Dan Alpert Profile picture
Sep 13, 2020 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
1/5
Thank you, @andrewrsorkin, for compiling these - largely, appropriately critical - essays on Milton Friedman's work of a half century ago. But one critical argument is absent: The change in composition of share ownership over the past 50 years.>> nyti.ms/2GRaXTK
2/5
As Hyman Minsky wrote sometime after Friedman's disturbing exegesis on corporate capitalism, even by the 1970s - larger by magnitudes since - the shareholders for whom profits are being generated have become isolated from corporate governance/oversight by "money managers.">>
3/5
This "money manager capitalism" is not really focused on profits, but on values reflected in stock prices. Regardless of profitability, manager-intermediaries seek, at all costs, price gains that place them in a competitive, or at least equal, position with other managers.>>
4/5
And they reward - handsomely - a managerial class for obtaining stock price gains, without regard to short of long term profitability. And, for the most part, these money managers can't "vote with their feet" and exit otherwise mismanaged companies for fear of their own...>>
5/5
...competition (other managers) NOT exiting and obtaining superior portfolio returns. Friedman's deluded prescription ignored the then developing nature of share ownership. Reading into Friedman a commitment to long-term profitability is, accordingly, besides the point.
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More from @DanielAlpert

Mar 13, 2023
Post-intervention #SVB 🧵:
1/n The Fed stepped up last evening and fulfilled a central bank's primary reason for existence - to stop bank panics by acting as lender of last resort and providing ample liquidity. This made all the more easier by the fact that the majority of...>
2/n...assets held by SVB were the debt of, or debt guaranteed by, the government itself. They now have made clear an already implicit backstop at par on those assets (and if it wasn't implicit to you, you haven't been paying attention this past quarter century). But this move...>
3/n...also set down another policy (in coordination with Treasury and the FDIC) that the backstop would come at a decisive cost. All equity, preferred equity and subordinated debt is now pushed way to the back of the line on recoveries - presumably recoveries to market prices.>
Read 9 tweets
Mar 11, 2023
#SVBCollapse 🧵
1/n There's a lot of conflation out there between the absence of mark to market accounting on US government bonds and the fact that SVB took losses on its bond portfolio when it sold a few billion to raise cash to accommodate withdrawals.
There's no great mystery>
2/n The book value of a bank's US government (risk-free) portfolio will always be recovered in full through their maturity (unless purchased at a humongous premium, which is extremely rare). The market value of a portfolio, of course, dances around with prevailing interest rates>
3/n In the present case, it is true that the Fed has increased the policy rate more rapidly than at any time in 50 years and that has crashed the price of preexisting government securities severely. But every institution has pretty constant rolloff and generally can look to...>
Read 11 tweets
Feb 20, 2023
Funny thing about the Fed's trying to whip inflation by raising the policy interest rate: If it doesn't result in a job-killing recession, it creates MORE INFLATION. Here's why... (cc. @stephaniekelton)
@StephanieKelton Let's say that last week one had $200,000 in 2 year Treasuries mature that had been acquired (at a small discount, admittedly) a year ago when one was concerned that equities had peaked and were in the midst of a slide (and there was this war in Ukraine brewing).
@StephanieKelton The US Treasury was paying the holder $300 per annum in interest on those securities, all that the poor sod had to show - from the government - for parking his money in exchange for its guaranteed, risk-free return at a later date.
Read 9 tweets
Jan 20, 2023
🧵 on the coming Commercial Real Estate crisis:
1/n
It is a mistake to view the present state of global real estate through the analytical lens of earlier crises.
In the 1987 - 1993 era, overbuilding spurred by tax incentives and excessive leverage was...2 bloomberg.com/news/features/…
2/n
...the driver of collapse (especially after the 1986 tax act ripped the tax benefits away).
Coming into the Global Financial Crisis, CRE was over-leveraged as a result of lax credit rating standards and property valuations then, as now, being forced down by Fed tightening.>
3/n
But this crisis is different from both of the renowned commercial real estate debacles of the past half century.
It starts with an enormous contraction in end-demand.
The most obvious and unprecedented form being in the office sector.
But other CRE...
nypost.com/2022/05/08/big…
Read 13 tweets
Dec 28, 2022
A 🧵 on the oh so crazy @CathieDWood and $ARKK.
1/n I bought into her top 10 wealth destroying actively managed ETF (Morningstar) this morning at $29.50 as an experiment.
One might think from the below chart that Cathie has been all hat and no cattle.
With huge hype from... Image
2/n (ex) Bloomberg's @Matthew_Winkler in 2020, ARKK hit nearly $140 a share and has lost nearly 80% of its then value.
Cathie was (is) selling a concept she calls "disruptive innovation" claiming that she can spot those with real disruptive technology and business models and...
3/n separate them from the 'fake it til you make it' crowd.
Very Schumpeterian of course, but Cathie packs a larger ideological bag as a disciple of Arthur Laffer, and is a still-avid supply sider and producerist -- long past the sell-by date for those theories.
Yet she has...
Read 12 tweets
Nov 10, 2022
#CPI The headline today is of course core slipping back to 0.3% MoM and all items falling back to 7.7% YoY on basis effects. But let's have a look behind the headlines...
Core goods are now decisively DEflating - down -0.4% MoM - as global supply chains are reopening in earnest and demand is slackening. The only real stubborn price pressures remaining in core goods are in new vehicles and some related parts. The chips issue still the culprit.
But the BIG NEWS today is the prices of Services less Rent of Shelter falling -0.1% MoM in October. This is a huge change (e.g. last month +0.9%) in direction and a bellwether as the rent and OER data is lagging the housing market that has already turned negative.
Read 5 tweets

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