Bankers – Sympathy For The Devil?

May 5, 2017

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By Umair Tariq. Originally published at ValueWalk.

In our recent report, Banks Are Evil, we pulled no punches in making the accusation that the financial system is the root cause of injustice in today’s society.

It’s a good blood-boiler. You should read it if you haven’t already.

Bankers

Its main premise is this:

In my opinion, it’s long past time we be brutally honest about the banks. Their influence and reach has metastasized to the point where we now live under a captive system. From our retirement accounts, to our homes, to the laws we live under — the banks control it all. And they run the system for their benefit, not ours.

While the banks spent much of the past century consolidating their power, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 emboldened them to accelerate their efforts. Since then, the key trends in the financial industry have been to dismantle regulation and defang those responsible for enforcing it, to manipulate market prices (an ambition tremendously helped by the rise of high-frequency trading algorithms), and to push downside risk onto “muppets” and taxpayers.

Oh, and of course, this hasn’t hurt either: having the ability to print up trillions in thin-air money and then get first-at-the-trough access to it. Don’t forget, the Federal Reserve is made up of and run by — drum roll, please — the banks.

With their first-in-line access to this money tsunami, as well as their stranglehold on the financial system that it all runs through, the banks are like a parasite feasting from a gusher on the mother-lode artery.

It should come as little surprise that, with all this advantage they’ve amassed, the banks have enriched themselves and their cronies spectacularly. They have made themselves too big to fail, and too big to jail. Remember that their reckless greed caused the 2008 financial crisis, and yet, in 2009, not only did bankers avoid criminal prosecutions, not only did the banks receive hundreds of billions in government bailouts, but they paid themselves record bonuses?

And the bonanza continues unabated today. By being able to borrow capital for essentially free today from the Fed, the banks simply lever that money up and buy Treasurys. Voila! Risk-free profits. That giveaway has been going on for years.

Couple that with the banks’ ability to push market prices around using their wide arsenal of unfair tactics — frontrunning, HFT spoofing and quote stuffing, stop-running, insider knowledge, collusion, etc — the list is long. James Howard Kunstler is dead on: we don’t have a free market anymore. Instead, we have rackets, run by racketeers. The rest of us are simply suckers to be fleeced.

But all is not roses if you’re a banker these days. Even within the evil machine, there is great disparity in how the plunder is being divided.

Bad Times For Bankers?

A guy I’ve known since childhood works on the ‘sell side’ (investment/commercial banking, stock brokers, market makers) and has been telling me how cutthroat things have become over the past few years. The pay structure and job security have deteriorated notably. And he says the same is true for many of his colleagues on the ‘buy side’ (hedge funds, asset managers, institutional investors), too.

Really?

Even with enjoying the “unabated bonanza” described above, even with the markets back partying at all time highs, things are getting worse for many bankers?

Yes.

And while I personally can’t conjure any sense of empathy for these poor devils, it looks like things are going to get even harder for them.

So what’s going on here?

Well, it’s mostly a story of the banking system’s plundering ways coming back to bite it.

Capital Is Fleeing From Active To Passive Funds

First off, by flooding world markets with over $12 Trillion since the Great Recession, the central banks (which, remember, are themselves owned by private banks) have pretty much destroyed “alpha”.

Alpha is the “excess return” that fund managers’ fees are based on — i.e., you’re paying more for a smart guy like me to “beat the market”. But when a tsunami of liquidity rises all boats at once, it’s that money flood (i.e. the central bank money printing) that drives valuations. And its influence is so much larger than any other factor that it’s really the only factor that matters. Great and crappy companies alike rise in price — the “fundamentals” that fund managers use in their analysis become useless.

Which is why 66% of large-cap active managers failed to top the S&P 500 in 2016, and why 90% missed their benchmarks over the past 15-year period.

So it’s no wonder that investment capital is fleeing from actively-managed funds to passively-managed ones. If the passive funds have much lower fees AND they perform better than the actively managed ones, why they heck shouldn’t money flow into them?

Per CNBC:

A buoyant start to the stock market in 2017 couldn’t stop investors from ditching actively managed funds.

The trickle away from stock pickers and toward indexes has turned into a flood, with more than half a trillion dollars heading into passive funds over the past 12 months, according to Morningstar.

Active management in total saw $13.6 billion in outflows for January, mitigated only by net inflows to bond funds, Morningstar said. U.S. equity saw $20.8 billion in outflows, bringing passive management closer to parity when it comes to domestic stock funds.

By contrast, passive management saw just shy of $77 billion in inflows. U.S. equity funds, which track broad indexes like the S&P 500 and its sectors and subsectors, pulled in $30.6 billion for the month.

Overall, actively managed U.S. equity funds now hold $3.6 trillion in assets while their passive counterparts hold nearly $3.1 trillion. All classes of passive funds have seen inflows of $563 billion over the past year, while active funds have suffered $325.6 billion in outflows.

“The massive exodus from actively managed U.S.-equity funds continued in January,” Alina Lamy, Morningstar’s senior analyst for quantitative research, said in a statement. “The tidal wave is showing no signs of stopping, threatening all but a select few and making active investing a dangerous ocean to swim in.”

The result of this is tremendous mounting pressure for active managers to reduce their fees. Lower fees being charged on shrunken fund pools obviously affords fewer asset managers, who in many cases are now working for less compensation.

Keep in mind, between just the ECB and the DOJ, nearly $200 Billion of additional liquidity has been — and continues to be — injected into world markets each month(!). So, as the above article says, don’t expect the tidal wave of capital fleeing actively-managed funds to stop while the central banks’ liquidity spigots are still flowing.

The White-Collar Cost Of Automation

Finance was one of the first industries to embrace the automation boom, given the obscene profits that could be made. In his book Flash Boys, Michael Lewis described how the arms race of high frequency algorithms literally changed the game in terms of how financial instruments are traded — and made $billions upon $billions of unfair profits for the big banks that invested in the technology.

Well, many of the bankers who cheered the boost the machines gave to their annual bonuses aren’t cheering so much now. You know what algo-driven markets don’t need? Human traders.