Phil's Stock World

by ilene - November 2nd, 2009 3:20 pm

Michael Mandel at BusinessWeek claims that By overlooking cuts in research and development, product design, and worker training, GDP is greatly overstating the economy’s strength.

Here’s a riddle: If a scientist or engineer is laid off, does it affect gross domestic product?

The third-quarter GDP figures, released on Oct. 29, showed the economy growing at a 3.5% annual pace, breaking a string of four consecutive negative quarters.

The trouble is that those GDP and productivity growth figures could be significantly overestimated—perhaps by one percentage point or even more.

That’s because the official statistics are not designed to pick up cutbacks in "intangible investments" such as business spending on research and development, product design, and worker training. There’s ample evidence to suggest that companies, to reduce costs and boost short-term profits, are slashing this kind of spending, which is essential for innovation. Without investment in intangibles, the U.S. can’t compete in a knowledge-based global economy. Yet you won’t see that plunge reflected in the GDP and productivity statistics, which are still too focused on more traditional sectors, such as motor vehicles and construction.

Here’s a sobering sign that companies are robbing the future to pay for short-term profits: Over the past year, U.S. employment of scientists and engineers—the people who create the next generation of products and make the U.S. more competitive over the long term—has fallen by 6.3%, according to a BusinessWeek tabulation of unpublished data. Yet overall employment has fallen only 4.1%. "There are really bright people who are struggling to find a job," says Josh Albert, managing director at Klein Hersh International, an executive search firm for life scientists.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the government agency that compiles the GDP figures, is taking steps to deal with the new realities. Software has been treated as investment since 1999, and the BEA plans to include R&D in the official GDP statistics in 2013, four years from now. But the agency acknowledges that other areas of intangible investment still need to be worked into the numbers. "We think it’s important not to ignore the fact that R&D is only part of broader innovative activity," says BEA Director J. Steven Landefeld. For now, though, the U.S. is navigating through the downturn with fragmentary information.

While the statistics

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The Chinese Disconnect?

by ilene - October 25th, 2009 2:45 pm

A follow-up to my last comment on the death-defying dollar. In his NYT op-ed column, Paul Krugman writes about The Chinese Disconnect and notes the following:

Many economists, myself included, believe that China’s asset-buying spree helped inflate the housing bubble, setting the stage for the global financial crisis. But China’s insistence on keeping the yuan/dollar rate fixed, even when the dollar declines, may be doing even more harm now.

Although there has been a lot of doomsaying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere.

But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead.

And that’s a particularly bad thing to do at a time when the world economy remains deeply depressed due to inadequate overall demand. By pursuing a weak-currency policy, China is siphoning some of that inadequate demand away from other nations, which is hurting growth almost everywhere. The biggest victims, by the way, are probably workers in other poor countries. In normal times, I’d be among the first to reject claims that China is stealing other peoples’ jobs, but right now it’s the simple truth.

So what are we going to do?

U.S. officials have been extremely cautious about confronting the China problem, to such an extent that last week the Treasury Department, while expressing “concerns,” certified in a required report to Congress that China is not — repeat not — manipulating its currency. They’re kidding, right?

The thing is, right now this caution makes little sense. Suppose the Chinese were to do what Wall Street and Washington seem to fear and start selling some of their dollar hoard. Under current conditions, this would actually help the U.S. economy by making our exports more competitive.

In fact, some countries, most notably Switzerland, have been trying to support their economies by selling

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Fitch: Financial Companies Hold 99.7% Of All Derivative Contracts

by Zero Hedge - July 29th, 2009 3:04 pm

Courtesy of Tyler at Zero Hedge

Fitch has released a comprehensive study on derivatives held by various corporations and has come out with some disturbing results: as Zero Hedge’s recent disclosure of data from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency confirmed, the bulk of the derivative risk is concentrated not merely in the "financial company" category (99.7%) but in a subset of just five companies, which account for an "overwhelming majority" of derivative assets and liabilities.

The companies in question (Total Notional Derivatives: Assets & Liabilities, $ in Trillions)

JP Morgan:$81.7;
Bank of America:$80.0;
Citigroup:$31.5;
Morgan Stanley:$39.3, and of course
Goldman Sachs: $47.8 (this is an OCC estimate: Goldman has not disclosed notional amounts in their derivative book, only # of contracts);

If you want a preview of what the Basel III definition of "Too Big To Fail" will look like, the above five companies is a great place to start.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of derivatives, here is a good blurb provided in the Fitch report:

Companies use derivatives to manage risks related to interest rates, foreign currency exchange rates, equities, and commodity prices, as well as more obscure risks such as weather and longevity. According to the Bank of International Settlements, the notional amount of the global over-the-counter derivatives market was nearly $600 trillion at the end of December 2008. Furthermore, gross market value (the sum of gross derivative assets and gross derivative liabilities) stood at $33.9 trillion.

While improved disclosures and transparency are a good start to helping gauge the risks posed by these instruments, it is important for analysts and investors to take a fresh look at risk management practices, including the use of derivatives within that context.

The need for better disclosure on derivatives has been obvious since the implementation of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) 133, “Accounting for Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities” (now Financial Accounting Standards Board [FASB] Accounting Standards Codification [ASC] 815). However, comprehensive derivatives disclosure did not become a U.S. GAAP requirement for most companies until March 2009 with the implementation of SFAS 161 (now ASC 815-10-50), “Disclosures about Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities.”

For a more quantifiable overview of derivatives, we recommend the most recent quarterly report from the

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