--- Begin Message ---
To: "MTA" <mta@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Cramer's Rewrite of His Watch the Bond Market Column
From: "James Bianco" <jbianco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 24 Oct 1998 17:19:23 -0500
Reply-To: "James Bianco" <jbianco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Remember, in a poll on this list that all the bond guys said the Fed cut
rates out of panic while the stock guys thought it had to do with some
revised view of inflation.
This article does a good job of explaining all HUGE problems in the
financial system, why the Fed is panicked, and why the bond guys are scared.
I recommend it to all the "old stock hands."
JB
-----Original Message-----
Wrong! Take Two: Cramer's Rewrite of His Watch the Bond Market Column
By James J. Cramer, www.thestreet.com
10/24/98 12:16 AM ET
>From this little piece, I must have gotten two dozen requests to do a
rewrite. As I am from the "customer is always right" school (unless you send
me a nasty email), here goes.
People, the bond market is bigger than the stock market. (About 10 times
bigger. And far more important to the way business is done in this country.
It is the lifeblood of business, not the equity market, and it provides the
day-to-day cash for many enterprises large and small.) The problems are in
the bond market, not the stock market. Right now, the Fed could give a
%^$#&^^#%&^# about the stock market. If it saves it, that's a moral hazard
that the Fed will have to pay the price for. It will. (I could not believe
how many people told me I was nuts for saying this. Except our fixed-income
readers -- they all applauded this piece as the first piece that told of the
real plight. They know the truth. You can't float a bond in this
environment. In fact, the last piece of paper that got done of any size was
that giant Worldcom (WCOM:Nasdaq) offering. Boy that could never get done
today. We hear hints of the problems.
Ascend (ASND:Nasdaq) and Lucent (LU:NYSE) advance capital -- people like it
from Lucent, hate it from Ascend. But you never read about the real pain in
this market. It has always been like that on Wall Street.
The day I first interviewed at Goldman Sachs, I was amazed to find that
equities, at the most important equity house on Wall Street, were virtually
Lilliputian compared to bonds. All the real big money came from
underwriting. As the bull market took off, it got even worse. The big money
came from securitization of different pieces of credit, car mortgages, house
mortgages, credit-card mortgages. You name it. These giant pieces of paper
were sold and sold aggressively. That's where the real money was. The
underwriting fees from the issuers were enormous. But you could trade these
pieces of paper and take 1/8th, as they say, and make millions. I never made
as much money selling stocks as I did with bonds. Ever. And bonds always
sell like hotcakes because people have to own them. Pensions have to own
them. Retirees have to own them. They can take every piece of paper ever
made and sell it -- even that Milken junk. Until now.
Now, there is no money. Now, there are no buyers. That's the point of this
article. By the way, Treasuries used to be sold aggressively when the
government used to print them like newsprint. You could make pretty good
money taking 1/64th on those! And what the heck is Jimmy Rip Van Rogers
talking about? Our government doesn't do this stuff any more. We are
skinflints. Have been since Clinton got in. I am no fan, but he's gotten the
bond market right, for certain.)
I keep reading that the worst is over. It may be in the stock market. But
the bond market? Heck, it is just beginning. (In other words, the marginal
buyers of everything but treasuries were, for the most part, accounts that
looked and acted exactly like Long Term Capital. When you buy stocks and you
want to leverage, you can borrow up to half of the value of the stock. When
you buy bonds, you can repo them, get more money, leverage that and leverage
it some more. Heck, you can borrow 10 times what you have. And if the Fed
and the lenders turn a blind eye, you can borrow 20 times. And if the ex-Fed
guys are involved and the lenders are invested, we know now you can invest
100 times your money. Or their money. Or whatever money you may be playing
with.
This market was like that scene upriver in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen
is asking those soldiers at night "Who is in charge here?" and they turn to
him and say "You are." Sure, nominally the Fed in New York is in charge, but
that's a whole other story, one that no one is willing to do because it is
too hard. Bond traders have always acted as if they had the full faith and
credit of the U.S. government behind their purchases. Turns out they don't
have the faith or the credit of anybody. Since Long Term Capital, what has
happened is that no firms want to lend you money to finance bond
inventories.
If you are sitting on a giant inventory of bonds and you are Fannie Mae
(FNM:NYSE), that's cool. You have no financing problems. But if you are
anybody else, believe me, you need some financing to keep all of that
inventory. In normal times, you could sell off what you had to sell if the
lenders want their capital back that they lent you to take down bonds. But
these are not normal times. The lenders want their money back, as they are
all capital-constrained right now and are trying to slim down their balance
sheets -- they basically loaned way too much, every brokerage house loaned
way too much -- and the borrowers can't sell the fixed-income junk they have
because the brokerage desks won't bid for the stuff and every other buyer is
full up.
So, one by one, these big players either liquidate via auction at prices
that are barely able to keep them in business, or they default and lose the
whole ball of wax, or they file bankruptcy a la Criimi Mae (CMM:NYSE). The
numbers are staggering. We are talking billions of dollars in loans from
brokerage houses that can't get paid. To make matters worse, the brokerage
houses already have billions upon billions of dollars in inventory. And they
are sitting on pieces of Long Term Capital's inventory. And nobody has the
capital or the inclination to buy this stuff except at vastly reduced
prices. As the crisis is worldwide -- all of the major banks in Europe were
in this, and the Japanese were in too -- and simultaneously everybody wants
to shrink his balance sheet -- there has been no movement in the market
whatsoever. If the sellers elect to sell at the prices that the brokers are
bidding, they will be forced to mark their other positions down to where
they will have even less collateral, which will beget more margin calls,
which will beget more forced selling. It is a real Mexican standoff. So, one
by one, these holders of paper wither or default.) That's where the layoffs
and the shutdowns are occurring. (Not only are the brokerages all trying to
shrink their balance sheets, they are all trying to shrink these
departments. They may not need all of those fixed-income traders and
salesmen because there are no new issues to sell, nobody to sell them to
right now as everybody just wants plain old Treasuries, where very little
money is being made trading and selling because it has become so competitive
and there are so few 30-year auctions, where all of the juice -- mark-ups,
commish, whatever -- was to begin with. So, inexorably, everyone of these
firms wants to fire people, streamline fixed income and get these incredibly
expensive people off their books. It will only get worse when the bonuses,
if there are any, get dispensed next month. Then I imagine we will see real
bloodshed.) That's where the market that has ceased to function. (No one
wants to take down any inventory. No one wants to extend financing. So,
imagine a housing market with no new houses being created and no mortgages
available so you had to pay with cash. Would you want to be a realtor, a
contractor, a developer in that market? That's what the bond market looks
like right now: a giant, multitrillion-dollar housing market with no
mortgages available.)
Let me write that again: ceased to function. (This is why I branded Bankers
Trust in denial. This is why I wish that there were many more people writing
about Long Term Capital instead of the equity market. This is why, except
for Tom Wolfe, nobody seems to even know where the real masters of the
universe used to reside. They resided in the bond market, not the stock
market. And they are no more. And the people, the vast number of people you
see downtown, are not needed anymore either.)
As that market is only about 10 times as important to the U.S. economy as
the stock market, we should not gauge the stock market's strength as a
measure of whether the Fed should be worried. (Remember, it is not just the
corporate bond market that is frozen. It is the collateralized security
market -- mortgages, car loans, credit cards. It is the emerging debt
market -- that's just vanished, vaporized, without a trace. It is the
municipal market, nothing cooking there. Heck, even commercial paper has
dried up. There is nothing for these people to do except eat pizza all day.)
If this freeze continues, a month from now, you could go to the fixed-income
floors of the major firms on Wall Street and turn them into bowling alleys.
(I am not being overly dramatic. These people are dead men walking if this
thing doesn't turn around soon. And those who follow stocks won't know the
difference.) There is still no liquidity. No credit. Nothing.
So, if you think the Fed is done easing because the market rallied 1,000
points, you are looking at the wrong market. It's the fixed-income market,
stupid. (Yes, there is a solution to all of this. You cut the rate that
everybody borrows at overnight to some minimal level, say 3%, such as we had
in 1990-91. That makes it more likely that these firms can finance
inventories without going belly-up. Easier money in the form of lower rates
would make much of this paper more attractive to buyers. It would solve the
inventory problem. It would solve the credit problem. If it is not solved,
we will have a bad recession. That is written. I don't care what the
economists/talking heads say, this logjam gets broken or we go into
recession.
But the logjam is broken by making the overnight rates dramatically cheaper,
so inventories of illiquid bonds don't cost much. The Fed, in its initial
ease, hoped that the problems weren't as systemic as they turned out to be.
Worldwide bond market shutdown isn't good for anybody. And it can be
changed. The rates are low in Japan, but no banks have enough capital to
finance inventories of bonds, and they are already financing real estate
that loses value by the day. So it has to be us. We are the only ones who
can break the logjam. Heck, if it causes the stock market to shoot up, so be
it. We have no choice. Greenspan knows this. Now. That's what the second
ease said.
Why is no one else writing about this crisis? Maybe because they don't have
any friends in the fixed-income business. I have tons of them. I know what's
going on, and I don't want them to lose their jobs because of this crunch.
But they will if the Fed does not ease big and fast. Amazingly, everybody
who trades at the multimillion-dollar level, where corporations are
financed, knows this. But no one in the press has a clue, and the talking
heads they present seem equally oblivious. This is like if the Dow were to
have dropped to 4,000 points overnight, except more stark, because the Dow
would not yield 12% at these prices like many of these bonds do.) That's
what you should be paying attention to. (How do you follow this day to day?
Read the credit columns. Look for new issues. If you see a pickup, that's
good news. But I don't think you will.)
If it still exists. (Yeah, remember, bonds are capitalism. Stocks are
offshoots of bonds. Stocks can do well in the very environment described,
provided the corporations don't need financing and have big cash flows.
Right now, corporate America is very liquid, so we don't see the problems
yet. But if we wait around, we will. The Fed knows this, though. I got very
negative on stocks when I did not think the Fed understood what I am
describing in this very column. How could they? The New York Fed, which is
supposed to monitor this stuff, was too close to Long Term Capital to see
the problems.
But, believe me, they know it now. And they can solve the problem. Which is
why I am no longer bearish. Can't be. Not on equities. Not given the easings
that the Fed will have to do put the fixed-income markets back to work
again.)
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