Japan is about to "detonate" a "debt bomb" and will be forced to massively devalue its currency, Kyle Bass says.
During an interview with University of Virginia business school professor: Ken Eades, Kyle Bass argues that Japan is already in a crisis, and that the possible election of Shinzo Abe next month will set off a chain of events that will result in a devaluation of the Yen and treasury yields skyrocketing. "In the next 12 to 18 months, I think you're going to see a move in their rates. Basically Japan is entering its final 'checkmate' phase of the chess game."
Japan is already running a -$100 billion trade balance, Bass says, and the country's GDP has been hit by Chinese boycott stemming from the Diayou/Senkuku islands dispute.
"You have a secular decline in the population happening, you have a balance of trade that's literally being rewritten and falling off a cliff and their GDP is now tracking -3.5, -4 percent.
"We think Abe's a shoo-in. And he said he's going to do everything possible to get to 3 percent inflation. He doesn't even know what he wishes for, because if he gets there, he detonates his debt bomb. "
"When there's a press release put on the BOJ's website from the MOF, the BOJ and the government — that's analogous to Bernanke, Geithner and Hillary Clinton issuing a joint press release saying 'we're going to end deflation'. This is how it begins to happen"
"Their backs are against the wall. They have a full crisis. They absolutely have to change the manner in which they deal with their currency."
Kyle Bass, an American hedge fund manager, is the Founder of Hayman Capital. He received extensive coverage in the financial press for profiting $590 million by short selling the sub-prime mortgage bond market, before that market crashed. In 2011, Bass initiated a huge position in Greek sovereign debt through CDSs. Media reports were that he could profit up to 650 times his investment should Greece default on its debt obligations.
November 27, 2012
November 20, 2012
Kyle Bass Talks about the end of the Debt Cycle
Kyle Bass, an American hedge fund manager, is the Founder of Hayman Capital. He received extensive coverage in the financial press for profiting $590 million by short selling the sub-prime mortgage bond market, before that market crashed. In 2011, Bass initiated a huge position in Greek sovereign debt through CDSs. Media reports were that he could profit up to 650 times his investment should Greece default on its debt obligations.
November 17, 2012
Kyle Bass New Letter: We Believe War Is Inevitable
Interest today rewards no genuine sacrifice, any more than does the rent of land. The owner of capital can obtain interest because capital is scarce, just as the owner of land can obtain rent because land is scarce. But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.”
. . .
“Thus we might aim in practice (there being nothing in this which is unattainable) at an increase in capital until it ceases to be scarce, so that the functionless investor will no longer receive a bonus[.] (emphasis added) “
This is nothing more than a chilling prescription for the destruction of wealth through the dilution of capital by monetary authorities
Central banks have become the great enablers of fiscal profligacy. They have removed the proverbial policemen from the bond market highway. If central banks purchase the entirety of incremental bond issuance used to finance fiscal deficits, the checks and balances of “normal” market interest rates are obscured or even eliminated altogether. This market phenomenon does nothing to encourage the body politic to take their foot off the spending accelerator. It is both our primary fear and unfortunately our prediction that this quixotic path of spending and printing will continue ad?infinitum until real cost?push inflation manifests itself. We won’t get into the MV=PQ argument here as the reality of the situation is the fact that the V is the “solve?for” variable, which is at best a concurrent or lagging indicator. Given the enormity of the existing government debt stock, it will not be possible to control the very inflation that the market is currently hoping for. As each 100 basis points in cost of capital costs the US federal government over $150 billion, the US simply cannot afford for another Paul Volcker to raise rates and contain inflation once it begins.
Hayek was, of course, right:
The current modus operandi by central banks and sovereign governments threatens to take us down Friedrich von Hayek's “Road to Serfdom”. Published in 1944, its message, that all forms of socialism and economic planning lead inescapably to tyranny, might prove to have been prescient. In the 1970s, when Keynesianism was brought to crisis, politicians were vociferously declaring that attempting to maintain employment through inflationary means would inevitably destroy the market economy and replace it with a communist or some other totalitarian system which is the “perilous road” to be avoided “at any price". The genius in the book was the argument that serfdom would not be brought about by evil men like Stalin or Hitler, but by the cumulative effect of the wishes and actions of good men and women, each of whose interventions could be easily justified by immediate needs. We advocate social liberalism, but we also need to get there through fiscal responsibility. Pushing for inflation at this moment in time will wreak havoc on those countries whose cumulative debt stocks represent multiples of central government tax revenue.
The non?linearity of expenses versus revenues is what will bring them down.
"Pavlov's Party" is ending, and when it does, it will happen so fast no reac
Through travel and meetings around the world, it has become clear to us that most investors possess a heavily anchored bias that has been engrained in their belief systems mostly through inductive reasoning. Using one of the Nobel Laureate Daniel Khaneman's theories, participants fall under an availability heuristic whereby they are able to process information using only variables that are products of recent data sets or events. Let’s face it – the brevity of financial memory is shorter than the half?life of a Japanese finance minister.
Humans are optimistic by nature. People’s lives are driven by hopes and dreams which are all second derivatives of their innate optimism. Humans also suffer from optimistic biases driven by the first inalienable right of human nature which is self?preservation. It is this reflex mechanism in our cognitive pathways that makes difficult situations hard to reflect and opine on. These biases are extended to economic choices and events. The fact that developed nation sovereign defaults don’t advance anyone’s self?interest makes the logical outcome so difficult to accept. The inherent negativity associated with sovereign defaults brings us to such difficult (but logical) conclusions that it is widely thought that the powers that be cannot and will not allow it to happen. The primary difficulty with this train of thought is the bias that most investors have for the baseline facts: they tend to believe that the central bankers, politicians, and other governmental agencies are omnipotent due to their success in averting a financial meltdown in 2009.
In the end, the EMU won't look the same, if it exists at all.
The overarching belief is that there will always be someone or something there to act as the safety net. The safety nets worked so well recently that investors now trust they will be underneath them adinfinitum. Markets and economists alike now believe that quantitative easing (“QE”) will always “work” by flooding the market with relatively costless capital. When the only tool a central bank possesses is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In our opinion, QE just doesn’t stimulate private credit demand and consumption in an economy where total credit market debt to GDP already exceeds 300%. The UK is the poster child for the abject failure of QE. The Bank of England has purchased over 27% of gross government debt (vs. 12% in the US). UK bond yields have all but gone negative and are now negative in real terms by at least ?1%. Unlimited QE and the zero lower bound (“ZLB”) are likely to bankrupt pension funds whose expected returns happen to be a good 600 basis points (or more) higher than the 10?year “risk?free” rate. The ZLB has many unintended consequences that are impossible to ignore.
Despite reading through Keynes’ works, we didn’t find a single index referencing the ZLB or any similar concept. In his General Theory, there are 64 entries in the index under “Interest” but no entry for the ZLB, zero rates, or even “really low rates”.
Our belief is that markets will eventually take these matters out of the hands of the central bankers. These events will happen with such rapidity that policy makers won’t be able to react fast enough.
On the lunacy of such "modern" "economic" "theories" as MMT (which may or may not stand for "Magic Money Trees")
The fallacy of the belief that countries that print their own currency are immune to sovereign crisis will be disproven in the coming months and years. Those that treat this belief as axiomatic will most likely be the biggest losers. A handful of investors and asset managers have recently discussed an emerging school of thought, which postulates that countries, as the sole manufacturer of their currency, can never become insolvent, and in this sense, governments are not dependent on credit markets to remain fiscally operational. It is precisely this line of thinking which will ultimately lead the sheep to slaughter.
The inevitable end of that supremely flawed monetarist experiment - the Eurozone:
Each subsequent “save” of the European debt crisis has been devised by the Eurocrats coming up with some new amalgamation of an entity that is more complex than its predecessor that is designed to project size, strength, and confidence to investors that the problem has been solved. Raoul, a friend of mine who resides in Spain, put it best:
“Let’s just clear this up again. The ECB is going to buy bonds of bankrupt banks just so the banks can buy more bonds from bankrupt governments. Meanwhile, just to prop this up the ESM will borrow money from bankrupt governments to buy the very bonds of those bankrupt governments.”
The EFSF, the IMF, the ESM, and the OMT (and who knows what other vehicles they will dream up next) have all been developed to serve as an optical backstop for investors globally. The Eurocrats are sticking with the Merkelavellian playbook of hiding behind the complexity of these various schemes. All one has to do is review the required contributions to said vehicles from bankrupt nations to realize that the circular references are already beginning to show in broad daylight. Does anyone stop to consider that the two largest contributors to the IMF are the two largest debtor nations in the world? Are things beginning to make sense now?
And finally, a less than rosy outlook for the entire "developed" world.
Trillions of dollars of debts will be restructured and millions of financially prudent savers will lose large percentages of their real purchasing power at exactly the wrong time in their lives. Again, the world will not end, but the social fabric of the profligate nations will be stretched and in some cases torn. Sadly, looking back through economic history, all too often war is the manifestation of simple economic entropy played to its logical conclusion. We believe that war is an inevitable consequence of the current global economic situation.
You can read the rest of the letter below as Kyle discussed also Japan’s situation and more on debt, issues and war:
“Thus we might aim in practice (there being nothing in this which is unattainable) at an increase in capital until it ceases to be scarce, so that the functionless investor will no longer receive a bonus[.] (emphasis added) “
This is nothing more than a chilling prescription for the destruction of wealth through the dilution of capital by monetary authorities
Central banks have become the great enablers of fiscal profligacy. They have removed the proverbial policemen from the bond market highway. If central banks purchase the entirety of incremental bond issuance used to finance fiscal deficits, the checks and balances of “normal” market interest rates are obscured or even eliminated altogether. This market phenomenon does nothing to encourage the body politic to take their foot off the spending accelerator. It is both our primary fear and unfortunately our prediction that this quixotic path of spending and printing will continue ad?infinitum until real cost?push inflation manifests itself. We won’t get into the MV=PQ argument here as the reality of the situation is the fact that the V is the “solve?for” variable, which is at best a concurrent or lagging indicator. Given the enormity of the existing government debt stock, it will not be possible to control the very inflation that the market is currently hoping for. As each 100 basis points in cost of capital costs the US federal government over $150 billion, the US simply cannot afford for another Paul Volcker to raise rates and contain inflation once it begins.
Hayek was, of course, right:
The current modus operandi by central banks and sovereign governments threatens to take us down Friedrich von Hayek's “Road to Serfdom”. Published in 1944, its message, that all forms of socialism and economic planning lead inescapably to tyranny, might prove to have been prescient. In the 1970s, when Keynesianism was brought to crisis, politicians were vociferously declaring that attempting to maintain employment through inflationary means would inevitably destroy the market economy and replace it with a communist or some other totalitarian system which is the “perilous road” to be avoided “at any price". The genius in the book was the argument that serfdom would not be brought about by evil men like Stalin or Hitler, but by the cumulative effect of the wishes and actions of good men and women, each of whose interventions could be easily justified by immediate needs. We advocate social liberalism, but we also need to get there through fiscal responsibility. Pushing for inflation at this moment in time will wreak havoc on those countries whose cumulative debt stocks represent multiples of central government tax revenue.
The non?linearity of expenses versus revenues is what will bring them down.
"Pavlov's Party" is ending, and when it does, it will happen so fast no reac
Through travel and meetings around the world, it has become clear to us that most investors possess a heavily anchored bias that has been engrained in their belief systems mostly through inductive reasoning. Using one of the Nobel Laureate Daniel Khaneman's theories, participants fall under an availability heuristic whereby they are able to process information using only variables that are products of recent data sets or events. Let’s face it – the brevity of financial memory is shorter than the half?life of a Japanese finance minister.
Humans are optimistic by nature. People’s lives are driven by hopes and dreams which are all second derivatives of their innate optimism. Humans also suffer from optimistic biases driven by the first inalienable right of human nature which is self?preservation. It is this reflex mechanism in our cognitive pathways that makes difficult situations hard to reflect and opine on. These biases are extended to economic choices and events. The fact that developed nation sovereign defaults don’t advance anyone’s self?interest makes the logical outcome so difficult to accept. The inherent negativity associated with sovereign defaults brings us to such difficult (but logical) conclusions that it is widely thought that the powers that be cannot and will not allow it to happen. The primary difficulty with this train of thought is the bias that most investors have for the baseline facts: they tend to believe that the central bankers, politicians, and other governmental agencies are omnipotent due to their success in averting a financial meltdown in 2009.
In the end, the EMU won't look the same, if it exists at all.
The overarching belief is that there will always be someone or something there to act as the safety net. The safety nets worked so well recently that investors now trust they will be underneath them adinfinitum. Markets and economists alike now believe that quantitative easing (“QE”) will always “work” by flooding the market with relatively costless capital. When the only tool a central bank possesses is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In our opinion, QE just doesn’t stimulate private credit demand and consumption in an economy where total credit market debt to GDP already exceeds 300%. The UK is the poster child for the abject failure of QE. The Bank of England has purchased over 27% of gross government debt (vs. 12% in the US). UK bond yields have all but gone negative and are now negative in real terms by at least ?1%. Unlimited QE and the zero lower bound (“ZLB”) are likely to bankrupt pension funds whose expected returns happen to be a good 600 basis points (or more) higher than the 10?year “risk?free” rate. The ZLB has many unintended consequences that are impossible to ignore.
Despite reading through Keynes’ works, we didn’t find a single index referencing the ZLB or any similar concept. In his General Theory, there are 64 entries in the index under “Interest” but no entry for the ZLB, zero rates, or even “really low rates”.
Our belief is that markets will eventually take these matters out of the hands of the central bankers. These events will happen with such rapidity that policy makers won’t be able to react fast enough.
On the lunacy of such "modern" "economic" "theories" as MMT (which may or may not stand for "Magic Money Trees")
The fallacy of the belief that countries that print their own currency are immune to sovereign crisis will be disproven in the coming months and years. Those that treat this belief as axiomatic will most likely be the biggest losers. A handful of investors and asset managers have recently discussed an emerging school of thought, which postulates that countries, as the sole manufacturer of their currency, can never become insolvent, and in this sense, governments are not dependent on credit markets to remain fiscally operational. It is precisely this line of thinking which will ultimately lead the sheep to slaughter.
The inevitable end of that supremely flawed monetarist experiment - the Eurozone:
Each subsequent “save” of the European debt crisis has been devised by the Eurocrats coming up with some new amalgamation of an entity that is more complex than its predecessor that is designed to project size, strength, and confidence to investors that the problem has been solved. Raoul, a friend of mine who resides in Spain, put it best:
“Let’s just clear this up again. The ECB is going to buy bonds of bankrupt banks just so the banks can buy more bonds from bankrupt governments. Meanwhile, just to prop this up the ESM will borrow money from bankrupt governments to buy the very bonds of those bankrupt governments.”
The EFSF, the IMF, the ESM, and the OMT (and who knows what other vehicles they will dream up next) have all been developed to serve as an optical backstop for investors globally. The Eurocrats are sticking with the Merkelavellian playbook of hiding behind the complexity of these various schemes. All one has to do is review the required contributions to said vehicles from bankrupt nations to realize that the circular references are already beginning to show in broad daylight. Does anyone stop to consider that the two largest contributors to the IMF are the two largest debtor nations in the world? Are things beginning to make sense now?
And finally, a less than rosy outlook for the entire "developed" world.
Trillions of dollars of debts will be restructured and millions of financially prudent savers will lose large percentages of their real purchasing power at exactly the wrong time in their lives. Again, the world will not end, but the social fabric of the profligate nations will be stretched and in some cases torn. Sadly, looking back through economic history, all too often war is the manifestation of simple economic entropy played to its logical conclusion. We believe that war is an inevitable consequence of the current global economic situation.
You can read the rest of the letter below as Kyle discussed also Japan’s situation and more on debt, issues and war:
Kyle Bass
Kyle Bass, an American hedge fund manager, is the Founder of Hayman Capital. He received extensive coverage in the financial press for profiting $590 million by short selling the sub-prime mortgage bond market, before that market crashed. In 2011, Bass initiated a huge position in Greek sovereign debt through CDSs. Media reports were that he could profit up to 650 times his investment should Greece default on its debt obligations.
Kyle Bass, an American hedge fund manager, is the Founder of Hayman Capital. He received extensive coverage in the financial press for profiting $590 million by short selling the sub-prime mortgage bond market, before that market crashed. In 2011, Bass initiated a huge position in Greek sovereign debt through CDSs. Media reports were that he could profit up to 650 times his investment should Greece default on its debt obligations.
November 16, 2012
Kyle Bass on Europe and some ideas
According to Kyle Bass “a popular revolt will happen” due to austerity and high unemployment. This will basically stop the kicking the can in Europe. Even though, Blackrock is buying European bonds, Kyle reminds that there were a very few people that got the credit crisis correct and the herd overall buys everything especially when it have a huge amount of capital. According to Kyle, buying Europe is like expecting Germany to leave the Euro in 3-4 years, as according to him, ‘joint-and-several’ liabilities will never happen when Germany is in.
Kyle Bass, an American hedge fund manager, is the Founder of Hayman Capital. He received extensive coverage in the financial press for profiting $590 million by short selling the sub-prime mortgage bond market, before that market crashed. In 2011, Bass initiated a huge position in Greek sovereign debt through CDSs. Media reports were that he could profit up to 650 times his investment should Greece default on its debt obligations.
November 09, 2012
Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital: Short JGB
• Bass sees convexity in pricing and “all the convexity of world is in Japan.”
• The next 18 months will set the stage for the Japan
• Central banks have replaced traditional intermediaries – that is why global volatility is so low
• Availability heuristic - people can only process data from readily available data
• Accepting the logical conclusion is detrimental to many factors of our life
• 3 false axioms of Japan according to him
o (1) Can Japan run a current account surplus to self-fund? Bass says no.
o (2) Bank of Japan is not buying debt. Bass says false. Monetization is occurring.
o (3) Retail investors will actually be able to hold all the debt.
Kyle Bass, an American hedge fund manager, is the Founder of Hayman Capital. He received extensive coverage in the financial press for profiting $590 million by short selling the sub-prime mortgage bond market, before that market crashed. In 2011, Bass initiated a huge position in Greek sovereign debt through CDSs. Media reports were that he could profit up to 650 times his investment should Greece default on its debt obligations.
November 02, 2012
Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital talks about Japan, SuperMedia and RMBS
Kyle Bass mentioned that 90% of what he – aka Hayman Capital owns is in bonds. He said that they own tons RMBS/subprime exposure.
SuperMedia Debt
Kyle Bass likes Supermedia debt. The company filed for bankruptcy and defaulted on billions of debt. Now debt trades at 66 cents and equity is almost zero. Now the company is also trying to merge with the competitor DexOne.
Kyle Bass recommends everyone not to own Japan
Kyle points out that there's 80-200 trillion in global debt. In 18 months Japan will structurally fall apart. He said: "There's no chance at Japan repaying their debt."
He says psychology is important so look at anchoring bias. It's important to think about how others think about debt. Japan's debt to GDP is the worst in the world. Their debt is 25x their revenues.
Bass said there are 3 axioms that are actually false:
1. Positive current surplus, Japan not self-funding: This is flat false he says.
2. Bank of Japan not monetizing the debt: Bass says they're already buying 2/3rds of the bonds today.
3. Retail investors will always support JGB's: Bass says Japan has a secular population decline.
He also illustrated how Japan is trying to sell JGB's by showing advertisements of a schoolgirl band selling them and sumo wrestlers pitching JGBs which is looks like a clear Ponzi scheme which desperately needs money to keep going.
Regarding the Softbank/Sprint deal since it was mentioned earlier in the panel by Lee Cooperman, Kyle Bass said that Softbank paying 20 billion yen to buy broken telecom is basically exporting yen as investors are starting to flee the currency.
Bass says that Japan has one of the "largest structural fiscal deficits in the world." He doesn't know when exactly this collapse happens as this could go on for a few years? He notes the timing on this sort of thing is very hard to peg, but it will "absolutely happen."
He said that playing options on this scenario is the best way as you get paid a ton when it happens and you lose a little while waiting.
Kyle Bass, an American hedge fund manager, is the Founder of Hayman Capital. He received extensive coverage in the financial press for profiting $590 million by short selling the sub-prime mortgage bond market, before that market crashed. In 2011, Bass initiated a huge position in Greek sovereign debt through CDSs. Media reports were that he could profit up to 650 times his investment should Greece default on its debt obligations.
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