Longleaf Ptners 10.94
Mutual Beacon 10.28
Oak Value 2.63
Oakmark Select 15.43
Source Capital 15.22
Tweedy Br. Amer. 4.87
___________________________
Average annual returns for the five years:
Group Average 10.80%
S&P 500 Index -0.57%

 
Obviously I am not offering, and cannot offer, investment advice but the paper is worth reading and, I think, points to valuable advice... Check it out for yourself.

One more thing. Reading British economic historian, Lord Robert Skidelsky's excellent, Keynes: Return of the Master which features a robust attack on EMT and the Rational Expecation Hypothesis. Skidelsky, recommended to his reader by Paul Krugman, includes a very succint discussion on the Gaussian bell-curve, and the associated dangers of 'bell-curve' risk management and modelling. Should be read in conjunction with paper above.

In addition, Lord Skidelsky extols the benefits ("sells the benefits" in industry parlance) of non-finance related pursuits particularly as this aids long-term investment. Keynes, though he lost three fortunes(!), nevertheless ended up with a positive ledger enabling him to live 'wisely, agreeably and well'. Would that we could all do the same!

Finally, refer to authors Joshua Coval, Jakub Jurek and Erik Stafford for their Harvard paper, 'The Economics of Structured Finance' regarding the rise and fall of structured credit. The authors peer into that darkened mirror to review the default complexity - Nassim Taleb would argue 'convexity' - of CDOs and CDOs squared and the growth of the subprime industry. The authors acknowledge the limitation in pricing appropriately for higher-yield when faced by undiversiable, systematic risk caused by a failing economy.

I will have more to say on this later. For the moment, I would submit that the ratings agencies did not cultivate the 360 hindsight I mentioned in the past, which attitude may have enabled them to view market risk 'in the round'. (Then again, the value investor's real skill, Graham, Dodd, Keynes and Lowenstein will tell you, lies in discarding hindsight bias for qualitative foresight - not absolute predictive power, but prudence).

When sufficiently prepared with data, I would also contest that market participants, agencies and everyone else(?!) could have adopted a more cautious, synthetic/creative outlook on the portfolio analytics and credit spreads to determine whether the industry was truly indulging in too much of a good thing.. At the same time, there is ample room here for vintage behavioural analysis a la Robert Shiller, in order to sample the 'vintage', as Joshua Coval, professor of Administration at Harvard Business puts it, of the last few bottled years of credit quality, and 'overcollateralized' bond spreads. In any event, fortunes rise and fortunes fall and 'men', as Tocqueville observed, 'are forever rising or sinking in the social scale'.

Regarding the structured credit run-up to 2009 meltdown, therefore, I sense the presence of the Goddess, Fortuna over my shoulder. Where will the industry go now?? But more on that another time.

Thursday, 15 September 2011

REFLECTIONS ON LEADERSHIP

Further to comments on Foreign Affairs, 'The World Ahead' discussed below, I read Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich's anniversary lecture for the Curtin Library. The library is under Paul Keating's tutelage. Two paragraphs worth transcribing; both are on the subjects of opportunity in crisis and freedom of the Internet:

'Historian John Edwards summed it up best by saying: Curtin’s “enduring achievement was not saving Australia from Japan but in creating modern postwar Australia.” This is the hallmark of great statesmen: looking beyond the moment to see the future needs of their countries. I have witnessed the same courage and conviction and clarity in the leadership of Paul Keating. He faced different challenges: an unprecedented budget deficit, a recession, and dramatically shifting events in the Asia-Pacific. He too responded with unflinching vision and uncommon candor. In the midst of a recession where the normal instinct of politicians is to blame their predecessors and forces beyond their control, Keating did what great leaders do. He described the recession as the “recession Australia needed to have.” He understood - as my friend Rahm Emanuel has said - that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And he articulated a vision for a more secure financial future with a floating currency, a national superannuation system, and expanded trade and engagement throughout the burgeoning Asia-Pacific. These transformations have endowed Australia’s economy today with an enviable strength and resilience'...

'Several of the things we must do to prevent scarcity don’t appear to have any direct connection to putting food or water on the table. For example, we must fight for an open internet because that is an essential tool to solving these problems. How can we possibly convince nations at different stages of development, with different political systems, and different economies, to make sacrifices and investments, and to collaborate on food, water, and energy production, unless we are all working from the same information? We support an open internet because of the intrinsic value of free expression. But we also support a free Internet for straightforward practical reasons - because the Internet is how many people in the 21st century learn facts, debate solutions, and solve problems. Without the free flow of information, people are less likely to see crises coming, or hold their leaders accountable. So an open internet is our engaging people around the world. Everyone on this planet is entitled to their own opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts. The internet can help ensure that the facts are out there for everyone'.


As mentioned previously, I am working on new posts.

CREATIVE CAPITAL: BANKING ON ART


Will follow up with paper on banking crises, finally some music stuff, Keynes on Europe and more on creative capital and alternative funds..

Will tidy up previous posts: Feel free to comment!

Wednesday, 14 September 2011

'LA GIOCONDA': PLEASE FEEL FREE TO POST

BUILDING WORLDS: CIVILIZING LAW, POLITICS AND FINANCE





The owl of Minerva begins its flight when dusk is falling…

(G W F Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right and Law)



I met a traveller from an antique land,
 
  Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desart....Near them, on the sand,
  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
  And on the pedestal, these words appear:

 My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, 
  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’)




BUILDING WORLDS: A CONSCIOUS CIVILIZATION


It is hard to define the term Civilization, as Kenneth Clarke cautioned, but one knows it when one sees it. Western and indigenous narratives have travelled, crossed and criss-crossed through the Akkadian, Sumerian, Greek, Persian and Roman empires.. Out of primordial chaos, human communities and urban polities constantly arise. Drawing on Clarke’s insights, Robert Miles has similarly alluded to the originary impulse of civilization, the word deriving from the Roman, ‘civis’ or citizen of the Roman Republic. Lost and emerging societies testify in monument and ruin alike, therefore, to the human spirit and our collective human capacity for ‘building worlds’.

Currently - and by extension I allude to the ‘current of history’ – we live in a time of crisis: crisis economics and the chaos of change. Professor Andrew Gamble indicates, nevertheless, that the West and the Rest may have reached a turning point, a point where new and more glorious socio-economic scripts are possible. As a global collectivity, humanity may stand upon the first rung of a bridge leading to financial, political and cultural progress: in short, we may be in the birth pangs of another great civilization. Reflecting upon the worldly matters of finance, law and international relations, therefore, I do see a civilizing light at the end of our historic tunnel..

As a practical corollary, moreover, I envisage greater opportunity and responsibility for global finance and business. Coupled with artistic and scientific and social endeavour, we may be on the cusp of a new, global business ethic and project for financing beneficial growth. 


CIVILIZED BEHAVIOUR: CONFRONTING THE LAW OF CHANGE


In his magisterial text, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: the Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960, Marti Koskenniemi expounds a fluid conception of socio-legal and historic change. Built from the Sir Hersch Lauterpacht symposium and lecture series at Cambridge University 1998, Koskenniemi points to the civilizing role of global culture in inculcating the international lawyer’s ‘professional sensibility’. 

Through a process of redaction, Koskenniemi congests a century of legal and political change into an account of the ‘rise and fall’ of international law and civilized conscience. Hence, Koskenniemi views lawyers, macroscopically, as ‘actors in particular social dramas’ who traverse the full ‘terrain of fear and ambition, fantasy and desire, conflict and utopia’. As a result, Koskenniemi heralds a ‘supra-national historicism’, the advent in his discourse of a fluid, flexible politico-legal dynamic of change and progress.

In particular, Koskenniemi’s internal dialogue with history is relevant to the current eurozone crisis. In the nineteenth century, great European legal minds such as Bluntschli and Sir Travers Twiss devised the paradigm of international cooperation, the ‘esprit d’internationalite which governed the European’s civilizing ‘conscience’ toward Africa and beyond. After two disastrous wars, Koskenniemi tempers this sanguine outlook with ‘realist’ and post-liberal critiques regarding ‘eurocentrism’ and the European narrative of everlasting progress. In the process, Koskenniemi stresses the importance of technology in generating better, more inclusive and inspiring narratives for international change.


TELLING STORIES: THE FUNCTION OF NARRATIVE


The function of narrative, I will argue, is to sustain explanations of change. One should question, in turn, whether these narratives are themselves ‘sustainable’. Whereas law, economics, politics and finance sustain independent stories, I would submit that we are truly engaged whenever we, collectively and in our work, acquire an enlarged ‘professional sensibility’. Koskenniemi himself refers to the term in order to distinguish fruitful story-telling, or “narrative” from sclerotic or sterile sub-narratives within narrow intellectual disciplines. In short, Koskenniemi and myself believe that history is constant, or rather constantly ‘fluid’. Things could have been different, but counterfactuals aside, professionals will seek to overcome their ‘limits of imagination’ to imagine new and better narratives. In so doing, Kosekenniemi demonstrates, professional story-telling enables struggling societies to travel beyond ‘epochal’ or biographical explanations of progress and decline.


PASSION FOR THE PAST, PASSION FOR THE FUTURE


In light of the not-yet Post-GFC world, it is time to review the ‘cyclicality’ of history and the process of building socio-economic and political worlds. Nietzsche propounded a theory of ‘perspectivalism’ to accommodate multiple viewpoints on cultural development. This is akin to the ‘commodious vicus of recirculation’ which James Joyce’s dictum reflects in Finnegan’s Wake. An isomorph for today’s world, the commodious vicus embodies Giambattista Vico’s account of history rising through ages of heroism, poetry and scientific endeavour. Such moments of advance, and punctuations of retreat, one can also read in the writings of Nietzsche, Toynbee and Spengler and their disciples. As the philosopher of logic and history, Georg Friedrich von Hegel claimed in The Philosophy of Right and Law, our conception, or philosophy of the past, always ‘comes too late’. In historic consummation, nonetheless,

‘What the conception teaches, history also shows as necessary, namely that only in a maturing actuality the ideal appears and confronts the real. It is then that the ideal rebuilds for itself this same world in the shape of an intellectual realm, comprehending this world in its substance’.

In view of history’s meanderings, more striking with respect to Civilization is the evolution of Hegel’s ethical thought in The Phenomenology of Spirit. To quote extensively:

‘Reason is spirit, when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to the level of truth, and reason is consciously aware of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself.. The living ethical world is spirit in its truth. As it first comes to an abstract knowledge of its essential nature, ethical life vanishes into the formal generality of right and law. Spirit, now being divided against itself, traces one of its worlds in the element of its objectivity as in a hard reality; this is the realm of culture and civilization’…  [My emphasis].


SHAPE-SHIFTING: THE SHIFTING SANDS OF GLOBAL BUSINESS


In the ‘World Ahead’, Foreign Affairs describes the soaring arc between twentieth century geopolitics and the resurgence of twentieth first century faith and cultural difference. Compassing the decline of American power and ‘profligacy’, the November/December 2010 edition analyses the BRIC pivotal powers, Brazil, Russia, India and China, including Turkey. In so doing, the various authors contemplate how one should legislate to solve the issues of population, food security, education and poverty. Focussing on the power in the twenty-first century, nevertheless, the edition underscores the value of technology and how value-creation will benefit the ‘rest’ as well as the West. In consequence, Foreign Affairs suggests how the world has bypassed Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ for highly dynamic, uncertain growth. (Cf Ferguson, Huntingdon, Kojeve, Fukuyama).  (See also, Zakaria, Ajami, Friedman).

For myself, three authors stand out in respect to their contribution to thought on “civilizational” change. Joseph Nye, Jr, in the “Future of American Power”, descries the outline of ‘Smart Power’. Meanwhile, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, hail the ‘advent and power of connection technologies’ in “The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power”. As with Koskenniemi, Schmidt and Cohen reflect their own innovative acts in their thought, and that thought, they hope, will facilitate positive change. Thus, the Google team see students and entrepreneurs (and more controversially, activists) as the ‘Interconnected Estate’ which will ride the tsunami of global growth. Since the Twenty-First century will be ‘all about surprises’, they applaud the policies of hyperconnected states such as Finland and Sweden who participate in the Global Network Initiative to improve digital networking. At the same time, Nye draws on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and Higher Education Supplements to advocate the use of networks and ‘Smart Power’ to effect suitable global outcomes and a ‘New Narrative’ of global progress. 


TO HELL AND BACK: BEYOND CRISIS


In Professor Andrew Gamble’s work on economic crisis, we find, I believe, a productive paradigm through which to view the Global Financial Crisis still ongoing. In The Spectre At the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession, Gamble indicates that ‘a crisis is not a natural event, but a social event, and therefore is always socially constructed and highly political’. Instead, a veritable matrix of stakeholders, not a consolidated architecture, will attempt to fill the void. Haunted by the ‘spectre of the past’ as history pertains to capitalist crisis, the current global crisis will involve consumers; national governments; international agencies; commercial organisations; non-state actors and financial intermediaries.

Presently, two schools appear to compete for the mantle of Civilization, at least economically: the Austrian/neo-liberal and New Liberal/neo-Keynesian. On the one side, the Austrian school, descended from Hayek and Friedman with neo-liberal variants, extols the acuity of the market. That is to say, the Austrians imagine the ability of market participants to bring assets to their true price levels, thereby smoothing wage and labour distributions and facilitating market clearance. From the Austrian perspective, ‘The capitalist market economy was a precious legacy which underpinned the foundations of modern civilization’. On the contrary, the New Liberals reiterate that the world, after thirty years of Great Moderation, has entered the cycle of Boom, Bust and Slump characterised by severe recession. Dismissing pre-crisis housing prices and asset values as the ‘product of exuberance’, the Keynesian demand-siders decry the failures of monetarism and Bernanke’s quantitative easing to escape the ‘liquidity trap’ of stagnant corporate cash balances and the drop in consumer confidence. They lament the likelihood of an Irving Fisher ‘deflationary hole’ together with the risks of contagion and Marxian overproduction. In fine, the New Liberals condemn neo-liberalism and Hayek’s work specifically as an ‘impressive monument to a myth’.    


WHAT OF CIVILIZATION? A ‘TRANSFORMATIONALIST’ THESIS


Like Professor Gamble, I find literary parallels between the global economic crisis and the nature of tragedy and art. With more appropriate narratives, as Gamble argues, the eurozone, America and the emerging BRIC powers can achieve catharsis. A leading thinker, Hyman Minsky has been happily revitalised by the current debacle. Advancing his Financial Instability Hypothesis, Minsky’s oeuvre see the financial system differently: opposed to stasis, financiers, policy-makers and the citizenry can instead seek to negotiate periods of robustness and fragility within an unstable equilibrium. By avoiding absolute Austrian or Keynesian prescriptions, Minskyeans prefer to adjust economic policy toward to continually new situtations. (In many respects, Minsky “moments” resemble the trajectory of Elliot and Kondratieff Waves in the real economy and the stock market respectively). Gamble paraphrases their approach thus: ‘Ideological determinism is no better than economic determinism’. And this, I feel, extends to finance and global development. The key for a global citizenry, however, will be the sense of, and power derived from, legitimation. Here, Jurgen Habermas' work is most instructive.

With an artists’s eye, Gamble opines:

‘Crisis is a much overused term, but still an indispensable one.. Here crisis is understood as a distinct moment in a process which has a much longer time-frame. This process is the disease itself, and the crisis is the turning point in that disease, the moment when the body either starts to shake off the disease or succumbs to it.

This notion of crisis as the point of resolution is also present in drama and music. Plays are often structured so that they build to a climax, which is then resolved in a way that makes sense of everything that has happened up to that point. The notion of crisis as a turning point is evident again here, the moment when a decisive change for better or worse is imminent’.          

Crucially citizens, whether of the world or their region or nation, interpret events through independent narratives. By reconstruing, or re-constructing these constructions, I would argue, humanity can construct something greater in the future. But as Gamble reminds us, crisis entails moments of suspense. Do we know what the future will bring??

ART OF PROFIT: THE TRANSFIGURATION OF FINANCE AND ITS ‘PROBLEMS, FRICTIONS AND SPARKS


Supporting the concepts of speciation and interdisciplinarity, I will tie two final perspectives together in the hope of drawing a possible future for finance. Being one possible future, my remarks are necessarily tentative. In light of the above, I hope the ‘transformational’ value of such an act of creation will be clear. In Empires of Profit: Commerce, Conquest and Corporate Responsibility, Daniel Litvin describes multinational corporations (MNCs) as ‘partially sighted giants’ which struggle to cope with the emergence of new narratives and the tension between globalization and indigenization. With 53,000 MNCs representing $200 billion of annual investment in the Asia/Pacific and Latin America, MNCs alternately create and are engulfed by ‘waves and repulsions’ of global change.

Whereas global big business and capital are exceedingly mobile, MNCs are paradoxically limited. Like Polyphemus in the Odyssey, MNCs are easily blinded by their lack of anthropological knowledge. From the destruction of the East India Company through to Murdoch and Star TV’s hesitant foray into Guandong province, China, MNCs and international business lobbies encounter problems, frictions and sparks. By opposing strict Western disciplines of rationality and narrow balance-sheet logic, however, Litvin advises that businesses, such as his ex-employer, Rio Tinto can peer ‘underneath the cloak.. of new narratives’ to sustain international cooperation and prosperity. In turn, MNCs are surprisingly capable, as the story of Aramco shows, in generating high levels of cultural commitment and social development. The objective, if only imperfectly realised, is for MNCs, capital and business to ‘understand, predict and shape' for the better.

(In accord with Litvin, I do not intend to comment on the nature of these businesses per se).   

In the Ascent of Money, Professor Niall Ferguson espouses an evolutionary theory of banking and financial reform. Setting aside for the moment Ferguson’s acrid dispute with Paul Krugman, Ferguson proposes an interesting paradigm for financial markets and for financial innovation. Tracing the extraordinary morphology of debt and capital markets from 13th century Venice to modern London, New York and beyond, Ferguson sketches, in more than impressionistic detail, the rise and fall of merchant banks and commercial houses to the apex of highly-leveraged hedge funds and commodity syndicates. Throughout this fluid history, nevertheless, Ferguson reiterates the value of innovation and price of inactivity or overreach. In a simultaneously globalizing and fragmentary world, financial markets will stand, fall or adapt to the Civilization or civilizations in which they find themselves and to which they provide sustenance.

Reflecting upon the importance, for example, of Central Banking in facilitating English industry and commerce, Ferguson dismisses any simple narrative opposing the real to the financial economy. Rather,

‘It may in fact be futile to seek a simplistic causal relationship (more sophisticated financial institutions caused growth or spurred growth spurred on financial development). It seems perfectly plausible that the two processes were interdependent and self-reinforcing. Both processes also exhibited a distinctly evolutionary character, with recurrent mutation (technical innovation), speciation (the creation of new kinds of firm) and punctuated equilibrium (crises that would determine which firms would survive and which would die out)’.

And this innovation will spiral on…


A CONCLUDED CANVAS?

According to Gamble, the crisis was a ‘moment of truth’.

Change acceleration.

Unity of Art applied to markets.

A new paradigm.

Not the only paradigm..


REFERENCES



Marti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: the Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960, Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001.

Andrew Gamble, The Spectre At the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession, Palgrave MacMillan, London, 2009.

Foreign Affairs, ‘The World Ahead’, Volume 89, Number 6, November/December 2010.

Monroe C Beardsley (Ed), The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche, Modern Library, New York, 1992.

Richard Miles, Ancient Worlds: The Search for the Origins of Western Civilization, Penguin Books, London, 2010.

Daniel Litvin, Empires of Profit: Commerce, Conquest and Corporate Responsibility, Thomson, USA, 2004.

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Penguin Books, Australia, 2008.

Monday, 12 September 2011

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF FINANCE


"More than anything else, it is Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi that captures the transfiguration of finance"…

(Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money)



POST ON THIS TOPIC FOLLOWING SOON…  

Wednesday, 7 September 2011

IN PURSUIT OF MACRO VALUE

For men may come and men may go,
   But I go on for ever.

(Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘The Brook’)


Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay…

(James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake)


A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT


  • Steering between two currents: Macro and Value.

  • Chart a new course.

  • Hegelian synthesis between macro and value theses.

  • Mirroring these with debt/equity positions.

  • By reviewing historical conditions, anticipate macro conditions.

  • But with a value investor’s nose for bargains and underpriced securities.

  • Not riding trends, rather being attuned to market dynamics/rhythyms with careful risk assessment.

  • Controlled flight into political/sovereign risk (ie. Eurocrisis, Middle East, emerging markets) – traditional non-value, macro territory with value emphasis.

  • Investment – doctrine of the mean with caveat below.

  • Creative drive applied through analytic synthesis.

  • Still seeing securities as businesses, not ciphers, or speculative units.

  • Expecting, and preparing, for inefficient markets.

  • Wise use of leverage. Steering a middle course.

  • *Cross-collateralisation/cross-fertilisation of investment Ideas – the two big macro and value ideas.

  • Aristotle’s Rational principle of steering the middle course transmuted by ‘Supra-Rational’ outlook on global markets.

  • Expect the unexpected..













A NEW APPROACH TO RESOLVE THE "CLASH"

In my next post, I wanted to run a thought experiment - really more of a blueprint. I hope to steer between, rather than clear, of the divergence between the Macro-leveraged and value-bargain approaches to investment.

It seems, following the GFC, we are all in uncharted waters. For what it's worth, here are my ideas..

By the way, I noticed that Nicholas Wapshott wrote a book along the line of my previous post topics, about the clash between Keynes and Hayek.

John B.Taylor, Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution had this to say about the book:
  

‘Nicholas Wapshott brings the Keynes-Hayek fight of the 20th century back to life, making the clash

 both entertaining and highly relevant for understanding economic crises of the 21st century.

    ‘This fascinating book surpasses—and fills a void left by—Robert Heilbroner’s 1953 classic

 history of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers, which devoted only one page to Hayek.’

I am still a fan of Heilbroner!

Tuesday, 6 September 2011

A HEDGE FUND ODYSSEY


 
The Long-enduring Odysseus must now set out for home. He shall set out on a raft put together by his own hands, and.. after great hardship, reach Scherie, the rich country of the Phaecians, who are close to the gods. They will take them to their hearts and treat him like a god. They will convey him by ship to his own land, giving him bronze, gold and woven materials in such quantities as he could never have won for himself from Troy

(Homer, ‘The Odyssey’)

Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow; decision, to the releasing of a trigger.

(Sun Tzu, ‘The Art of War’)



HEDGING THE MARKET


A W Jones, reputed to be the original Hedge Fund manager, is said to have adopted the ‘2 and 20 performance’ fee from his study of ancient Phoenician seafarers. In More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, Sebastian Mallaby points to a surprising by-product of the alternative funds industry, popularly known or derided as the Hedge Fund Industry. As a whole, hedge funds are crucial nodes in the link to global financial intermediation and prosperity. Within a globalised financial ‘network’, hedge fund partners can manage investment funds and allocate capital selectively and aggressively, thereby smoothing ‘wrinkles’ in  partially efficient financial markets. They are “invested” in the full range of financial instruments, employing leverage to good effect and, as such, are able to regulate, and ‘re-regulate’ flows in bond and equity markets. Surprisingly, therefore, Hedgies help to keep the Market honest..

Indeed, I submit that Hedge Funds are a necessary counterpoint to price anomalies and destructive trends in so-called ‘efficient markets’. Hedgies, by nature and method, tend to be ‘contrarian’ investors offering alternative, innovative organisational models to counter market bias. In the process, I would argue that hedge fund managers, generally speaking, successfully adapt multiple strategies to identify motivated buyers and sellers. In turn, they can combat a great deal of corporate inertia and literally ‘hedge’ attendant market risk. In so doing, however, there are many ways to skin a cat. Of course, certain Hedge Funds have branched out already into multi-strategy platforms. Enthused by Mallaby’s text, let me take you on a Hedge Fund Odyssey..


THE ART OF WEALTH


I think it is instructive to read the personal histories of the most successful hedge fund managers. As I found in Mallaby’s very readable account, hedge fund luminaries, Marcus Steinhardt, George Soros and Julian Hart Robertson shared a love of the arts, history and philosophy in spite of their widely divergent management styles and investment strategies. A W Jones, founder of the Jones Fund and arguably the original ‘Hedgie’, was himself a man of great distinction and taste. He mixed in progressive circles in company with famous artists, scientists and philosophers. In his youth, Jones even flirted with Marxism. As Carol Loomis indicated in her still-fresh expose of the industry, this extends through the industry history via family offices and high-net worth wealth management funds. And creative capital raising and employment very frequently benefits creative endeavours. For example, the great cellist, Gregor Piatigorsky was invested in a family fund.


Specifically, Bruce Kovner, a Harvard Phd dropout who admired classical music, later served as chairman of the Julliard School of Music. At Harvard, Kovner actually studied with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the illustrious lawyer and Senator, subsequently retaining his fascination with politics. As his former manager expressed, ‘I really value richness in intellect’ and admired Kovner as a ‘Colourful figure in art and politics’. Soros’ abiding enthusiasm for philosophy and his beloved mentor, Karl Popper are also well known. Although he received mediocre grades at the London School of Economics, Soros derived support from Popper’s system of philosophic ‘trial and error’ (the academic term is ‘falsificationism’) to construct his investment philosophy of ‘Reflexivity’. In Soros’ case, he extended his system into a general account of human behaviour and cognitive bias. At one illustrious stage in his investment career, Soros actually fancied his theory of reflexivity rivalled Einstein’s theory of relativity! In Hedge Fund investing, Mallaby stresses, ‘there’s as much Horowitz’ as there is data analysis, chart reading or econometric modelling.



‘NERVELESS..  NO DISTRACTIONS’


Riding out economic vicissitudes, hedge funds hold collectively a substantial $trillion under management. Notwithstanding its size, more intriguing is the Industry’s diversity. As if a hundred flowers bloomed, new forms constantly proliferate: the long/short, event/’special situation’, arbitrage, leveraged, short selling, fund of funds models etc. (REFERENCE). In so doing, high-performing funds have consistently beaten the S&P 500 index and competing mutual funds for return on investment. FIGURES From Mallaby’s vignettes of leading industry figures, one senses that successful fund managers, ‘Combined a feel for the markets with Organizational talent’ (p 80).


The managers who last, it seems, cultivate a ‘healthy’ ego. In an otherwise rarefied world, Mallaby lists instances of gross extravagance and dirty dealing. However, what is remarkable is the seeming psychological stability, or ‘guts’ of successful fund managers and their consistency of principle. Through good times and bad, successful managers adhered to their investment axioms. In order to direct the flow of large portfolios, Hedge Funds are evidently required to hedge their risk. In consequence, it seems to me that leading fund managers such as Soros and Robertson were ‘ego-protective’: they were confident enough to bear market and personal strain (no pun on bear markets intended!), which strained their psychological and emotional well-being and their finances. At the same time, they were adaptable personalities, attuned to market dynamics as well as market dissonance. Hence, leading fund managers discarded mere mechanics in favour of the subtle psychology of successful investment and funds management. This reminded me of Charlie Munger’s paper, ‘The Psychology of Human Mis-judgment’. By the same token, managers managed their cognitive dissonance. As a result, they avoid the pitfalls of what I would term ‘corporate intertia’.

Through boom-bust sequences, successful funds appear to have an uncanny capacity to turn risk to good advantage – to ‘embrace’ risk for return. And the feature common to these successful funds is their aversion to standard operating procedure and establishment thinking. Reflecting what Wittgenstein would have styled a ‘family resemblance’, leading funds differentiate themselves from the wider investment universe by their entrepreneurial vision and ferocious drive. To my mind, this is largely traceable to leading fund manager’s personalities and their will to outperform. From the inception of the Industry in A W Jones’s long-short fund, the hedge funds industry has inspired financial innovation (for better or for worse), rewarded intelligence, encouraging risk-taking while simultaneously entrenching careful risk management. On the other hand, the disparate Hedge Fund universe is capable of absorbing insights from mathematicians such as Benoit Mandelbrot who challenged prevailing mutual fund trends and standard econometrics with his financial adaptation of Chaos Theory.



HEDGE FUND CONTRARIANISM: ‘CLASH OF THE FINANCIAL TITANS’


In the strangest coincidence, Mallaby opens his Chapter, ‘Top Cat’ with his depiction of a ‘Clash of the Financial Titans’. (Refer my previous post). Irony upon irony, the chapter opens with Buffet’s 1983 speech at Columbia Business School in which he debated Professor Michael Jensen of Jensen’s alpha fame. Though treading dangerous ground here (without quantitative backing), successful Hedge Funds do appear to have delivered year-on-year ‘positive Alpha’. The success of the diffuse Hedge Fund construct, I submit, is that it ventures like Odysseus into the unknown. Even past the Sylla and Charybdis of herd behaviour and market risk. In this way, the Hedge Fund industry hangs together as a loose community of many dynamic ‘villages’ with the financial firepower to adjust to, and profit from, mispriced markets. In spite of Vishny’s academic scruples surrounding transaction costs and the friction of performance-based review, Hedge Funds are ideally positioned to engage in risk arbitrage. When rational markets turn irrational, successful fund managers can ‘turn on a dime’ to correct course and catch a better wind.

To quote from Jensen’s, ‘The Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period 1945-1964’:  

‘All three models are based on the assumption (Sharpe, Treynor, Lintner) that (1) all investors are averse to risk, and are single period expected utility of terminal wealth maximizers, (2) all investors have identical decision horizons and homogeneous expectations regarding investment opportunities, (3) all investors are able to choose among portfolios solely on the basis of expected returns and variance of returns, (4) all
trans-actions costs and taxes are zero, and (5) all assets are infinitely divisible’.

Most spurious of all, however, is Jensen’s ‘additional assumption’ that the capital market is in equilibrium. Guided by Eugene Fama, it appears to me that Jensen similarly assumed “away” the inconvenient absolute returns achieved by the likes of the Quantum and Tiger funds and Berkshire Hathaway without allowing for ‘fat tail’ risk such as Black Monday, Japanese deflation, negotiation of the Plaza Accord, devaluation of the dollar, the Tesebono crisis and Britain’s forced withdrawal from the ERM. Whereas Mallaby demonstrates Efficient Market theory originated on sleepy university campuses, Hedge Funds proactively seek ‘institutional distortions and debate the great themes of exchange-rate fixity versus interest-rate flexibility so as to fine-tune their market postures. In brief, this requires Hedge Fund managers to look beyond ‘beta’ distortions to profits latent in changing socio-economic conditions. Even value investors stay on the wave..



CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS: FIGHTING MARKET INERTIA


Hence, Mallaby’s book emboldened me: Hedge Funds will succeed over the wreckage of the efficient market hypothesis. As a supreme irony, father of neo-classical economics, Paul Samuelson invested in Helmuth Weymar’s Commodities Corporation fund to achieve returns on the basis of trend forecasting – anathema to most efficient marketeers. With the very inefficiencies in the Rational Expectations/EMT hypothesis, I would simply close with this view of ‘establishment’ academic-corporate thinking. Unable to view the market holistically and progressively, standard mutual fund and corporate managers hail from Robert Graves’ description of

‘.. the land of the fierce and barbarous Cyclopes, so called because of the large, round eye that glared from the centre of each forehead. They have lost the art of smithcraft known to their ancestors who worked for Zeus, and are now shepherds without laws, assemblies, ships, markets, or knowledge of agriculture; living sullenly apart from one another, in caverns hollowed from the rocky hills’.


If I might venture an overarching objective for the industry (as individualist as it is), I believe that Hedge Funds are well placed to attack waste and dissipation of assets and to reduce corporate inertia. Early in his book, Mallaby refers to the ‘glorious success’ of block trading, which empowered Hedge Fund managers to react to cross-over points in correlation of bank data, including bond spreads and home prices. A ‘vehicle for betting against conventional wisdom’, managers such as Marcus Steinhardt can trade on one-way bets against the Riyal, for example. Regardless of their macro or value posture, therefore, the top fund managers sloughed despair and sought to identify the main chance. A W Jones, repudiating the Dow Theory in ‘Fashions in Forecasting’, abandoned chart searching for the positive reinforcement of incentive to reward his best traders. Over time, factoring in explosive earnings, successful Hedge Fund managers have earned themselves, their limited partners and general investors a rather exclusive respect.


TAKING ON THE SUMMIT: A NEW EQUILIBRIUM


Between Troy and Ithaca, Robertson’s Tiger Fund and Jim Simons’s Medallion Fund, the Hedge Fund Odysseuses each wrote a ‘script for the market’ which could 360 degrees to profit from macro moves and value selection. Whether these adventurers were searching for bargains or leverage, they could adapt both bold strategy and granular sectoral analysis to their unique and fulsome personal psychologies. Through bets big and small, leading Hedge Fund managers succeed in trading the whole market.


In researching this “new equilibrium”, I identified three ‘soft’ factors critical to successful investment: receptivity to ideas, ability to network and communication. I suppose one could argue that communication subsumes the other generic qualities. Nevertheless, I also believe that Mallaby’s text underscores the ‘scope of communication’ required by successful fund managers. This scope covers no less than the sum of what one might label the ‘cash flows’ from superior analytic ability, the ability to read and process data; the intuition and good sense to project trends or patterns and adjust strategy accordingly; and the personal ability to translate and discuss relevant positions and associated risks. And even though funds differ widely, in composition and outlook, I am taken by Julian Robertson of the Tiger Fund’s focus on ‘Long-Termism’. In brief, short-term logic becomes long-term insanity. Look beyond the moment!

And that final, elusive ability to get things done, superintendent upon all the other qualities.. Shall we call that Alpha??


What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease

(Sun Tzu, ‘The Art of War’)


THIS POST IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

Thursday, 1 September 2011

CLASH OF THE TITANS, OR JUST A PLAIN OLD BAR FIGHT?



Further to my post, 'Clash of the Titans', I just read Gregory Mankiw's interesting analysis with respect to one-upmanship in economics. To place my post in context, Mankiw argues that neo-classical economists and new Keynesians face each other down much like two men in a bar fight. On the one side, we have Robert Solow sticking up for the new Keynesians; on the other side, Robert Lucas for the neo-classicals.

Perhaps one could label this effect, 'economic pugilism' - though, as I mentioned, the phenomenon extends beyond finance, economics or policy-making. In any event, here is an excerpt from Mankiw's paper (cited in a previous post), 'The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer'. Enjoy!

'.. this dispute reflects the differing perspectives of the protagonists about the goal of the field. Lucas seems to be complaining that Solow does not appreciate the greater analytic rigor that new classical macroeconomics can offer. Solow seems to be complaining the Lucas does not appreciate the patent lack of reality of his market-clearing assumptions. They each have a point. From the standpoint of science, the greater rigor that the new classicals offered has much appeal. But from the standpoint of engineering, the cost of this added rigor seems too much to bear.   

I dwell on the nature of this debate not only because it reflects the underlying tension between scientists and engineers but also because it helps explain the choices made by the next generation of economists. Such vitriol among intellectual giants attracts attention (much in the way that the patrons in a bar gather around a fist fight, egging on the participants). But it was not healthy for the field of macroeconomics. Not surprisingly, many young economists chose to avoid taking sides in this dispute by turning their attention away from economic fluctuations and toward other topics' (p 14)