This is the memo by Howard Marx. Today, another episode of Behind the Memo, in which Howard shed some light on themes from his most recent memo. Here he is discussing sea change with Oak Tree Senior Financial Writer Anna Shamanski.
Howard, in this memo you describe the third sea change you've seen in the investment world during your career. I want to begin by having you describe what exactly you mean by a sea change. How does such a change differ from the normal ups and downs of a cycle?
I think a sea change is characterized by its scale. It's big. It's substantial. It's not your typical month-to-month or year-to-year fluctuation. But it's something that, well, the definition I chose to publish, use the word transformation. That's a hell of a lot different from a cyclical fluctuation. It's a change. It has aspects of long-term.
Well, Anna, if you go back a few memos to I begged to differ, which I think came out in the summer, you'll recall that I talked about our conference in London, which was June 21. I did my normal kickoff session and all the questions I got surrounded how bad will inflation get, how long will it last, how much will the fed raise rates to fight the inflation, and will that produce a recession, and if so, how bad and for how long?
I answered those questions and then I sat down and then I had lunch and then I got back up after lunch and I said, you know what, those aren't the important questions. That's all short-term stuff. We can't know much about it. We can't attach much probability being right to our judgments and we're not going to do much about it.
We're not going to convolut our portfolios to accommodate it and it doesn't matter in the long run. I talked about that and I begged to differ. When I said, if you want to be different from other investors in an important way, how about carrying about it the long run and not the short? Then in the illusion of knowledge, I said that so much of the energy in the investment business is expended trying to guess short-term events, which A can't be done and really don't matter.
Then in what really matters, I singled out short-term events and short-term trading and short-term performance as what doesn't matter. I think was leading up to this and kind of a steady drum beat, not intentional or conscious, but it was a theme that I got on. Then Bruce Karshani made a trip in mid-October. He and I were bouncing ideas back and forth and most of the ideas for the sea change came out of that trip, which started off just talking by the end of the trip.
I had the list of attributes that's in the memo and he encouraged me, as he always does, to think about this and I concluded that the clients who we didn't get to visit should also, I'm tempted to say, have the benefit or thinking if it's beneficial, but at least be exposed to our thinking on this subject.
So let's go to the first sea change, which you describe as the development of a new investor mentality. You write and this is in reference to the 1970s. Now risk wasn't necessarily avoided, but rather considered relative to return and hopefully born intelligently. So I'd like you to discuss this shift and why it was so foundational to the development of the modern investment world.
I think when I came into the business, people thought it was the job of the professional investor to buy good things. And what I learned from my first 10 years of experience is that good investing doesn't come from buying good things, but from buying things well. The difference is more than grammatical. We talked about investment grade bonds, guilt-edge stocks, if a fiduciary bought a low quality asset and lost money on it, he or she could be surcharge, that is, taken to court and made to pay the loss even if the overall portfolio made money.
So if you included 10 risky assets and lost money on one, you could be required to make up the loss on the one. So that was obviously is an extreme attention to the quality of what you're buying quality defined in a very traditional sense. And you know, I was struck when I started working in high yield bonds in 1978 that moody's defined a b-rated bond as follows, fails to possess the characteristics of a desirable investment.
In other words, it's a bad investment because the company was of low credit worthiness. Doesn't say anything about the price. Doesn't say anything about the adequacy of the yield to compensate for the low quality, just low quality. And the innovation by Mike Milken and a few others in 77-778 period was that you should be able to issue high yield bonds, that is to say bonds of below investment grade rating, if the prospect of return was sufficient to compensate for the risk. As I say in the memo, that's all we do now is we think in that dimension. And people who think that way today, which should be everybody, would be shocked to learn that that's not what people thought of 50 years ago.
Yeah, it was interesting when I was reading that section. It just made me think that so much of the growth that we've seen in the economy in the last 40 years is really based on that shift in thinking. People had not been able to engage in risky investments.
How would all of the tech companies that contribute so much to our lives today have gotten the money to start?
那些如今给我们生活带来如此多贡献的技术公司,最初是从哪里获得启动资金的呢?
So let's shift now to the next sea change, which happened a little bit after, which was the beginning of the four decades of declining interest rates that began in the 1980s.
You speak about this at length in the memo. So first, I would just like you to discuss why you say that this trend is really one of the key drivers of investment performance during that period.
Whether everyone knows it or not, interest rates have been enormous, multifaceted, impact in the financial and investment world. They make companies more profitable by reducing their costs. They lower interest rates, drive people to make, so we say, riskier or more aggressive investments in order to get the returns they want or need, which makes capital available for riskier activities. They increased the value of bonds, an 8% bond is worth a certain amount in a climate where 8% interest rates are prevalent, but it's worth a lot more in a climate where 4% interest rates are prevalent.
So yields in the environment down value of a bond up. This is automatic. Now, what not everybody appreciates to the same extent is that the same is true of every other asset, a stock in a company with a certain growth potential and that pays a certain dividend is worth more in a low interest rate environment than a high one.
A building that throws off $100,000 a year in net operating income is worth a lot more when prevailing interest rates are less. The value of a company, the value of any asset classically, is defined as the discounted present value of the future cash flows. The lower the rate at which you discount the future cash flows, the more it's worth today.
So, as I say, there are multiple ways in which interest rates have a salutary effect for everybody other than the lender or the saver. And I think that those multiple ways in which low interest rates are helpful really had a very important effect on those four decades that you describe.
As I say in the memo, I borrowed a 22 and a quarter in 1980 and two and a quarter 40 years later. By the way, I think that not everybody understands the magnitude of this impact and the way I've been describing it to people in the last few days, which means to say it's not in the memo, is using the example of the frog in the hot water.
If you put up frog in a pan of hot water, it'll jump out. But if you put it in the pan of cool water and turn on the burner, it'll get gradually hotter and the frog won't know to jump out. So the point is this is something that happened gradually over decades. I think that not everybody is fully conscious of the magnitude of the impact.
What do you think is the relationship between those two sea changes that shift in mentality and the declining interest rates? I don't think there's a direct connection, but I think that the fact that they both occur at similar points in time allowed each to amplify the other.
And the greatest example of the two in action is probably private equity. The appetite for risk allowed high yield bonds to be issued, which enabled private equity to borrow a lot of money. At the same time, the decline in interest rates made private equity investments very profitable, which led to an amplified the growth of the sector. So more coincidence than causal, but together, a very dramatic impact.
So now let's move on to the third change that you describe. To begin with, can you just discuss what is this third sea change and why you think it merits being referred to as a sea change?
I think that we had a very consistent environment ever since the end of the global financial crisis, which ended in late 2009. So now it's more than 13 years. With the exception of an unusual period for the pandemic and immediate aftermath, which was affected by exogenous, non-cicocal, non-economic forces, first the pandemic and then the rescue.
So they kind of break up the narrative, but you can look at 21 as a continuation of 19. It's really 20 that was anomalous.
这些故事有点打乱了情节,但你可以把21看作是19的延续。实际上是20比较异常。
If you look at that period, so 12 years out of the last 13, you see a very active and stimulative Fed, which could be stimulative and flood the world with money and at low interest rates because inflation was quite essence. We had a consistently positive economic outlook. We had the longest economic recovery in history, albeit a slow one. We had a positive mood, so low level of risk aversion, perhaps due to the fact that the Fed actions really prevented there from being many defaults and bankruptcies, both in the global financial crisis and in the pandemic period.
I'll just note that in the crises of 1991 and a 102, there were two years of double digit defaults in the Hyal Bond universe in the global financial crisis, which in many ways was much worse, there was only one and in the pandemic crisis, there were none.
As result of all this, we had eager buyers, happy holders, no urgent sellers and the greatest fear, I believe, was foam O of the fear of missing out. Not too many people were afraid of losing money.
The credit market was wide open. It was easy for companies to get the money they wanted or investors to get money for leveraged investment programs.
信贷市场敞开大门。公司想要筹到资金或投资者想要进行杠杆投资计划都十分容易。
So I would say this period was uniformly optimistic, positive, easy, untroubled, depending, of course, on who you were. It was a great period for people who owned assets, people who had assets they wanted to sell or people who wanted to borrow money. That's such a great period for bargain hunters or providers of credit.
I gave a speech from October of 2012 until February of 2020. That is until the doorstep of the pandemic entitled investing in a low return world. For us, it was a low return world.
That fixed income bonds credit, however you wanted to describe it, was offering the lowest returns in its history. There was cash at zero, treasuries at one, high grade bonds at two, or three, high yield bonds at four or five. These were not very helpful for most institutional investors. For example, defined benefit pension plans need roughly seven. So you can't use one, two, three, four, five percent returning assets very much in a portfolio that needs seven and a slow period.
Now I believe most of what I describe is reversed. The Fed is obviously restrictive. It has to be because inflation is now at a 40-year high or reached a 40-year high.
The economic outlook probably includes a recession. They everybody tells me, not a forecaster. Everybody believes that raising interest rates to kill off inflation will produce a recession. It's not easy to get money anymore for a corporation. It's not cheap. The credit mechanism is somewhat in a jam because of the hung bridge loans. The buyers are not that eager. The holders are not that complacent.
Well, certainly at 9.30, this was one of the worst years in history for both stocks and bonds and probably the worst for the combination of stocks and bonds. Of course, there's been a rally in the stock market since 9.30.
But now there's real fear, not just FOMO. Now there's risk aversion. Now the outlook is not so rosy and the going is not so easy. But now credit instruments, treasury returns are now forish, not oneish. Yield spreads are additive to that and they're not skinny, they're normal. So prospective yields on credit instruments are pretty good. I describe them as more than ample.
The 7% investor can make use of credit instruments today, whereas it was tough to use public, unlevered credit instruments a year or two ago. So if it's true that the description of the 19 through 21 period is now changed, is it 180 degrees or is it 143 degrees or is it 90 degrees, I think it's substantially different. I think that some of these changes may be permanent.
I'm pretty confident that interest rates are not going to go down another 2,000 basis points. I think that a lot of what went on in those 12 years was a function of the low rates and thus the sanguine environment. Maybe we're in a period where being an asset owner or a borrower is not an unmitigated bone where a bargain hunter or a lender can find better opportunities. If so, and if it lasts a while, I think that is a sea change.
And you described the declining interest rates of the frog and the boiling water and this is kind of long term. What we're seeing now seems to be a pretty rapid shift. So I'm curious how you think it might be different in that it is so sudden.
Well, I think first of all, Anna, that this was behind the very bad performance of stocks and bonds in the first 9 months of 2022. All of a sudden, remember that in 20, when the Fed cut rates to zero and pumped out money through quantitative easing, the buying up bonds, and when the Treasury engaged in so much in relief payments, COVID relief payments and deficit spending, people said, well, we think it's going to be inflationary. Yet it didn't rear its head. And you'll recall a lot of discussion of something called modern monetary theory, which said that these things don't matter. And by the way, we don't hear anything about that anymore.
Then in 21, we started to see the inflation. As I recall, it was in the region of 4% in April of 21. And then the Fed came out strongly that they thought it was transitory. In late 21, they allowed, well, maybe not transitory, maybe structural for a while. And so they embarked on a dramatic program of interest rate increases.
Probably the strongest I've ever seen. The Fed used to move interest rates in increments of 25 basis points. And 50 was considered strong medicine and a fairly dramatic signal. Oh my God, they increased 50 well this time around. The Fed did some 75s consecutively. So this was a very, very dramatic period of interest rate increases, which produced very dramatic declines in the stock and bond markets. I think the shock of all that was very substantial.
And as you indicate much more sudden than a slowly heating up the water in the pan. So how would you have any final thoughts? Well, Anna, I do believe that the period ahead will be markedly different from the period behind. I don't know if it's going to last one year, two years, or be a real sea change with some aspects of permanence. Do you know I'm not a forecaster?
And I emphasize in the memo that we're not going to bet on my forecast. But I do think that the Fed now realizes it can't be in a similar mode on a permanent basis. And the other thing is, of course, some people might argue we're going back to zero or one on the Fed funds rate. But back in 17 or 18, there was considerably unhappiness with the low level of interest rates because people said, but if we have a recession and the Fed has to cut rates to cure the recession, there's no room from zero or one.
And I would imagine that the Fed is not going to go back there and get back into that pickle. So I think that we'll see higher rates for a while. I think that roughly the current level will be close to the norm for the next several years. And we're only substantially less if there's a serious recession that needs fighting, which, of course, some people think we're going to see in the next year or two.
But if people say, as I always imagine them in my head saying, let's go back to normal like 2010 to 2019. That was an unusual, easy period, which I think we're not going back to. Howard, thanks so much. Thank you, Anna. It's always a pleasure to get behind the memo.
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