Category: Investing

Control Your Soul’s Thirst for Freedom

Since late February the bulk of global attention has been focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The invasion remains ongoing, and will likely last for months, potentially even years, and represents the most dangerous geopolitical situation we are likely to face until China tries to enforce control over the South China Seas or invades Taiwan.

But while our attention has been narrowly focused, interest is growing about how the world’s second largest economy is choosing to mange the late stages of the pandemic, a series of choices that have ramifications for much of the world.

China has had mixed luck with Covid. By the end of 2020 it looked as though China might be the only winner economically from the pandemic, but 2021 turned out to be a year for the West. First, Western vaccines, particularly the mRNA vaccines were highly effective, while the Chinese vaccine produced domestically had only a 50% success rate. The Chinese government also was hyper critical of the more effective Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, essentially precluding them from Chinese use. This has left the country in a difficult spot. Chinese mandated lockdowns have been brutal but effective, leading to uneven vaccine use. The low infection rates that the “Covid Zero” policy has delivered has also robbed the country of natural immunity. Today China, already struggling economically, is still locking down whole cities in the hopes of containing outbreaks.

Shanghai is the current major city to be shut down, but the lockdowns are spreading. Complaints about food shortages and people trapped in apartment buildings, offices, and closed off from their places of work have led to some fairly strange places, including protests and at least once the use of “speaking drones” urging citizens to comply with rules and reprimanding the citizens singing in protest one night to “Control your soul’s thirst for freedom. Do not open your windows and sing.”

This image came from early April

Chinese lockdowns are also worsening global inflation. The supply chain disruptions caused by the most recent lockdowns in Shanghai are dramatic to say the least. In the above picture each yellow dot represents one cargo ship waiting to be docked and unloaded. Supply chains were already deeply stressed when Shanghai went into lockdown last month, and the global impact of further supply disruptions is something we’re very likely to notice.

This image came from early May

Lastly, some months ago (October 2020) I had detailed how China’s foreign policy, which was heavy handed and often petulant, was angering nations all across the globe. China may not view the world the way its geopolitical rivals do, but its inability to grasp at least what might be considered fair or just by other nations is damaging its own ability to wield soft power, an essential part of being a global hegemon. China’s decision to back Russia in its invasion of Ukraine likely reflected China’s near-term goals of retaking Taiwan and its general contempt for the current world order. However, the global resistance to the Russian invasion, the support shown Ukraine and the barrage of negative publicity (as well as realizing that an untested military in countries with lots of corruption may not be able to score quick military victories) must serve as a wake-up call to China’s ruling class. As of 2022 China seems to have squandered much of its international good will and is unlikely to find many willing allies for its global ambitions.

China seems to be suffering on all fronts. 2021 was a bad year for China’s economy, cumulating in the public meltdown of one of its biggest developers in November. But everything, from its politics to its public health policies are working against it. The world’s second largest economy, one that is the largest trading partner to 130 countries, can’t seem get out of its own way, and as it falters it can’t help but impact us.

Walker Wealth Management is a trade name of Aligned Capital Partners Inc. (ACPI)*

ACPI is regulated by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (www.iiroc.ca) and a Member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (www.cipf.ca). (Advisor Name) is registered to advise in (securities and/or mutual funds) to clients residing in (List Provinces).

This publication is for informational purposes only and shall not be construed to constitute any form of investment advice. The views expressed are those of the author and may not necessarily be those of ACPI. Opinions expressed are as of the date of this publication and are subject to change without notice and information has been compiled from sources believed to be reliable. This publication has been prepared for general circulation and without regard to the individual financial circumstances and objectives of persons who receive it. You should not act or rely on the information without seeking the advice of the appropriate professional.

Investment products are provided by ACPI and include, but are not limited to, mutual funds, stocks, and bonds. Non-securities related business includes, without limitation, fee-based financial planning services; estate and tax planning; tax return preparation services; advising in or selling any type of insurance product; any type of mortgage service. Accordingly, ACPI is not providing and does not supervise any of the above noted activities and you should not rely on ACPI for any review of any non-securities services provided by Adrian Walker.

Any investment products and services referred to herein are only available to investors in certain jurisdictions where they may be legally offered and to certain investors who are qualified according to the laws of the applicable jurisdiction. The information contained does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any product or service. 16 Past performance is not indicative of future performance, future returns are not guaranteed, and a loss of principal may occur. Content may not be reproduced or copied by any means without the prior consent of the author and ACPI.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

What’s Happening With Markets?

Markets have been falling through the year, and despite some encouraging rallies the trend so far has been decidedly negative. The NASDAQ Composite, one of the three big indexes heavily tilted towards technology companies had a -23.86% YTD return as of Monday, May 16th, a minor recovery after it had reached a low of -27% on Thursday of the previous week. The Dow Jones and the S&P 500 have YTD returns of -10.31% and -14.82% respectively. The question for investors is “what to do?” in such markets, especially after some of the best years despite the pandemic.

A closer inspection of the markets however shows that while there have been some steep sell offs reflected in the broad market, the real market declines have been far more concentrated. And while there are many different market headwinds to choose from when it comes to reasons for the recent selling action; inflation, interest rates, geopolitical strife, COVID-19, maybe even Elon Musk, the sector that has been sending markets lower has been the tech sector.

Over the past couple of years the companies posting the biggest gains in the markets have been tech companies. Apple stock (AAPL) was up 88.97% in 2019, 82.31% in 2020, 34.65% in 2021, and is down -11.6% so far in 2022. Amazon (AMZN) was up 76.26% in 2020, and has fallen -30.18% this year. Facebook, now META Platforms (FB) gained 56.57% in 2019, 33.09% in 2020, 23.13% in 2021 and has lost -38.08% in 2022. Netflix was up 67.11% in 2020, and a further 11.41% in 2021 but is down -68.74% this year. Tesla, which had an astounding 743.4% gain in 2020 and another 49.76% return in 2021 is so far down -17.36% in 2022, how long can it resist gravity? (All prices and YTD performance were collected from ycharts.com on May 6th, 2022).

I predict that we may never fully understand how the pandemic changed thinking and why stock prices climbed so much, but the reality was that many tech companies benefited from people staying home, going online and the changing priorities that coincided with not having to be in offices and commuting. Tech companies that became huge like Shopify (SHOP), which allowed traditional retailers to become online retailers, benefitted immeasurably from the lockdowns. But it too has seen its stock decline this year by -69.59%, pushing the price back to where it was in December 2019.  

Because the tech sector has become so large, particularly in the NASDAQ, the retreat of these companies carries big implications for indexes and by extension the wider market as well. As markets fall, it encourages investors to panic sell, aided and abetted by the army of computers that help multiply the effects of momentum selling. This is especially true as investors have migrated to low-cost passive index ETFs, a trend so noticeable that experts worry it might be warping the market as investors worry less about the value of individual companies and instead pile money into broad indexes with no quality filters.

Markets are facing other risks too. Inflation, which seems to be running at about 8%, can threaten economies as people buy fewer items due to cost increases. Interest rate hikes, which are meant to ultimately curb inflation by restricting monetary supply and reduce lending/economic activity have hit bond markets particularly hard. Higher interest rates mean higher borrowing costs, and its here we might hypothesize about some of the unintended consequences of the incredibly accommodative monetary policy that the pandemic introduced. That might be that investors were able to borrow to invest, and the threat of both rising interest rates and stumbling returns will only hasten the exit of money from the market by some investors. Higher borrowing costs will also have another impact on markets, as a sizeable amount of stock market returns over the past decade have come from share buy backs, funded in part by low-cost borrowing.

Having said all that, economies are still looking very strong in the present. Earnings have remained high, jobless claims continue to fall, and while we’ve seen a spike in costs the ability to address those inflationary pressures may not be something that can be easily done through monetary restricting.

There are many different sources of inflation, but two significant issues are not connected to “cheap money”. Instead we have issues that are primarily structural and represent the failure of political foresight. The first among these has to do with oil. Since the price of oil fell in 2014, infrastructure development has stalled, heavily indebted producers have retreated, and now Russia has been closed off from much of the global market. This confluence of events has unfortunately arrived as economies are reopening, global use nears pre-pandemic levels, and global refined supply is at historic lows. There is no simple solution for this, as the only remedy is time (and development). In theory, Canadian and US oil could make up much of the global need, but for a multitude of reasons neither country is in a position to rapidly increase production.

Similarly, supply chain disruption and the heavy reliance on offshore manufacturing have meant that there is no simple solution to production problems occurring in other nations. China is the key issue here, with an enormous grip on much of global supply on many items and their current insistence on a “Covid Zero Policy” China is effectively shut to global business. This means ships can’t get into port, and with-it products cannot make it to market.

Higher borrowing costs seem unlikely to handle this problem. High gas prices and lack of supply may be inflationary, but high borrowing costs can’t target those issues. Instead, higher interest rates and the threat of more in the future are hitting the parts of the market that have been pushed higher by cheap credit. The stock market and the housing market.

If markets seem to be moving independently of economies, its possible that won’t stay that way for long. As previously mentioned, higher energy prices are not controllable by higher lending rates. But higher energy prices can introduce demand destruction, a fancy way of saying that economies shrink because prices get out of control. Oil is still in high use and its needs go far beyond powering cars. In fact internal combustion engines only account for 26% of global oil need, meaning those higher prices for crude, if they get too high, can have wide inflationary impacts to the entire economy.

Higher lending rates may also lead to a substantial economic reset, especially for Canadians who have much of their net worth tied up in their homes. With almost 50% of new mortgages in Canada variable rate mortgages, home prices having skyrocketed in the past few years and with most Canadian debt connected to homes, the risk to home owners is very real. Can the Bank of Canada tame inflation, orchestrate a soft landing for the housing market and keep the economy chugging along? Such a question invites highwire act comparisons.

So what’s happening with markets? Perhaps we are simply correcting a narrow subset of the market that got too hot through 2020-2021. Perhaps we are seeing the dangers of printing too much money. Perhaps we are seeing the realities of people buying too many index ETFs. Perhaps we are witnessing people being too fearful about the future. Perhaps we are too fearful of inflation or interest rates. Perhaps we are on the brink of a recession.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

But let me offer a slightly different take. Investing is frequently about connecting your needs as an investor with the realities of the world. As Warren Buffet famously said, in the short term the stock market is a voting machine, in the long term a weighing machine. If you can afford risk, you can be risky, and with that comes the potential for significant market swings. If you can not afford risk, then your portfolio should reflect that need. If you cannot stomach bad days, potentially weeks or even months of bad news, then you need to find a way to keep your investment goals aligned with your risk tolerance.

When I started this essay we had just completed one of the worst weeks of the year, which bled into the second week of May. As I finish this piece markets are in the process of rallying for a third day, posting modest gains against the backdrop of significant losses. It would be nice if I could end this with some confidence that we’ve turned a corner, that markets had bottomed and that the pessimism that has led to so much selling is evaporating as people come to recognize that stocks have been oversold. Yet such prognosticating is the exact wrong tack to take in these markets. Instead, this is a good time to review portfolios, ensuring that you are comfortable with your risk, that your financial goals remain in sight and that the portfolio remains positioned both for bad markets, and for good ones too.

If you have any concerns about how your portfolio is positioned and need to review, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.

Walker Wealth Management is a trade name of Aligned Capital Partners Inc. (ACPI)*

ACPI is regulated by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (www.iiroc.ca) and a Member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (www.cipf.ca). (Advisor Name) is registered to advise in (securities and/or mutual funds) to clients residing in (List Provinces).

This publication is for informational purposes only and shall not be construed to constitute any form of investment advice. The views expressed are those of the author and may not necessarily be those of ACPI. Opinions expressed are as of the date of this publication and are subject to change without notice and information has been compiled from sources believed to be reliable. This publication has been prepared for general circulation and without regard to the individual financial circumstances and objectives of persons who receive it. You should not act or rely on the information without seeking the advice of the appropriate professional.

Investment products are provided by ACPI and include, but are not limited to, mutual funds, stocks, and bonds. Non-securities related business includes, without limitation, fee-based financial planning services; estate and tax planning; tax return preparation services; advising in or selling any type of insurance product; any type of mortgage service. Accordingly, ACPI is not providing and does not supervise any of the above noted activities and you should not rely on ACPI for any review of any non-securities services provided by Adrian Walker.

Any investment products and services referred to herein are only available to investors in certain jurisdictions where they may be legally offered and to certain investors who are qualified according to the laws of the applicable jurisdiction. The information contained does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any product or service. 16 Past performance is not indicative of future performance, future returns are not guaranteed, and a loss of principal may occur. Content may not be reproduced or copied by any means without the prior consent of the author and ACPI.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

Chaos Unleashed

Two weeks ago Russia began its invasion of the Ukraine in earnest. What had begun in 2014 following the ouster of a corrupt pro-Russian government was followed by the annexation of the Crimea and then the fermenting of a civil war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, finally cumulating in his goal of retaking the entire country and bringing it back under Russian purview, most likely in the form of a puppet government.

No one has been more successful at undoing Russian strategic goals than the Russian government. Putin had once hoped to establish a new Warsaw style pact, he hoped to undermine NATO, he’d longed to set up an Eastern European economic zone to compete with the EU. To imagine that any of these goals could today be defined as likely is to dabble in fantasy. His ultimate goal, at least defined by his own comments, was to restore Russia to its previous status as a respected superpower like it was under the Soviet Union. Today it seems as though his army, impressive and large though it is, has already met its match in conventional warfare in the early days of its Ukrainian adventure.

While the military side of his invasion doesn’t seem to be going according to plan, something that must have really taken him by surprise was the resolve he faced globally. Though NATO has said it won’t get involved, weapons are flowing into the country. Nations, like Finland and Sweden whom Russia has treated as extensions of its old empire, are making loud noises that they too would like to join NATO. Germany, long a NATO laggard has promised to increase its military spending above the target 2% of GDP for NATO members. The notoriously neutral Switzerland has said it will freeze Russian assets, and throughout the world condemnation has been swift, especially on the financial front.

In the space of a few days Russia didn’t just find itself diplomatically isolated, but financially as well. The international banking system has been effectively closed to Russia and its central bank, putting a stop on many of its rainy day funds it will need to sustain its campaign. I won’t endeavor to explain the full range of how the global bank sanctions work, as the process is complicated and other better versed people can explain it more succinctly, but the truth is that the Russian state is deeply isolated and in financial chaos.

Markets have responded to this chaos with a fair amount of volatility, with some big swings both up and down since the invasion began. This is understandable, but what comes next will be more unpredictable. Russia does not have many face-saving ways to undo its situation, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by many. Stuck in heavy fighting in Ukraine, a collapsing economy, a restless population at home and a kleptocratic network of military officials and billionaire oligarchs who hide their assets in Western nations, Putin may find himself backed into a corner with few options open to him, some of which were likely previously unthinkable.

Sun Tzu, famed military strategist and author whose book sits unread on the shelves of tedious hedge fund managers.

I’m reminded of a saying from Sun Tzu, the famed military strategist of ancient China, whose book on strategy is often “required reading” for a certain type of hedge fund manager. “When you surround your enemies, leave an opening; do not push too hard on the enemies who are desperate.” Even if Putin is ultimately successful in Ukraine it’s hard to see what kind of victory can be cobbled together on the world stage. Russia will need a way out, an opportunity to exit and with walls closing in our own “Western” victory of aiming to contain Putin may create more chaos than we are expecting or can anticipate.  

I don’t want to be alarmist, but the nature of war is to be unpredictable, and cautious investors should take note that we are still in the early days of what could prove to be a long, protracted, and ultimately surprising conflict that has many unknowable outcomes, some of which may leave the world order changed, for better and worse. Putin has unleashed something, and what that is can not be fully guessed.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

Looking Back on 2021

Its traditional that the end of a year should stimulate some reflection on the past and the future, and so in the spirit of tradition I thought I’d take some time to look over some of the stranger and more surprising aspects of 2021.

China

While 2021 brought the pandemic *closer* to an end through the distribution of vaccines, markets underwent some fairly dramatic reversals over the course of the year. For instance China looked to be the principal economy in January. Following its own strict enforcement of Covid restrictions and solid economic performance, China seemed to be an earlier winner by the beginning of 2021, and set to enjoy robust growth through the year.

By March the tide was shifting however. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, proved to be every bit committed to his past comments about protecting and strengthening the CCP over free market concerns. Several billionaires, notably Jack Ma the founder of Alibaba, disappeared for long periods before reemerging only to publicly announce that they would be stepping down from their roles.

However, even while China was shaking down its billionaires and upsetting foreign nations, a new economic threat appeared in the form of a housing bubble looking ready to burst. Evergrande, one of the country’s largest property developers announced that it could not finance its debt anymore and looked likely to default. This news was unwelcome for markets, but for China hawks it fit their long standing belief that China’s strength has been built on a mountain of unsustainable debt, with property one of the most vulnerable sectors of the economy.

The finer points of China’s housing market are too nuanced to get into here, but it’s enough to know that the property bubble in China is large, built on sizeable debt and could take some time to deflate (if it does) and no one is sure what the fallout might be. Combined with China’s ongoing policy of “Covid Zero” – an attempt to eradicate the virus as opposed to learning to live with and manage it, we head into 2022 with China now a major outlier in the Asian region.

Inflation

Inflation was probably the other most discussed and worrying trend of 2021. Initially inflation sceptics seemed to win the argument, as central banks rebuffed worries over rising prices and described inflation as transitory. That argument seemed to wane as we entered late Q3 and prices were indeed a great deal higher and didn’t seem to be that “transitory” anymore. Inflation hawks took a victory lap while news sites began to fill up with worrying stories about rising prices on household goods.

The inflation story remains probably the worst understood. Inflation in Canada, as in other Western nations has been going on for sometime, and its effects have been under reported due to the unique nature of the CPI. But some of the concern has also been overwrought. Much of the immediate inflation is tied to supply chains, the result of “Just-in-time” infrastructure that has left little fat for manufacturers in exchange for lower production costs. Bottlenecks in the system will not last forever and as those supply chains normalize that pressure will recede.

The other big pressure for inflation is in energy costs, but that too is likely to recede. Oil production isn’t constrained and prices, while higher than they were at the beginning of the pandemic are lower than they were in 2019. In short, many of the worries with inflation will not be indefinite, while the issues most worrying about inflation, specifically what it costs to go to the grocery store, were important but underreported issues before the pandemic. Whether they prove newsworthy into the future is yet to be seen.

*Update – at the time of writing this we were still waiting on more inflation news, and as of this morning the official inflation rate for the US over the past year was 7%. Much of this is still being chalked up to supply chains squeezed by consumer demand. An unanswered question which will have a big impact on the permanence of inflation is whether this spills into wages.

This political advertisement from the Conservatives ruffled many feathers in late November

Housing and Stocks – Two things that only go up!

If loose monetary policy didn’t make your groceries more expensive, does that mean that central bankers were right not to worry about inflation distorting the market? The answer is a categorical “No”. As we have all heard (endlessly and tediously) housing prices have skyrocketed across the country, particularly in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, but also in other countries. The source of this rapid escalation in prices has undoubtedly been the historically low interest rates which has allowed people to borrow more and bid up prices.

In conjunction with housing, we’ve also seen a massive spike in stock prices, with even notable dips lasting only a few days to a couple of weeks. The explosion of new investors, low-cost trading apps, meme-stocks, crypto-currencies, and now NFTs has shown that when trapped at home for extended periods of time with the occasional stimulus cheque, many people once fearful of the market have become quasi “professional” day traders.

Market have been mercurial this past year. Broadly they’ve seemed to do very well, but indexes did not reveal the wide disparities in returns. Last year five stocks were responsible for half the gains in the S&P 500 since April, and for the total year’s return (24%), Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet Inc, Tesla and Nvidia Corp were responsible for about 1/3 of that total return. This means that returns have been far more varied for investors outside a tightly packed group of stocks, and also suggests markets remain far more fragile than they initially appear, while the index itself is far more concentrated due to the relative size of its largest companies.

Suspicious Investment Practices In addition to a stock market that seems bulletproof, houses so expensive entire generations worry they’ve been permanently priced out of the market, the rapid and explosive growth of more dubious financial vehicles has been a real cause for concern and will likely prompt governments to begin intervening in these still unregulated markets.

Crypto currencies remain the standout in this space. Even as Bitcoin and Etherium continue to edge their way towards being mainstream, new crypto currencies trading at fractions of the price, have gotten attention. Some have turned out to be jokes of jokes that inadvertently blew up. Others have been straight-up scams. But all have found a dedicated group of investors willing to risk substantial sums of money in the hope of striking it rich.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens have also crept up in this space, making use of the blockchain, but instead of something interchangeable (like a bitcoin for a bitcoin, i.e. fungible) these tokens are unique and have captured tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for unique bits of digital art. Like cryptocurrencies, much of the value is the assumed future value and high demand for a scarce resource. However, history would show that this typically ends poorly, whether its housing, baseball cards or beanie babies.  

Lastly, there has been a number of new investment vehicles, the most unusual of which is “fractional ownership”. The online broker Wealth Simple was the first to offer this in Canada and it has been targeted to younger investors. The opportunity is that if your preferred stock is too expensive, you can own fractions of it. So if you wanted to invest in Amazon or Tesla, two stocks that are trading at (roughly) $3330 and $1156 respectively at the time of writing, those stocks might be out of reach if you’re just getting started.

This is a marketing idea, not a smart idea. The danger of having all your assets tied up in one investment is uncontroversial and well understood. The premise behind mutual funds and exchange traded funds was to give people a well-diversified investment solution without the necessity of large financial position. The introduction of fractional ownership ties back to the market fragility I mentioned above, with younger investors needlessly concentrating their risk in favour of trying to capture historic returns.

The End

For most investors this year was largely a positive one, though markets went through many phases. But while the pandemic has remained the central news story, the low market volatility and decent returns has kept much of us either distracted or comfortable with the state of things. And yet I can’t help but wonder whether the risks are all the greater as a result. Many of these events, the large returns in an ever tightening group of stocks, the growth of investors chasing gains, the sudden appearance of new asset bubbles and the continued strain on the housing market and household goods add up to a worrying mix as we look ahead.

Or maybe not. Market pessimists, housing bears, and bitcoin doubters have garnered a lot of attention but have a bad track record (I should know!) Many of the most pressing issues feel as though they should come to a head soon, but history also teaches us that real problems; big problems that take years to sort out and lead to substantial changes are often much longer in the making than the patience of their critics. The test for investors is whether they can stand by their convictions and miss out on potential windfalls, or will they become converts right as the market gives way?

Next week, we’ll examine some of the potential trends of 2022.   

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

The End of the 60/40 Split?

For the past few weeks I’ve been struggling to capture what’s been happening in markets since late January. There has simply been so much that it is hard to succinctly cover it all in a single blog post.

So instead, toady I hope to touch on one thing that should stand out to us, the potential end of an investing strategy that is so standard it is reflected in almost every corner of the financial services world, from mutual fund companies to robo-advisors to banks.

The 60/40 split, or balanced portfolio, is the general go to solution for steady returns. The principle is simple: 60% of a portfolio is weighted towards equities, that is stocks in companies, mutual funds or ETFs, and the remaining 40% goes towards fixed income; a collection of bonds or other “safe” investments that pay some income in the form of mutual funds or ETFs.

This is a wide space to play in. Within the stock or equity portion, a portfolio may have exposure to any number of companies, sectors, or geographies. Similarly, the fixed income component can have government debt, corporate bonds, T-bills, mortgage securities, either domestic or foreign, in short or longer durations. The individual positions may have short term impacts on performance, as some investments will outperform for limited stretches, but the general architecture of the portfolio should see relatively stable and consistent returns over time with an acceptable level of risk for the majority of investors.

This wasn’t just speculation. It had some math behind it, explained in the form of the “Efficient Frontier”, a curve that showed the relation of risk to return and aimed to help identify an optimum portfolio based on these two metrics. The goal was to maximize the amount of return for the risk undertaken. Its easy to get lost in the weeds here, but if you’re ever interested you can read up on Modern Portfolio Theory or Harry Markowitz. Put simply, the lesson the industry took was that a diversified portfolio of investments, with rough weightings of 40% in fixed income and 60% in equities would largely suit most people.

It’s worth asking why this is. And the answer has a lot to do with buying a house in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

As anyone who remembers 8-tracks will tell you, buying a house in the early part of the 80s was expensive. 5-year fixed rates were 20%, or more. According to the website ratehub.ca, the prime lending rate in Canada peaked at around 21.75% in August of 1981. By comparison, my current 5-year mortgage is a whopping 1.8%. In 1981, you could buy a Government of Canada 10-year bond with a coupon rate of 15.3%, and a 5-year GIC with a rate of 15.4%. Today a 10-year government of Canada bond has a yield of 1.51% and the most generous GIC I can sell is 1.96% from Haventree Bank with a minimum deposit of $50,000.

Figure 1 From London Life – Looking Back at Historical Returns

Okay, so what’s the connection?

The issue here is not just that buying a house cost more when it came to lending in the 1980s, but that the cost of lending itself has been falling for the last 40 years. We tend to think of bonds as an investment you buy, when in reality they are a loan you are making that can be traded on an open market. So imagine you were building a bond portfolio in the early 1980s, and the average yield of that portfolio (the interest you will receive based on what you paid) is 15%. It’s very safe, made entirely of Canadian 10-year bonds. Now, three years pass and a new 10-year bond from the GoC has a rate of 12.3%, what’s the effect on your bond portfolio?

It’s good news! It’s worth more, because for the next 7 years your bonds will pay 3% more than any new bond issuance. By 1986 a 10-year bond was paying 6% less per year than your portfolio. For the last 40 years the cost of borrowing has continued to decline, and the result has been to make bonds issued in previous years more valuable. And so, while there may have been fluctuations in returns over short periods of time, by and large a portfolio of bonds returned not just income, but also capital gains as older bonds were worth more with each decline in the cost of lending.

Figure 2 From http://www.Ratehub.ca/prime-mortgage-rate-history

Today the cost of lending is low. Very low. Central bank lending rates for Canada, the United States, and the ECB are 0.25%, 0.25% and 0% respectively. A 30-year government of Canada bond has a current yield of 1.948%. In other words, were you to buy that bond today, the most you would earn is 1.948% on whatever you paid for the next 30 years.

But remember, bonds are traded on an open market. This means that the value of a bond fluctuates with its demand, and with it the return the bond gives. So, if you think that 1.948% is not enough interest to warrant buying the bond and the broad market agrees with you, the price of the bond should fall enough to push up the yield (for reference, the yield is the interest paid by the bond, divided by its price) until it pays enough interest to warrant investing. And that is what has been happening this year. Government bonds in the United States have been dumped as investors expect stock markets to do well and bond yields are considered too low. And as the bond price falls, the yield the bond pays goes up in relation to the decline of the price, and with it sets a borrowing rate investors are more comfortable with.

What this means for portfolios is that the 40% allocated to bonds is now very vulnerable to both investor sentiment and future rate hikes by central banks. With borrowing rates already at rock bottom both of these risks seem likely, and it’s left the traditional “balanced portfolio” exposed when it comes to reducing risk through different asset classes.

You might assume that this is a new problem, but it isn’t. Risk has been growing and portfolios have been evolving in complexity to meet the needs of investors for the last few decades. Much of this has happened on the equity side of portfolios, with investors demanding, and ultimately gaining access to a much wider range of investable products since the 90s. The period where you could have a portfolio made up of just Canadian dividend paying stocks ended long ago, and in its place, portfolios now hold a variety of investment products with access to large cap, small cap, US, North American, global, international, Emerging Markets, Frontier Markets, sector specific investing, thematic investing, commodities, dividends, value, growth, and growth at a reasonable price. Bonds have undergone a similar transformation, with investors moving from government bonds, to corporate bonds, to junk bonds (bonds with lower quality ratings and potentially higher default rates) both domestically and globally.

Today, to achieve a return of about 6.5%, the average investor is taking on risk at a much higher rate than they would 20 years ago. In 2000 a 6.5% return could be achieved with a portfolio of exclusively bonds. 20 years later a 6.5% return would require a much larger range of positions, including US stocks (large and small cap), real estate, private equity and would have a relative level of risk of more than double (almost three times!) the 2000 level. The above changes to the bond market will only mean more risk and more volatility for investors.

I’m reluctant to ever declare something “dead” or “over”. That language betrays too much confidence about tomorrow, but financial history is much longer than most people appreciate and is filled with disruptions and the ending of economic certainties followed by the arrival of new paradigms. Whether it is the bankrupting of the Medicis, or the popping of a tulip bubble, economic realities can change.  The “balanced portfolio” with its 60/40 mix, has been a cornerstone of simplified investing, a “go-to” solution that has made mass investing using discount platforms affordable and easy.

Figure 3 From Wealth Simple’s web page, simply choose your risk comfort and get a portfolio with more or less bonds. No need to think, no need to worry.

In an ideal world we might wish that investing was more “set it and forget it” than not, but long-term data and averages obscure the reality for many people. In the last ten years we’ve seen two serious “once in a lifetime” events that have shaken markets and governments. Investors, no matter what their stripe, whether they prefer robo-advisors, bank products or a personal financial advisor like myself, should be cautious that the rules to successful portfolio building are immutable.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

The Game Stop Chronicles

Last week may go down as one of the weirdest weeks in investing history.

By now you have been made aware of the company Game Stop (GME:N). You’ve undoubtably been forced to look up what a short position and a “short squeeze” are and have collided head first into the meme fuelled online community of Wall Street Bets, the subreddit that lives for dangerous investments and may go down in history for the first market based populist uprising.

My first twig that something was going on came the week before last. I had investments in Blackberry (BB:TSX), a company that I had felt was undervalued and believed had made a successful transition into cyber security, a market sector I believe poised for long term growth. The ride had had not been fun. And then, all of a sudden the stock began going up. At first it seemed to be in response to a series of positive news stories; a settled IP legal case with Facebook, a new deal with Amazon for cloud services, and the sale of some 90 patents to Huawei. And then the stock took off. Within days a stock that had been languishing around $8 – $9 had suddenly doubled and was now looking to triple.

I was elated, until I read about Wall Street Bets (WSB), Game Stop, a hedge fund and how a number of stocks, including Blackberry, were being driven higher in an attempt to hurt a hedge fund. The story was fascinating but also terrifying. On Tuesday morning I exited Blackberry and began trying to understand what was going on.

The internet is a weird place, and far from creating a new universal society, it has instead hastened the growth of more insular and specialized communities. From the outside these groups can feel pretty alien. They have their own language, jokes and hierarchies and the subreddit Wall Street Bets is no different. But once you had pushed past the memes and lingo, it became clear the WSB, which is filled with amateur traders, had caught on to a risky move by a hedge fund called Melvin Capital. Melvin Capital had taken out large short positions on Game Stop, a legacy business that sold physical game cartridges in malls that was obviously struggling. The price of the stock had recently gone up following a new board member and announced plans for further restructuring. The traders at Melvin Capital believed the price of the stock over valued and had opted to short the stock (a method of betting on a future price decline by “borrowing” stock, selling it and buying it back within a set period of time). What the investors over at WSB understood was that the size of the short was too big, and that if they were to buy up all the available stock and hold it they could create a “short squeeze” in which the price of the stock climbs and the available supply of the stock falls, forcing potentially unlimited losses on those holding the shorts.

From here everything becomes extremely weird. It turned out the Wall Street Bets crowd wasn’t interested in making money as much as they were interested in crippling Melvin Capital. The trading platform that facilitated all of this, Robinhood, which prided itself on “democratizing trading” and offered no fees for doing trades, suddenly seemed to fold under the most minor of pressure to the request of another hedge fund to restrict retail trading on Game Stop, allowing only selling and no buying on Thursday. Suddenly members of Congress from across the political spectrum were tweeting and complaining about the restriction of trading regarding Game Stop and threatening to hold hearings into Robinhood’s practices.

On Friday limited purchases of Game Stop reopened, and much to the surprise of many, the commitment to “hold” did hold. While the price of Game Stop stock had fallen Thursday during the period only selling was allowed, the price decline reflected minimal volumes. On Friday morning the stock opened again above $300, and despite considerable volatility closed the week at $325 a share.

You’d be forgiven if you’re having a hard time following all the facets of this story, but from my vantage I’d like to share the 4 major issues this convoluted chain of events has created.

1.Populism and Democracy – Twitter and Reddit have been alive with excitement over screwing with a hedge fund, and its apparent that those engaging in the initial rally for GME are committed to undermining Melvin Capital, but the sharp response from Wall Street institutions that this represented some kind of illegitimate assault on the markets highlights the lack of interest in a “democratized” market. Like a lot of internet buzz about “making things more accessible” or “democratic”, when put into practice established institutions don’t seem to like the rabble actually having all that much power. Whether it’s a crowd sourced populist group of traders playing the other side of an over leveraged short position, or simply an online vote that wishes to name a scientific vessel “Boaty McBoatface”, efforts to open, engage and democratize previously closed off institutions seem to fail when it turns out the masses don’t share the goals or reverence of those institutions.

2. Hedge funds often describe themselves in terms of significant reverence and are self-styled “Titans of Wall Street”, but as a group hedge fund performance frequently falls flat. What hedge funds have been good at is risking other people’s money. The brashness and over confidence displayed by hedge fund traders is precisely how you end up with a short position worth 130% of the available stock of a company and squandering $5 billion in a week. Some may find “shorting” a controversial practice, but in reality it is a common and well understood strategy. But in the hands of hedge funds it can become predatory as efforts are made to sometimes game the system and force stock prices down unnecessarily.

3. The Robinhood trading app, which has become all the rage with DIY investors seemed to have its brand implode in the week, and it perhaps revealed far more about this business than anyone had wanted. Like Google or Facebook, where the service is “free”, people using the Robinhood trading platform were the product. Robinhood, legally but controversially, makes its money by “payment for order flow”, or by directing the orders to different parties for trade execution. This all gets pretty complex, but at its core those using the Robinhood app may have been paying fractionally too much for their trades, but when in the context of billions of trades it adds up to a substantial amount of money. The benefit of buying overflow is that high frequency trading algorithms can potentially front run those trades, which was the subject of the controversial Flash Boys book by Michael Lewis. Perhaps more nefarious was who was Robinhood’s primary purchaser of order flow; Citadel Execution Services, which is owned by Citadel LLC, which just bailed out Melvin Capital.

4.Much of this will end up bypassing the bulk of the population. The story is too weird, to convoluted and too specialized. It involves a cynical and anarchistic online community whose rallying cry is “WE CAN REMAIN RETARDED LONGER THAN THEY CAN STAY SOLVENT”, something that many will find repellent and will keep people from looking closer. What might make people pay attention is the money.

The apocryphal story of the famous investor receiving investment advice from the shoe shine boy right before the great crash has some modern parallels. Prices for stocks, some at all time highs, keep going up despite worrying fundamentals. Companies like Tesla, which have devout adherents, have bid up that stock so that the total company is worth more than all the other major car companies combined! This reeks of the beginnings of a mania, one that can only be made worse by a prolonged lockdown, low interest rates, and the use of social media to hype up a stock. The allure of easy money, embodied by the events surrounding Game Stop will only attract more investors that believe that they too can beat the market.

At the end of last week the number one app in Canada was the Wealthsimple Trade App, a similar low cost trading platform to Robinhood, while the Robinhood App itself remains highly popular south of the border.

The wind has been let out of the sails somewhat this week. Game Stop closed under $100 on Tuesday, and early hype that silver was going to be the next big WSB play seem to have fizzled also. Markets seem to have responded to this cooling of temperatures by resuming their positive direction, but the spectre of market mania looms over returns. Where we go next, I don’t know. But I do know that sensible investors should be watching this with concern. Whatever the merits of hunting hedge funds through crowd sourced market initiatives, the larger story remains one of deep concern, involving all the worst aspects of investing.

“Information in this commentary is for informational purposes only and not meant to be personalized investment advice. The content has been prepared by Adrian Walker from sources believed to be accurate. The opinions expressed are of the author and do not necessarily represent those of ACPI”.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

After Trump: The Persistent Discontent


Supporters of President Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Jose Luis Magana

The shocking scenes of Trump supporters storming the capitol building on January 6th, sometimes jovially, other times with what seemed like murderous intent, may have permanently cemented Trump’s fate. He’s been impeached, again, and efforts are being made to prevent him from running for office in the future. He may also be facing multiple criminal charges and possibly even bankruptcy.

Explanations for the insurrection both over and under explain the problem. Yes, Trump is a demagogue and its true his supporters have been radicalized in a number of ways, including conspiratorial thinking and racist ideas about threats to white people and black lives matter. But as the saying goes, “the issue isn’t the issue”.

In a video about anti-vaxxers (people who promote ideas that are untrue about vaccines) the YouTube Channel WiseCrack pointed out that vaccine acceptance was highest during and just after the Second World War, a period of high confidence and trust in the government by the American citizenry. Today that confidence has ebbed to an all-time low, and that collapse in trust isn’t necessarily unwarranted. The rise of a managerial and technocratic elite has placed an unacceptable distance between citizens and their governments, while government failures seem never to lead to any improvements or accountability.

The cost of these mistakes remains high. In Europe it has led to Brexit, months of protests by “Yellow Vests” in France, the erosion of the center-left ruling party in Germany and a resurgent far right party, the decline of liberal democracies in Hungary and Poland, and a number of anti-establishment parties getting control of small countries like Greece and big countries like Italy.

Canada, forever looking reasonable and calm compared to other countries, is having its own struggles. Prior to the pandemic we had rail protests across the country, have shown a consistent inability to get large infrastructure built and continue to see the erosion of our manufacturing sector. Pandemic response itself has been a laughable mess, from overconfident and condescending pronouncements on the ineffectiveness of masks and accusations of racism about concern of the virus, to complete reversals of position. Vaccine acquisition and distribution has also been underwhelming. The federal government didn’t seem to get enough at the right time, and provincial governments have struggled to get the vaccine to those who most need it (This is nothing compared to the US, where health care workers are actually refusing the vaccine).

In this moment, China can make credible claims for being a useful alternative to the US and other Western countries in its growing sphere of influence. A competent dictatorship with substantial economic growth and a rising standard of living must seem appealing to autocrats and some global citizens alike.

There are other concerns too. The gap between Main Street and Wall Street has grown ever wider. During early months of the pandemic the collapse of jobs and business was mirrored by a resurgent stock market that began gaining steam even while the real economy was crashing. This disparity between the world of investing and the world we live in only heightens inequality concerns. Ownership of stock by Americans closely correlates with age, ethnicity, wealth, and education. For many people today, inequality continues to look like a political class consorting with a billionaire class that don’t play by the same rules that govern everyone else. In a pandemic Jeff Bezos gets rich, and you get fired.

This is obviously not universal. Different countries have different problems and the degree to which these issues are felt by individuals depends a great deal on background and government. But even if we assume that the American situation represents an extreme amongst Western nations, it should not blind us to the anger that people rightly felt when they learned of politicians and executives travelling outside of Canada while asking everyone else to cancel their Christmas dinners. Politicians of all stripes seemed to believe that they would be exempt from the restrictions they imposed on others and had a hard time fathoming that constituents would be upset.

Fixing these problems will not be easy. Technocrats, that is governing authority due to technical expertise, imbues our current leaders with a lot of confidence on issues where there may be no correct answers. They leave people blind to what they do not know and encourage authorities to rely on models and projections rather than real life.

Take for instance inflation. Governments and central banks are very concerned with inflation. Too little and the economy will not grow. Too much and the economy will stall while savings lose value. Inflation needs to be “just right” which is currently considered somewhere between 1% – 3%, with a target rate of 2%. According to Statistics Canada, the CPI since 2010 has been around 1.5%, just below the current 2% target. In other words, $100 in 2010 would buy roughly $85 of similar goods today.

But would it?

Inflation has been higher and felt more directly by lower income people. Using data collected by Statistics Canada (you can click the link below to download the spreadsheet with all these numbers and my calculations) for retail food prices between November 2010 to November 2020, we can see that many food staples have become more expensive in the last decade at rates in excess of core inflation. In that time, the price of beef has risen between 4% to 7% per year depending on the cut. Potatoes have risen in price over 10%, onions by 5.5% and carrots by 6.3% a year. Baby food rose by an average of more than 9% a year, and toothpaste by 8%. Almost none of the staple groceries tracked by Statistics Canada had price increases contained to the 1.5% official rate of inflation, instead many rose at rates double that or more.

retail-food-change-2010-2020Download

Like real estate, another asset class that continues to defy gravity without an impact on inflation but a dramatic one on the population, a rising price of food that remains unaddressed only highlights the different reality Canadians seem to be living from our elected officials. Despite a great deal of lip service about the importance and risks facing the middle class, governments have yet to seriously tackle these issues, or make them central in elections. Instead we continue to deal with these problems in a patchwork of modest tax credits and empty rhetoric.

I, and I assume many others, would like to put the Trump era behind us and treat it as an anomaly. But to do so would assume that Trump had landed (as had Brexit and other populist movements) fully formed but alien to us, and that we had been taken by a madness that can finally be broken.

I think we know this is not true.

From the moment that Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “Deplorables” (or half of them at least) there has not been a clearer delineation between those that control the cultural zeitgeist, and those who have come to resent it. We have a similar divide in Canada too, with Alberta constantly at odds with more “progressive” provinces over environmental issues, and Quebec (doing as it always has) putting its historic/cultural/religious identity ahead of more multi-cultural aspirations of equality. Toronto and Vancouver may sit at the centre of Canada’s cultural output, but these two economic powerhouses do not share much with the rest of the country.

Our prolonged period of peace, wealth and stability has tricked us into believing that unrest, dissatisfaction, and failure are aberrations. But the history of Canada, the United States, Great Britain, and other European powers has been one of long periods of unrest. William Jennings Bryan, before being disgraced in the Scopes Money trial, had been a tireless campaigner for agrarian populism. In Canada we too had an agrarian populist movement (interestingly enough, similarly conservative and steeped in conspiratorial anti-Semitism, prominent in Alberta and Quebec) that only really started to disappear after the mid-60s and not totally until the late 80s. Political dissatisfaction can have long legs.

Five people died as a result of the assault on the capitol on January 6th, and one was Ashley Babbitt, a Q-Anon, MAGA loving Trump supporter who had breached four lines of security in an attempt to overthrow the government on behalf of Donald Trump. But while her motives and goals were deeply misguided, her past remains a window into a dispiriting world for many Americans. A fourteen year veteran of the United States air force, Babbitt now owned a pool supply business that was struggling, forcing her into a short term loan with a 169% interest rate. Medieval Europe had better rules governing usury than California. Or consider the North Carolina woman who took to social media because she couldn’t afford the $1000 insulin prescription for her son. Insulin, among other drugs in the United States, has been reported on multiple times for its rising price. Despite that, no government or corporation has been able to act in such a way to curb the rising price of a life saving drug that been around for a century.

All this is baked into America, and represents a growing risk for the future. Though the country has a more dynamic market, holds more patents and has some of the largest corporations, the failure to consider the effects of pushing up stock valuations at the expense of everything else will likely only deliver diminishing results in the future, both for investors like you, but also for the global liberal order that provides much of the stability we rely on.

Information in this commentary is for informational purposes only and not meant to be personalized investment advice. The content has been prepared by Adrian Walker from sources believed to be accurate. The opinions expressed are of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Aligned Capital Partners Inc.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

Defeating the Coronavirus?

Monday, markets exploded after learning that Pfizer may have a viable and highly effective vaccine for Covid-19. The Dow Jones briefly rose above 1200 points before settling back down to a more respectable 835 points for the day. Similar rallies were seen in Toronto and in overnight trading in Asia and Europe. In all, it’s been a good week for markets even while Covid-19 cases continue to surge.

Courtesy of @jkwan_md

The arrival of a vaccine remains the only thing that can truly right our social and economic ship, and without it the economic reality is poised to get worse. Despite efforts to use non-pharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks), the virus is resurgent almost everywhere, with new cases exploding across Europe, Canada and the United States.

So the news of a potential vaccine offers the first real potentially positive change for economies. And while the Pfizer vaccine may be the first, it likely will not be the last. Eli Lilly has also introduced an antibody treatment that has received emergency approval from the FDA. Again, such treatments will not be the last, and hint that the balance in the fight against the pandemic is beginning to shift back towards us and away from the virus.

Some quick thoughts on these developments:

  1. Had this announcement come out before the election Trump likely would have won, despite his uniquely poor handling of the pandemic. 
  2. There are still many unknowns about the vaccine, and so we should temper our excitement. This includes how many doses (two, reportedly), how long it lasts in your system, and how effective it will be for the most vulnerable parts of the population.
  3. How long it will be before we get a vaccine is still up in the air. Nicholas Christakis, author of Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, recently spoke on Sam Harris’s Podcast saying that it is no small feet to design, produce and distribute a new vaccine (you can listen to that podcast HERE). It could be several months, perhaps even a year, before we see the full recession of the pandemic.
  4. Markets should respond positively, but not indefinitely. Volatility will surround progress or delays in the vaccine, but so long as progress remains steady the vaccine should offer stability in markets for a wider recovery.

Finally, as a father, I’m excited to see that prospect of a return to normalcy for my kids. We’ve spent months sheltering patiently, denying my kids aspects of their childhood for the wider protection of our family. Like many parents with family members that have compromised immune systems, we’ve chosen the path of virtual learning, a half measure that allows for some academic progress but without the important social aspect of school. But the toll is visible on our children, and I am deeply saddened that my kids (as I am for everyone) should have to see a part of their lives, and their innocence about the wider world, forfeit to the reappearance of our oldest but most enduring foe. It is welcome news in a year so full of difficulty.

Information in this commentary is for informational purposes only and not meant to be personalized investment advice. The content has been prepared by Adrian Walker from sources believed to be accurate. The opinions expressed are of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Aligned Capital Partners Inc.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

The Undiscovered Country

Pandemics, plagues and other disasters have previously heralded major changes to economic and social landscapes. Most notably, the Black Death had the effect of badly eroding the existing feudal structure. Literally so many people died that feudal lords had to entice serfs to come and work their land or risk it sitting fallow. The Irish potato famine, which reversed the demographic trends in Ireland and made it an outlier in European population growth, also drastically improved the lives of those that survived the famine. This pandemic will be no different, changing the fortunes of many by the time it is gone.

While I wait for books on our current situation, governments aren’t sitting idly by. Faced with an unprecedented crisis, politicians have cried havoc and let slip the public purse strings, passing huge relief bills and providing large social support to ease the monetary impact of global shutdowns and the sudden halt to economies.

This marks a serious departure from what might be considered “peace time” economic management. In normal times, and for much of the past 40 years, control of the economy has been left in the hands of central banks who have manipulated the overnight lending rates (or key interest rates) to encourage or retard economic growth. Even if you haven’t paid much attention to the work of central banks you are likely familiar with some of the most notable names. Alan Greenspan in the 1990s, Ben Bernanke through the financial crisis, and Mark Carney as the Governor of the Bank of Canada and then Governor of the Bank of England have all helmed a central bank and were a staple of economic news and forecasting.

The job of setting rates was to encourage growth and mange inflation; increasing the cost of borrowing should slow economic growth and curb inflation, while cutting rates should make borrowing cheaper and speed up economic growth. But since 2008, with rates hovering at near zero and now a global pandemic destroying wealth, governments have had to take a more active roll in direct economic management.

Enter Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, the new(ish) idea that governments can largely spend their way out of problems and that fiscal deficits may be the cure for what ails us. The theory has been nicely (and optimistically) covered in the book “The Deficit Myth” by Stephanie Kelton, who argues that our understanding of money and taxes are wrong and as a result we have misunderstood the best way to deal with wealth inequality and job creation.

Kelton’s book is well written, but natural criticisms of her argument feel conspicuously absent. The crux of her thesis is that so long as you’re a “monetary sovereign”, that is a nation that issues its own currency and issues debt in its own currency, its impossible to go bankrupt. In addition, concerns that printing your own money might lead to inflation are not well grounded and that governments are not running deficits large enough to get to full employment. Some of this makes sense, indeed for many years we’ve seen countless countries like Canada, the United States and Japan all run very large deficits with no serious repercussions. But much of the language in the book feels unusually precise, navigating us around large objections with clever rhetorical sleight of hand. Where anyone with a passing understanding might wonder how it is that countries that have previously succumbed to too much debt and hyperinflation didn’t reap the benefits of MMT, the book is quick warn that you don’t want to have the “wrong” type of deficit and that too much spending can be detrimental, before rushing the reader off to see what can be done with MMT to fix pressing issues.

Whether this is a good idea or not, MMT has found a champion in Justin Trudeau, a prime minister for whom spending money as a political solution is as constant as the northern star. Reportedly our new finance minister Chrystia Freeland may be a fan too, a departure from the more traditional Bay Street pedigree of Bill Morneau. But even if our most senior politicians do not have any explicit endorsement of MMT, the direction of spending and the behavior of the Bank of Canada suggests the Modern Monetary Theory is central to current government policy.

Since March, the Bank of Canada has purchased the vast bulk of Canadian government issuances, particularly at the long end of the yield curve (debt that matures in over 11 years), and by the end of 2021 the BoC is expected to hold 60% of all outstanding Government of Canada securities. Intentional or otherwise, this is what MMT looks like, with the government effectively issuing debt to itself so it can spend more. And currently Canada is on track to run the largest deficits of any country, developed or otherwise, in the world.

Governments frequently run deficits but have relied on efforts of slowed spending and economic growth to reduce the long-term debt burden. In fact, it has very rarely been the case that governments ever cut spending, more frequently simply reducing future promised spending below predicted rates of inflation. Yet despite the fact that no government I can think have has run a surplus over the last decade, the belief that we haven’t spent enough will likely only be a reassuring message to governments looking for opportunities to improve their standing in the polls.

Under MMT, politicians like Donald Trump actually look very good (this goes unacknowledged by Kelton, but its impossible to miss). Trump’s lavish spending and huge deficits did seem to have the desired impact of reducing unemployment to below 4%, much lower than the previously believed “natural” rate of unemployment of 5%. And as a result of the pandemic, the US deficit moved from an expected $1 Trillion in 2020, to about $3.7 Trillion for the year. It’s currently an open-ended question how much more needs to be spent before the deficit will be large enough to offset the impact of Covid-19, let alone all the other ills that society faces. Given that most economists are calling for even more spending into 2021 and maybe even 2022, its hard to imagine how big a cheque will need to be written.

A central tenet of our society has been that debt makes us weaker, and that unconstrained spending, either by a household or a government will inevitably become a problem if left unchecked. Modern Monetary theory turns this on its head, and while the theory is serious it would likely not have found mainstream consideration were it not for the pandemic. Like feudal lords forced to consider paying serfs to work their lands, politicians are having to make peace with running huge deficits and manage ballooning debts.

But MMT remains untested, its ideas about money, debt and financial sovereignty are theoretical. Our relationship to debt and our ideas about preserving wealth are very old and persistent, while those that have broken the bond of fiscal prudence, be it Greece in 2011, Zimbabwe in the 1990s, the Weimer Republic in post war Germany or Revolutionary France, have always ended in defaults and hyper-inflation.

I remain skeptical of ideas like MMT, but open to new approaches where old ones seem to be failing. Covid-19 will likely be with us until 2022, putting pressure on all levels of government for the immediate future. Politically, Western nations weren’t doing well prior to the pandemic, plagued with populist political insurgencies, a retreating liberal order and lack luster economic growth. Now with a mountain of new problems, MMT offers perhaps a path to saving economies and people’s livelihoods by freeing us from previous assumed constraints, but carries with it awesome risk. Will our political class be able to resist borrowing or printing too much? We may have no choice but to embark on this path, into an undiscovered country.

Information in this commentary is for informational purposes only and not meant to be personalized investment advice. The content has been prepared by Adrian Walker from sources believed to be accurate. The opinions expressed are of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Aligned Capital Partners Inc.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc

Beyond Protests and The Police

While protests may not be, strictly speaking, market-based news, the size and scope of the protests regarding police violence and black lives makes them hard to ignore regardless of context. So far, these massive public demonstrations have not had an impact on markets (though they may yet on the spread of Covid-19), and have garnered a mixed reaction in the wider society. Whether police will be held to a level of greater accountability for actions that result in death remains to be seen, and regardless of what reforming actions are taken by police departments its quite obvious that it will take years to overcome distrust of authorities in some communities.

A more interesting aspect of the protests have been calls to “defund the police”, a rallying cry that either means exactly what it says, or sparks 15 minutes of explanations as it “doesn’t mean quite what it sounds like”. The arguments for it do make some sense though, and within some police departments there is sympathy for the idea that too much is asked of the police, resulting in a hodgepodge of policy goals foisted on a group simply not equipped to handle them. Currently the same people who have to deal with a domestic disturbance and oppose criminal gangs are the same people that have to help those with serious mental health issues and spend their days collecting revenue for cities. Not all these jobs should likely fall on the same person.

This raises an interesting point, which is how our political class has largely sidestepped any of the blame aimed at police departments. Police only enforce the laws that they have on the books, and true to any bureaucratic industry, we have lots of laws on the books. So many laws in fact that it is practically impossible to know what they all are. By-laws are added with little consideration for what has preceded it, speed limits seem set arbitrarily and may be subject to change, some laws are posted while others invisible. Which laws are enforced and where is left to the discretion of the police at the time. Many laws end up serving an unintended dual function, launched ostensibly to combat thing A, but end up serving issue B.

Consider that in 2008, Ontario passed a law making it illegal to smoke in a car in the presence of a minor, someone under the age of 16. This was part of a long campaign aimed at discouraging smoking in public that bore some superficial resemblance to other laws that discouraged smoking by making it harder to do in social settings. But where as smoking in public on patios and bars limited where you could go, this new law invited police into a citizen’s private space and criminalized behavior that was, at least under the laws of the province, still kind of legal. But the real issue here is who the law inadvertently targets.

Despite continued drops in the number of people smoking, those people that do smoke are statistically more likely to be poorer with more minimal education. According to the CDC 30% of people below and 25% of those at or just above the poverty line smoke, while those at more than double the poverty level only smoke at a rate of about 15%. In short the people most likely smoking in their car won’t be found in Leaside, but might be found in one of Toronto’s less affluent but already heavily policed neighborhoods. This law isn’t intended to target minorities or the poor, but put in the hands of police who are already tasked with policing higher crime areas (again areas that tend towards being poorer and with higher populations of minorities and new Canadians) it puts another class of previously non-offending people into potential confrontations with the police.

You may remember the death of Eric Garner in 2014. Another black American who died in the arms of a police officer that was caught on camera, Garner had been placed in a choke hold and had died from lack of asphyxiation. Garner’s crime, that had led him to this confrontation with multiple police, was for selling “loose cigarettes”. As part of a style of policing called “broken windows”, police had been instructed by the highest levels of authority within civilian politics to crack down on minor crimes to scare off larger criminal enterprises. Tackling the “loose cigarette” problem ultimately involved “the deployment of special plainclothes unit, two sergeants, and uniformed backup” to arrest a man selling cigarettes for a dollar who had been arrested 12 previous times. At no point did anyone wonder if this was a useful deployment of resources, or whether re-arresting a man who had already been arrest 12 times might finally break his habit.

You might be tempted to imagine that police would simply look the other way when silly or impractical laws find their way onto the books, but this too is a problem. Indeed, we know that the police can sometimes be given directives to enforce some laws over others. But the law cannot function effectively when it is applied only at the discretion by those in authority. If a law cannot be practically enforced or only enforced unevenly, it probably shouldn’t be a law at all.

Politicians remain responsive to their voters, particularly so at municipal levels. That can put enormous pressure on them to pass laws that are intended to fix social ills for moral reasons, but our politicians should be mindful that every law passed puts potentially puts citizens into conflict with the police. So long as the police remain the first line of citizen’s interaction with the state’s power, whether it be for jay walking, speeding, parking illegally, domestic disturbances, assault, or more serious illegal activity, any action can theoretically become fatal. Recently two young people died during police interventions in the GTA. The first was a young woman named Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who fell from a balcony during a mental health crisis when police showed up to take her to CAMH. The second, D’Andre Campbell was shot by police in his home in Brampton when police were called because he was having a schizophrenic episode. How culpable the police were in these events is the subject of much debate, but families in both instances have wondered aloud whether it is the police that should be the people who come during a mental health crisis.  

While Canada’s problems are mercifully not those of the United States (the proliferation of guns and the militarization of police are fortunately not major issues here), that shouldn’t excuse politicians who make noise about police excesses while being quick to use the law to fix minor grievances. While the police continue to do their own reviews and consider reforms, politicians should perhaps begin considering an audit of the numerous laws that we keep and whether it still makes sense to be ticketing people for jaywalking, working out in a park, or issuing fines to children who run a lemonade stand, especially when these laws can not be enforced with any consistency.  Whether our politicians can rise to meet even this challenge remains to be seen.

*In addition to the linked articles within this post, I have also referenced the book The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale for anyone interested in the arguments of defunding or abolishing the police.

Information in this commentary is for informational purposes only and not meant to be personalized investment advice. The content has been prepared by Adrian Walker from sources believed to be accurate. The opinions expressed are of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Aligned Capital Partners Inc.

by The Walker Report of Walker Wealth Management and Aligned Capital Partners Inc