11/7/16: Russian Strategy Change? Perhaps... and Lets Hope So

A rather interesting analysis from The Moscow Times on the emerging directional change in Russian geopolitical strategy: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/a-modest-deal-vladimir-putins-new-d233tente-op-ed/574322.html.

As someone who consistently stressed the need for both, Russia and the West, to (1) actively seek cooperative resolution to the ongoing process of confrontational politics, and (2) pursue consistent policy of de-escalating relations, with a specific focus on potential sources of risks (e.g. accidental encounters in the international air space or waters), recent change in rhetoric from Moscow is certainly welcome. In time, I suspect, we will see more comprehensive strategy emerging from Kremlin statements, but for now, even less-than-comprehensive statements are a good sign.

As a note of caution, I do not agree with the entire set of the author conclusions. Just highlighting the important nature of change. The degree of risks severity here is highlighted by a range of surveys and public opinion views, here is a snapshot of investors' key concerns:

In this environment, last thing anyone needs is more geopolitical risks.

10/7/16: Europe's Banks: Dinosaurs On Their Last Legs?

Europe's banks have been back in the crosshair of the markets in recent weeks, with new attention to their multiple problems catalysed by the Brexit vote.

I spoke on the matter in a brief interview with UTV here: http://utv.ie/playlists/default.aspx?bcid=5026776052001.

Now, Bloomberg have put together a (very concise) summary of some of the key problems the banks face: "Europe's banks have been a focal point of investor skittishness since Britons voted to leave the European Union, but reasons to be worried about financial firms pre-date the referendum. Whether it be the mountain of non-performing loans, the challenge from fintech firms and alternative lenders encroaching on what was once their turf, or rock bottom interest rates eroding margins, the problems facing Europe's lenders are mammoth."

To summarise the whole rotten lot: European banks (as a sector)

• Cannot properly lend and price risk (hence, a gargantuan mountain of Non-Performing Loans sitting on their books that they can't deleverage out, exemplified by Italian, Slovenian, Spanish, Portuguese, Cypriot, Greek, Irish, and even, albeit to a lesser extent, German, Dutch, Belgian and Austrian banks);
• Cannot make profit even in this extremely low funding cost environment (because they cannot lend properly, while controlling their operating costs, and instead resort to 'lending' money to governments at negative yields);
• Cannot structure their capital (CoCos madness anyone?);
• Cannot compete with more agile fintech challengers (because the dinosaur mentality and hierarchical structures of traditional banking prevents real innovation permeating banks' strategies and operations);
• Cannot reform their business models to reflect changing nature of their customers demands (because they simply no longer can think of their customers needs); and
• Cannot succeed in their traditional markets and services (despite being heavily shielded from competition by regulators and subsidised by the governments).

Instead of whingeing about the banks' plight, we should focus on the banks' resound failures and stop giving custom to the patrician incumbents. Let competition restructure Europe's banking sector. The only thing that sustains Europe's banks today is national- and ECB-level regulatory protectionism that contains competition within the core set of banking services. It is only a matter of time before M&As and organic build up of fintech players will blow this cozy cartel up from the inside. So regulators today have two options: keep pretending that this won't happen and keep granting banks a license to milk their customers and monetary systems; or open the hatches and let the fresh air in.

1/7/16: Sunday Night Bailout: Italy

As I have noted on Twitter and in comments to journalists, Brexit has catalysed investors' attention on weaker banking systems. As opposed to the UK banks, that are doing relatively well, given the circumstances, the focal point of the Brexit fallout is now Italian banking system, saddled with excessively high non-performing loans risks and with assets base that is, frankly, toxic, given their exposure to Italian debt and corporates.

Take a look at Kamakura Corporation's data on default probabilities across European financial institutions:

Nine out of twenty five top European financial institutions suffering massive increases in default probabilities over the last 30 days and 90 days are Italian, followed by five Spanish ones. Of five UK institutions on the list, only two are sizeable players worth worrying about.

Not surprisingly, as reported by the WSJ (link here) the EU Commission has approved, quietly and discretely, over Sunday last, use of Italian government guarantees "to provide liquidity support to its banks, ...disclosing the first intervention by a European Union government into its banking system following the U.K. vote to leave the EU." The programme includes EUR150 billion in Government guarantees and is supposed to ease the short term concerns about Italian banks that, based on Italian officials estimates will require some EUR40 billion of new capital.  No one quite has any idea who on earth will be supplying capital to the banks heavily weighted by high NPLs, burdened with massive fallouts in equity valuations and faced with low returns on their 'core' assets (especially Government bonds).

As WSJ notes: "Italian banks have lost more than half of their market capitalization since the beginning of the year, as investors fret about some EUR360 billion in bad loans still logged on their balance sheets. That drop in market value compares to an average decline of less than one third for European lenders. Some Italian banks have seen their shares plummet by some 75% in the first half of the year." Anyone looking into buying into their capital raising plans needs to have their heads examined.

Of course, we know that there is only one ready buyer for the Italian banks 'assets' - the Italian state. Back in April this year, Italy announced the creation of the Atlante fund, designed to "buy shares in Italian lenders in a bid to edge the sector away from a fully-fledged crisis".

As noted in an FT article (link here): "the fund... can also buy non-performing loans." The background to it is that "Italian banks have made €200bn of loans to borrowers now deemed insolvent, of which €85bn has not been written down on their balance sheets. A broader measure of non-performing debt, which includes loans unlikely to be repaid in full, stands at €360bn, according to the Bank of Italy. So is Atlante — with about €5bn of equity — really enough to keep the heavens in place?"

Sh*t no. Not even close to being enough. Which means the State is now fully hooked in banks risks. As the FT article details, the idea is that the Italian Government will buy lower-seniority tranches of securitised trash [sorry: assets] at knock-down prices, leaving senior tranches to private markets. In other words, the Italian Government will spend few billion euros borrowed from the markets to subsidise higher valuations on senior tranches of defaulting loans.

An idea that such schemes are anything other than Italian taxpayers throwing cash at the burning building of the country banking system is naive. Despite all the European assurances that the next bailout will be 'different', it is clear that little has changed in Europe since the days of 2008.

26/6/16: Black Swan ain't Brexit... but

There is a lot of froth in the media opinionating on Brexit vote. And there is a lot of nonsense.

One clearly cannot deal with all of it, so I am going to occasionally dip into the topic with some comments. These are not systemic in any way.

Let's take the myth of Brexit being a 'Black Swan'. This goes along the lines: lack of UK and European leaders' preparedness to the Brexit referendum outcome can be explained by the nature of the outcome being a 'Black Swan' event.

The theory of 'Black Swan' events was introduced by Nassin Taleb in his book “Black Swan
Theory”. There are three defining characteristics of such an event:

1. The event can be explained ex post its occurrence as either predictable or expected;
2. The event has an extremely large impact (cost or benefit); and
3. The event (ex ante its occurrence) is unexpected or not probable.

Let's take a look at the Brexit vote in terms of the above three characteristics.

Analysis post-event shows that Brexit does indeed conform with point 1, but only partially. There is a lot of noise around various explanations for the vote being advanced, with analysis reaching across the following major arguments:

• 'Dumb' or 'poor' or 'uneducated' or 'older' people voted for Brexit
• People were swayed to vote for Brexit by manipulative populists (which is an iteration of the first bullet point)
• People wanted to punish elites for (insert any reason here)
• Protests vote (same as bullet point above)
• People voted to 'regain their country from EU' 
• Brits never liked being in the EU, and so on

The multiplicity of often overlapping reasons for Brexit vote outcome does imply significant complexity of causes and roots for voters preferences, but, in general, 'easy' explanations are being advanced in the wake of the vote. They are neither correct, nor wrong, which means that point 1 is neither violated nor confirmed: loads of explanations being given ex post, loads of predictions were issued ex ante.

The Brexit event is likely to have a significant impact. Short term impact is likely to be extremely large, albeit medium and longer term impacts are likely to be more modest. The reasons for this (not an exhaustive list) include: 

• Likely overshooting in risk valuations in the short run;
• Increased uncertainty in the short run that will be ameliorated by subsequent policy choices, actions and information flows; 
• Starting of resolution process with the EU which is likely to be associated with more intransigence vis-a-vis the UK on the EU behalf at the start, gradually converging to more pragmatic and cooperative solutions over time (what we call moving along expectations curve); 
• Pre-vote pricing in the markets that resulted in a rather significant over-pricing of the probability of 'Remain' vote, warranting a large correction to the downside post the vote (irrespective of which way the vote would have gone); 
• Post-vote vacillations and debates in the UK as to the legal outrun of the vote; and 
• The nature of the EU institutions and their extent in determining economic and social outcomes (the degree of integration that requires unwinding in the case of the Brexit)

These expected impacts were visible pre-vote and, in fact, have been severely overhyped in media and official analysis. Remember all the warnings of economic, social and political armageddon that the Leave vote was expected to generate. These were voiced in a number of speeches, articles, advertorials and campaigns by the Bremainers. 

So, per second point, the event was ex ante expected to generate huge impacts and these potential impacts were flagged well in advance of the vote.

The third ingredient for making of a 'Black Swan' is unpredictable (or low predictability) nature of the event. Here, the entire thesis of Brexit as a 'Black Swan' collapses. 

Let me start with an illustration: about 18 hours before the results were announced, I repeated my view (proven to be erroneous in the end) that 'Remain' will shade the vote by roughly 52% to 48%. As far as I am aware, no analyst or media outfit or /predictions market' (aka betting shop) put probability of 'Leave' at less than 30 percent. 

Now, 30 percent is not unpredictable / unexpected outcome. It is, instead, an unlikely, but possible, event. 

Let's do a mental exercise: you are offered by your stock broker an investment product that risks losing 30% of our pension money (say EUR100,000) with probability of 30%. Your expected loss is EUR9,000 is not a 'Black Swan' or an improbable high impact event, but instead a rather possible high impact event. Conditional (on loss materialising) impact here is, however, EUR30,000 loss. Now, consider a risk of losing 90% of your pension money with a probability of 10%. Your expected loss is the same, but low probability of a loss makes it a rather unexpected high impact event, as conditional impact of a loss here is EUR90,000 - three times the size of the conditional loss in the first case. 

The latter case is not Brexit, but is a Black Swan, the former case is Brexit-like and is not a Black Swan event. 

Besides the discussion of whether Brexit was a Black Swan event or not, however, the conditional loss (conditional on loss materialising) in the above examples shows that, however low the probability of a loss might be, once conditional loss becomes sizeable enough, the risk assessment and management of the event that can result in such a loss is required. In other words, whether or not Brexit was probable ex ante the vote (and it was quite probable), any risk management in preparation of the vote should have included full evaluation of responses to such a loss materialising. 

It is now painfully clear (see EU case here: http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/06/brexit-in-brussels-junckers-mic-drop-and-political-brexploitation/, see Irish case here: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/government-publishes-brexit-contingency-plan-1.2698260) that prudent risk management procedures were not followed by the EU and the Irish State. There is no serious contingency plan. No serious road map. No serious impact assessment. No serious readiness to deploy policy responses. No serious proposals for dealing with the vote outcome.

Even if Brexit vote was a Black Swan (although it was not), European institutions should have been prepared to face the aftermath of the vote. This is especially warranted, given the hysteria whipped up by the 'Remain' campaigners as to the potential fallouts from the 'Leave' vote prior to the referendum. In fact, the EU and national institutions should have been prepared even more so because of the severely disruptive nature of Black Swan events, not despite the event being (in their post-vote minds) a Black Swan.

21/6/16: Real Ireland and the New 'Fiscal Space'

My comment for the Sunday Business Post on the Summer Statement by the Irish Government, covering fiscal space for 2016-2021 is available here: http://www.businesspost.ie/comment-sorry-real-ireland-youre-low-on-list-of-government-priorities/.

21/6/16: Some Painful Stats on Males 'Nonemployment'

Courtesy of @TheStalwart, a nice chart comparing levels of non-employment for prime-age males across a range of countries.

Couple of things jump at a glance:

1. Ireland is firmly within the Souther European states group;
2. Irish change between 1990 and 2014 is one of the smallest on record, suggesting absence from employment is a long-running problem for Ireland.
3. In 1990, Ireland ranked at the top in the sample of countries in terms of the proportion of prime-age males not in employment (note, these exclude those in education and training). In 2014 it was fourth ranked, owing to a massive swing to the upside in the emasure in Greece, Spain and Italy.
4. Countries normally associated with stable and healthy labour markets (e.g. Israel and Finland) are running high proportions of prime-age makes not in employment
5. Notice Iceland's position (presumably no 1990 data is available) ranked 6th lowest percentage of prime-age males not in employment.

Quite interesting.

20/6/16: Aid:Tech in Techstars 2016

So it is now official: AID:tech (https://aid.technology/) is one of 11 companies selected for the Techstars 2016 programme: http://www.techstars.com/content/accelerators/announcing-11-companies-summer-2016-techstars-london-class/

AID:tech is the largest blockchain player in the market for providing payments facilitation, data collection and analytics; and assets / supply chain management company for international NGOs and State organisations providing aid and social welfare supports around the world. The company has fully-developed, field-tested suite of solutions allowing it to assist NGOs and governments in:

• Reducing risk of fraud in international aid and social welfare payments by digitalising their payments processes;
• Transmit a payment to the end recipient of aid, instantaneously verifying identity of the recipient, receipt of funds, and confirming the use of funds in the case of aid-related purchases
• Substantially (by a factor of up to 3 times) reduce the cost currently charged by less secure platforms that generally offer lower degree of tractability of transactions.

Today there is a lack of transparency and accountability in the distribution of funds by NGO's and governments.

Of the $360bn transferred each year by NGO's, only $90bn is currently delivered via transparent systems and these systems are extremely expensive to administer. By utilising private blockchain technology, AID:tech enables all international aid to be accounted for, including the distribution of assets such as medicine, food and other essentials. The platform also offers add-ons such as smart contracts and instant micro-insurance, as well as advanced data analytics that help organisations to better plan and execute aid deliveries.

AID:tech is finalist in the Irish Times Innovation Awards (http://www.irishtimes.com/business/irish-times-innovation-awards-finalists-original-thinkers-from-all-sectors-1.2663210 and http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2016/05/30516-aidtech-through-to-irish-times.html) and is shortlisted for the ‘Best Humanitarian Tech Startup’ for The Europas European Tech Startup Awards https://aid.technology/aidtech-shortlisted-for-the-europas-european-tech-startup-award/.

Disclosure: I am very proud of being involved with the company as an adviser and shareholder.

20/6/16: Creating Fiscal Space. Or Money Growing on Trees

You might excuse an average punter for thinking things are going the beleaguered Irish Health Services ways with some EUR500 ml added to the spending bin (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eu-ruling-means-extra-540m-for-health-fbpnqcqb8?shareToken=699206929a359223e8662e8ae88a18d2). After all, even the good folks of The Times bought into the positive story.

But, such a conjecture is wrong. What really is happening, thus? In simple terms, the Eurostat reclassification of the Government conversion of AIB preference shares into ordinary shares generates several implications:

1. Preference shares represent a preferred (or senior) claim on AIB assets in the case of default or dilution compared to ordinary shares. That is the basics corporate finance and as such implies that State conversion of shares adds new risk to the State holdings, as well as reduces the value of that holding. It does create a marginal improvement in the AIB’s outlook for selling shares in the markets, however.
2. The conversion also raises official State deficit and spending volume for 2015, which has no direct material impact on 2015 spending, except via two channels: Channel 1 is the impact that added spending has on future (2016) spending; and Channel 2 is the GDP effect - as AIB transaction added some EUR500 million to State official spending, that EUR500 million is now an addition to 2015 GDP.
3. Because State spending for 2015 is now EUR500 million higher, and because our 2015 deficit was still below the approved (by the EU) target, the State is allowed - by the EU rules - to spend extra cash this year.
4. Although Ireland has funds ‘available’ for such increased spending, the funding will come from borrowing. The reason for this is simple: Ireland is still running a general deficit. Not a general surplus. If the State were to spend EUR500 million of ‘added fiscal space’ on activities for which it is borrowing funds under pre-existent budgetary commitments, the deficit would have dropped - in 2016 - by, roughly, that amount. However, if Ireland were to spend it on a new spending line or to increase spending above previously planned, the funding will come via borrowing from some other activity, such as repaying Government debt.

In simple terms, there is no free lunch. Irish State does not have extra EUR500 million floating around that it did not have before. No matter what you classify things as, basic accounting means: unless you got paid by someone EUR500 million, you have to borrow EUR 500 million in order to spend it.

Simples. But not for Irish media that keeps confusing deficit financing via debt for resources.

19/6/16: Irish Regulators: Betrayed or Betrayers?..

As I have noted here few weeks ago, Irish Financial Regulator, Central Bank of Ireland and other relevant players had full access to information regarding all contraventions by the Irish banks prior to the Global Financial Crisis. I testified on this matter in a court case in Ireland earlier this year.

Now, belatedly, years after the events took place, Irish media is waking up to the fact that our regulatory authorities have actively participated in creating the conditions that led to the crisis and that have cost lives of people, losses of pensions, savings, homes, health, marriages and so on. And yet, as ever, these regulators and supervisors of the Irish financial system:

1. Remain outside the force of law and beyond the reach of civil lawsuits and damages awards; and
2. Continue to present themselves as competent and able enforcers of regulation capable of preventing and rectifying any future banking crises.

You can read about the latest Irish media 'discoveries' - known previously to all who bothered to look into the system functioning: http://www.breakingnews.ie/business/report-alleges-central-bank-knew-of-fraudulent-transactions-between-anglo-and-ilp-740684.html.

And should you think anything has changed, why here is the so-called 'independent' and 'reformed' Irish Regulator - the Central Bank of Ireland - being silenced by the state organization, the Department of Finance, that is supposed to have no say (except in a consulting role) on regulation of the Irish Financial Services: http://www.independent.ie/business/finance-ignored-central-banks-plea-to-regulate-vulture-funds-34812798.html. 

Please, note: the hedge funds, vulture funds, private equity firms and other shadow banking institutions today constitute a larger share of the financial services markets than traditional banks and lenders.  

Yep. Reforms, new values, vigilance, commitments... we all know they are real, meaningful and... ah, what the hell... it'll be Grand.

18/6/16: Retail At Google Conference: June 2016

My slides from this week's presentation at Google Retail conference:

18/7/16: Gamed Financial Information and Regulation Misfires

A recent interview by the Insights by Stanford Business, titled “In Financial Disclosures, Not All Information Is Equal” (all references are supplied below and all emphasis in quotations is mine) touched upon a pivotal issue of quality of information available from public disclosures by listed companies - the very heart of the market fundamentals.

The interview is with Stanford professor of accounting Iván Marinovic, who states, in the words of the interviewer, that “financial statements are becoming less and less relevant compared to other sources of information, such as analysts and news outlets. ...there is a creeping trend in financial disclosures away from the reliance on verifiable assets and toward more intangible elements of a business’s operations.”

In simple terms, financial information is being gamed. It is being gamed by increasing concentration in disclosures on ‘soft’ information (information that cannot be verified) at the expense of hard information disclosures (information that can be verified). More parodoxically, increasing gaming of information is a result, in part, of increasing requirements to disclose hard information! Boom!

Let's elaborate.

In a recently published (see references below) paper, Marinovic and his co-author, Jeremy Bertomeu define ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ information slightly differently. “The coexistence of hard and soft information is a fundamental characteristic of the measurement process. A disclosure can be soft, in the form of a measure that “can easily be pushed in one direction or another”, or hard, having been subjected to a verification after which “it is difficult to disagree”."

For example, firms asset classes can range "from tangible assets to traded securities which are subject to a formal verification procedure. Forward-looking assets are more difficult to objectively verify and are typically regarded as being soft. For example, the value of many intangibles (e.g., goodwill, patents, and brands) may require unverifiable estimates of future risks.”

The problem is that ‘soft’ information is becoming the focus of corporate reporting because of coincident increase in hard information reporting. And worse, unmentioned in the article, that ‘soft’ information is now also a matter of corporate taxation systems (e.g. Ireland’s ‘Knowledge Development Box’ tax scheme). In other words, gamable metrics are now throughly polluting markets information flows, taxation mechanisms and policy making environment.

Per interview, there is a “tradeoff between reliability and the relevance of the information” that represents “a big dilemma among standard setters, who I think are feeling pressure to change the accounting system in a way that provides more information.”

Which, everyone thinks, is a good thing. But it may be exactly the opposite.

“One of the main results — and it’s a very intuitive one — shows that when markets don’t trust firms, we will tend to see a shift toward financial statements becoming harder and harder. [and] …a firm that proportionally provides more hard information is more likely to manipulate whatever soft information it does provide. In other words, you should be more wary about the soft information of a firm that is providing a lot of hard information.”

Again, best to look at the actual paper to gain better insight into what Marinovic is saying here.

Quoting from the paper: “...a manager who is more likely to misreport is more willing to verify and release hard information, even though issuing hard information reduces her ability to manipulate. To explain this key property of our model, we reiterate that not all information can be made hard. Hence, what managers lose in terms of discretion to over-report the verifiable information, they can gain in credibility for the remaining soft disclosure. Untruthful managers will tend to issue higher soft reports, naturally facing stronger market skepticism. We demonstrate that untruthful managers are always more willing to issue hard information, relative to truthful managers."

Key insight: "...situations in which managers release more hard information are also more likely to feature aggressive soft reports and have a greater likelihood of issuing overstatements.”

As the result, as noted in the interview, “…we should expect huge frauds, huge overstatements precisely in settings or markets where there is a lot of credibility. The markets believe the information because they perceive the environment as credible, which encourages more aggressive manipulations from dishonest managers who know they are trusted. In other words, there is a relationship between the frequency and magnitude of frauds, where a lower frequency should lead to a larger magnitude.”

In other words, when markets are complacent about information disclosed and/or markets have greater trust in the disclosures mandates (high regulation barrier), information can be of lower quality and/or risk of large fraud cases rises. While this is intuitive, the end game here is not as clear cut: heavily regulating information flows might be not necessarily a productive response because markets trust has a significant positive value.

Let’s dip into the original paper once again, for more exposition on this paradox: “We consider the consequence of reducing the amount of discretion in the reporting of any verifiable information. The mandatory disclosure of hard information has the unintended consequence of reducing information about the soft, unverifiable components of firm value. In other words, there is a trade-off between the quality of hard versus soft information. Regulation cannot increase the social provision of one without reducing the other.”

Now, take European banks (U.S. banks face much of the same). Under the unified supervision by the ECB within the European Banking Union framework, banks are required to report increasingly more and more hard information. In Bertomeu-Marinovic model this can result in reduced incidence of smaller fraud cases and increased frequency and magnitude of large fraud cases. Which will compound the systemic risks within the financial sector (small frauds are non-systemic; large ones are). The very disclosure requirement mechanism designed to reduce large fraud cases can mis-fire by producing more systemic cases.

In its core, Jeremy Bertomeu and Ivan Marinovic paper shows that “certain soft disclosures may contain as much information as hard disclosures, and we establish that: (a) exclusive reliance on soft disclosures tends to convey bad news, (b) credibility is greater when unfavorable information is reported and (c) misreporting is more likely when soft information is issued jointly with hard information. We also show that a soft report that is seemingly unbiased in expectation need not indicate truthful reporting.”

So here is a kicker: “We demonstrate that …the aggregation of hard with soft information will turn all information soft.” In other words, soft information tends to fully cancel out hard information, when both types of information are present in the same report.

Now, give this a thought: many sectors today (think ICT et al) are full of soft information reporting and soft metrics targeting. Which, in Bertomeu-Marinovic model renders all information, including hard corporate finance metrics, reported by these sectors effectively soft (non-verifiable). This, in turn, puts into question all pricing frameworks based on corporate finance information whenever they apply to these sectors and companies.



References for the above are:

The Interview with Marinovic can be read here: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/financial-disclosures-not-all-information-equal.

Peer reviewed publication (gated version) of the paper is here: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/theory-hard-soft-information

Open source publication is here: Bertomeu, Jeremy and Marinovic, Ivan, A Theory of Hard and Soft Information (March 16, 2015). Accounting Review, Forthcoming; Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University Working Paper No. 194: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2497613.

18/7/16: Euromoney on Brexit

My comment for Euromoney on the topic of Brexit impact on UK sovereign credit risks: http://www.euromoney.com/Article/3563119/Country-risk-Experts-say-UK-economy-will-quickly-recover-from-Brexit-shock.html.