Category: Investing

March Madness: How has Bitcoin done relative to the S&P 500 and inflation?

by philg

For basketball fans, today is the beginning of March Madness. For the rest of us, the primary kind of madness to which we’ve been exposed is the idea that humans can control a respiratory virus with bandanas as PPE. But what about the second maddest form of madness, i.e., the belief that “they’re not making any more bits” and therefore that Bitcoin is inevitably valuable?

What if we’d bought the S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends over the past year? How would that compare to a dividend-free investment (not to say “speculation”!) in Bitcoin? And how have both strategies fared compared to the inflation that we are assured is both minimal and transitory?

Let’s look at the S&P 500. It seems to be up about 6.6 percent. Then add in a dividend yield of just under 2 percent and we get an 8.6 percent bump in nominal terms:

Of course, inflation has been at least 10 percent (if we count the cost of buying a house) and therefore an investor in the S&P 500 has actually lost money over the past year (he/she/ze/they is down about 20 percent measured against the cost of buying a house in South Florida). Bitcoin is an inflation hedge like gold and therefore must surely have done better, right? Yesterday’s chart:

Down 32 percent! What about gold itself? Or, in this case, GLDM:

Up 15 percent, so losing value compared to real estate but perhaps roughly even with most other items.

What if we’d bought tanker trucks full of gasoline? It has gone up from $2.71/gallon to $4.10/gallon (EIA.gov), a 51 percent bump in nominal dollars.

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Six-year anniversary of the SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF

by philg

Happy 6th birthday to the SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF (symbol: SHE):

Seeks to provide exposure to US companies that demonstrate greater gender diversity within senior leadership than other firms in their sector

Companies in the Index are ranked within each sector by three gender diversity ratios

The Index seeks to minimize variations in sector weights compared to the composition of the index’s broader investment universe by focusing on companies with the highest levels within their sectors of senior leadership gender diversity

There are nearly 200 holdings in the fund out of the roughly 3,500 significant publicly traded U.S. companies (Wilshire 5000, in which 3,500 is the new 5,000). In other words, roughly 5 percent of U.S. public companies do things the correct (gender diverse) way.

To celebrate Dr. Marissa Mayer‘s brave stewardship of Yahoo! (history, which included 30 days of daily new logos in 2013) we should get a custom chart comparing SHE to the Wilshire 5000 over the past 6 years from Yahoo! Finance.

The stocks of companies that failed to enter the gender diversity Olympics were up by roughly 107 percent in nominal dollars (but don’t forget that inflation eroded these gains; a house in our Florida neighborhood has gone up in price by much more than 107 percent in the same period and even the government’s cooked CPI number is up roughly 20 percent). Stocks of companies with people identifying as “not men” in leadership positions were up by 44 percent.

Related:

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How an asset bubble that inflates and deflates makes a lot of people worse off

by philg

One might think that an asset bubble that inflates and deflates doesn’t hurt that many people. After all, if you just stay in your house, what difference does it make if the value goes up to 3X and then comes back down to 1.2X?

Jeremy Grantham, the G in the asset management firm GMO, points out that people caught up in bubble fever adjust their consumption (i.e., spend like drug dealers). From his January 20 newsletter (a friend who has managed $billions sent it to me):

All 2-sigma equity bubbles in developed countries have broken back to trend. But before they did, a handful went on to become superbubbles of 3-sigma or greater: in the U.S. in 1929 and 2000 and in Japan in 1989. There were also superbubbles in housing in the U.S. in 2006 and Japan in 1989. All five of these superbubbles corrected all the way back to trend with much greater and longer pain than average.

Today in the U.S. we are in the fourth superbubble of the last hundred years.

One of the main reasons I deplore superbubbles – and resent the Fed and other financial authorities for allowing and facilitating them – is the underrecognized damage that bubbles cause as they deflate and mark down our wealth. As bubbles form, they give us a ludicrously overstated view of our real wealth, which encourages us to spend accordingly. Then, as bubbles break, they crush most of those dreams and accelerate the negative economic forces on the way down. To allow bubbles, let alone help them along, is simply bad economic policy.

What nobody seems to discuss is that higher-priced assets are simply worse than lower-priced ones. When farms or commercial forests, for example, double in price so that yields fall from 6% to 3% (as they actually have) you feel richer. But your wealth compounds much more slowly at bubble pricing, and your income also falls behind. Some deal! And if you’re young, waiting to buy your first house or your first portfolio, it is too expensive to get even started. You can only envy your parents and feel badly treated, which you have been.

If your house goes from being worth $800,000 to $1.6 million, as the houses in our Florida neighborhood have done within the past two years, Grantham predicts that you’ll sign up for that lavish vacation, buy the fancy new car, splurge on clothing and jewelry (see “Cartier’s Dazzling Festive Season Bodes Well for Luxury Stocks” (WSJ): “Overall, U.S. jewelry sales increased 32% year-over-year from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24”), pay $1.2 million for a piston-powered unpressurized airplane, etc. We see this with governments as well. States that are raking it in from temporarily turbocharged capital gains taxes build new spending programs that will need to be funded every year, even if capital gains tax revenues collapse due to asset values stagnating (but maybe inflation can help, since capital gains tax calculations don’t adjust for inflation and, therefore, even assets that actually lost value will result in taxes being owed on a nominal profit).

Where does Grantham, an elder statements of the equity markets, think we’ll end up?

The key here is that two things are true: 1) the higher you go, the lower the expected future return; you can gorge on your cake now or enjoy it piece by piece into the distant future, but you can’t do both; and 2) the higher you go, the longer and greater the pain you will have to endure to get back to trend – in the current case to a trend value of about 2500 on the S&P 500, adjusted for the passage of time, from whatever high point the market might reach (currently at nearly 4700).

In other words, the S&P crashes to 2,500 or, assuming sufficiently clever manipulation of all the control wheels by wizards in Washington, D.C., stays more or less where it currently is, adjusted for inflation, for a decade or so.

(Maybe “spend like drug dealers” above isn’t the best expression for today? How about “spend like crypto early-adopters”?)

Related:

  • Grantham warned us of a bubble in January 2021 (and if you’d followed his advice by going short or moving to inflation-savaged cash you’d be pretty miffed right now!): “We at GMO got entirely out of Japan in 1987, when it was over 40% of the EAFE benchmark and selling at over 40x earnings, against a previous all-time high of 25x. It seemed prudent to exit at the time, but for three years we underperformed painfully as the Japanese market went to 65x earnings on its way to becoming over 60% of the benchmark! But we also stayed completely out for three years after the top and ultimately made good money on the round trip. Similarly, in late 1997, as the S&P 500 passed its previous 1929 peak of 21x earnings, we rapidly sold down our discretionary U.S. equity positions then watched in horror as the market went to 35x on rising earnings. We lost half our Asset Allocation book of business but in the ensuing decline we much more than made up our losses.” The Jan 2021 piece includes the figure below.
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Success with Wise money transfer

by philg

In Finally a use case for cryptocurrency? (currency conversion fees), Tim suggested Wise as the, um, wise way to transfer dollars to euro-denominated accounts overseas. I recently used this to pay a roughly $700 bill over in Portugal (where what we would call ACH transfer is apparently the standard way to pay) and it was done within hours for a fee of $44 (Bank of America’s hidden fees would have been closer to $200).

If you want to transfer some money away from the galloping inflation of the U.S. dollar, Wise seems like a reasonable option. The euro per se, however, is probably not the best currency to choose for inflation protection. They have the same fraudulent way of computing inflation, in which the cost of buying a house is excluded (Reuters) and their money printing during coronapanic has generated roughly 5 percent annual inflation. Right now Japan and Switzerland are looking good in a ranking of countries (the U.S. is down with Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and Argentina). One thing that I don’t understand is how Germany and France can use the same currency, be right next to each other, and yet have substantially different inflation rates (5.2 percent and 2.8 percent).

Remember, though, that you might have to file some additional IRS forms if you own foreign financial accounts/assets (looks as though real estate is exempt, but not a real estate investment trust, for example).

(A potential inflation hedge in Gruyères, Switzerland. Cheese not included.)

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What edge does Rivian have in the truck or EV market?

by philg

“Rivian Is The Biggest Company With No Revenue In The U.S.” (Jalopnik) provides a little background on what is now the world’s third most valuable vehicle maker (Tesla #1, Toyota #2, Rivian #3, just ahead of VW).

Readers: Please educate me! What does Rivian know how to do that makes it worth huge $$ despite zero revenue? Wikipedia doesn’t describe any innovations other than maybe putting in four motors (but so what? A C8 Corvette has only one motor and it gets down the road and around corners).

It can’t be battery chemistry because the company buys batteries from Samsung (InsideEVs).

It can’t be that nobody else can make an electric pickup truck because the Ford F-150 Lightning will be here soon.

It can’t be that nobody else can make electric commercial vehicles because Mercedes promises the eSprinters to Americans starting in 2023 (Car and Driver).

I don’t see how it can be the case that Rivian will flood the market before the legacy companies, the way that Tesla has remarkably done, because Rivian is only just struggling to get its first vehicles out to consumers. If things go perfect, Rivian will deliver 40,000 units in its first year (source). Ford sells nearly 1 million F-150s per year.

An electric pickup enthusiast will have to wait his/her/zir/their turn for either a Rivian or a Ford. Why wouldn’t the typical buyer prefer to order a Ford? The price for Ford’s electric truck is lower than Rivian’s price and the reviews of the Ford are positive (example).

Ford is an investor in Rivian, so presumably there is a rational answer to why Rivian is worth a lot (since Ford knows the industry!). But what is that answer?

(Investors take note: I thought and wrote pretty much all of the above about Tesla when the company was young. I think it is safe to say that I have been proven wrong! But on the third hand Tesla didn’t arrive on the scene at the precise moment that the legacy car makers were going all-in on electric vehicles while Rivian is arriving after Ford already demoed the electric F-150.)

vs.

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Lecture regarding portfolio diversification from a mother of 6

by philg

What are folks doing for end-of-year portfolio clean-up in light of the radically changed economic landscape, notably the dramatic inflation as measured by the CPI and the even more dramatic inflation as experienced by actual consumers? A friend who is a connoisseur of hip hop sent me this brief lecture on portfolio diversification (the percentages are accurate for a lot of states, but the dollar figures could have been a lot higher if higher-income targets had been identified). Note that the lecturer’s strategy is inflation-proof since the wages on which her income is based should rise along with any inflation rate.

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Prepare for a worldwide market crash

by philg

I had some cash sitting in a checking account due to selling our house in Maskachusetts and becoming a renter here in the Florida Free State (a relocation analysis). If this had happened a few years ago, I might have let the money sit in checking until the day when it is time to get super extra stupid again and buy a house here in Florida (trade “call the landlord and open the door to the maintenance guys one hour later” for “spend a week begging contractors to come over”). But with inflation for the stuff that we might actually buy, e.g., houses, aircraft, etc., running at 20 percent annually, “park it in checking” didn’t seem viable.

I didn’t have enough confidence in the U.S. dollar or the Democrats’ muscular central management of the economy to buy more U.S. stocks. Buying bonds seems literally crazy given that the interest rate is lower than the official inflation rate. Buying TIPS doesn’t seem wise given that they’re pegged to the official inflation rate, which is way lower than the inflation rate for our family. So… that leaves non-U.S. stocks. The euro seems to have some of the same inflation risks as the USD, with governments using the same logic that Americans used from 1961 through 1975 with respect to the Vietnam War (“if we just throw some more cash at fighting this enemy, we cannot be defeated”; the enemy today, of course, is SARS-CoV-2).

But my beloved Sweden has its own currency! And that currency is up quite a bit against the euro (i.e., of course I am late to the party!):

(The dollar has lost roughly 10 percent of its value against Swedish krona as well.)

From Best way to invest in Sweden? (September):

I do think the Swedes will prosper in the long run due to superior mental health, a focus on something other than COVID-19, their kids having an extra year of in-person school compared to kids in U.S. cities, etc. I want to invest in Sweden with a 10-20-year horizon.

I have now put my money where my mouth is. The house sale proceeds are, as of today, in EWD, a high-fee index fund of Swedish stocks that I never could figure out how to buy directly as an American.

However, since I am the world’s dumbest investor, if I have moved money from cash to stock that can only mean one thing going forward: a worldwide stock market crash (or at least a crash in the Swedish market and/or currency!). You have been warned!

In the best tradition of Wall Street, if this investment outperforms, I will claim credit as a farsighted genius, second only to Mileva Marić, who explained the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and formulated the special and general theories of relativity. If this investment underperforms, I will say that it is my version of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Investing, in which I support a society that had the courage to carry on educating children, working, socializing, breathing without masks, etc. despite recognizing that COVID-19 would kill some people (albeit at a much lower rate than in a lot of countries that were celebrated for their mask and shutdown orders). The Swedes even managed to get through 2020 and 2021 without the marijuana that California and Massachusetts governors/covidcrats deemed “essential” (“Cannabis in Sweden is illegal for all purposes.”).

Readers: What are doing right now for protecting savings from Bidenflation?

Related:

  • “Annual inflation hits 30-year high” (The Hill, today): The consumer price index (CPI), which tracks inflation for a range of staple goods and services, rose 0.9 percent last month and 6.2 percent in the 12-month period ending in October, the highest rate in the U.S. in 30 years. Analysts broadly expected the CPI to rise by 0.5 percent last month, up from a gain of 0.4 percent in August, and 5.8 percent over the past year.
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Portuguese stock picks

by philg

If you want some insurance against future Europe-US travel restrictions, want your children to have the flexibility to study/work/live in the EU, or just want to be like Eric Schmidt (support Biden and the Democrats’ plan to re-make U.S. society and the U.S. economy, but have the Gulfstream fueled and that second passport handy just in case!), the Portuguese Golden Visa program is an inexpensive path to an EU passport (less than $100,000 in fees and travel expenses). One requirement of the program is investing in real estate, which the Portuguese love and which I personally hate, or stocks, which the Portuguese hate and I love. The stock purchase approach requires more capital (1 million euro, versus as little as 280,000 for real estate that needs renovation), but is virtually guaranteed to be liquid.

(see Portuguese stocks or Lisbon real estate for the next five years? for some backgrond)

Friends of friends manage money or work in investment banking over in Europe. The general consensus was that Portuguese stocks aren’t mispriced and therefore there is no reason to expect them to do worse (or better) than German or U.S. stocks. That said, the stock market isn’t very developed in Portugal and it is perhaps easier for a management team to loot from shareholders.

Here are some notes from a guy who grew up in Portugal, but has spent his career as an investment banker in London and Spain….

Don’t buy real estate unless you want to use it. He bought in the center because he is fanatical about capital preservation. It took a long time to unload an apartment in Lisbon after the last crash.

Why has PSI-20 done so badly? Had same problems in 2001 and 2008 as everyone else. Bank blew up in 2014. Should be correctly priced now. They’ve survived hell and high water.

The PSI-20 has more exposure to Poland than Brazil or Angola, e.g., through JMT.

You’re in great shape with the large liquid components of the PSI-20.

  • JMT (10, great management, high growth) [the number is a rating from 1 to 10]
  • EDPR (world’s leading wind farm developer, incredibly management)
  • EDP (owns 65% of EDPR, cheapest right way right now to own EDPR)
  • GALP (4, local distribution company for oil, invested some into oil fields in Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, not especially well-managed)
  • BCP (6, only remaining bank, not especially well-managed, dirt cheap, too big to fail for system, largest shareholder is Chinese)
  • RENE (5, just the grid, regulated business, natural monopoly for electricity and gas, yield play)
  • SON (1, conglomerate, screw the minorities every single time, subsidiary is NOS and own that)
  • NVG (integrated paper manufacturer, Europe’s leader, very good management, very well run)
  • COR (10, one of the best companies I’ve ever come across, 50% of good wine[ry?])
  • ALTR (8, indirect way of owning, one of Europe’s most efficient [… something?])
  • CTT (6, post office)
  • SEM (85% of value is navigator, forget about them)
  • EGL (avoid)
  • PHR (avoid)
  • IBS (very nice company, KFC and Pizza Hut, they can grow)
  • Novabase NBA (great company, small IT provider, all software for Vodaphone, half of market cap is cash)
  • RAM (specialized steel and have a forest, properly managed and managed for you).

What if the Portuguese bank holding one’s securities fails? It is just like in the U.S. and the bank is only a custodian.

What did I decide to buy?

CompanySymbolWeight PSI-20Percent portfolio
J. MartinsJMT1325
EDPEDP1220
CorticeiraCOR417
NavigatorNVG610
AltriALTR410
IbersolIBS110
NovabaseNBA0.55
RamadaRAM0.33

The above is based on personal prejudice against banks (ruled out BCP), enthusiasm for Poland (overweight JMT), enthusiasm for electricity (overweight EDP; think of all the European douchebags needing to charge their Teslas!), belief that people are too lazy to cook and that table-service restaurants are unsustainable in a world of COVID-19 plus high labor costs (IBS).

Due to prejudice (observing the USPS!), I didn’t buy the post office, which is sad because they have great-looking trucks:

(2017 photo from the Azores)

Readers: Let me know if you need an introduction to attorneys and bankers over there.

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Finally a use case for cryptocurrency? (currency conversion fees)

by philg

I did a lot more research after Portuguese stocks or Lisbon real estate for the next five years? (May) and, as part of an EU citizenship project, decided to purchase stocks over in Portugal rather than take on more real estate ownership hassles (one of the big joys of our Florida move has been saying goodbye to homeownership).

Moving money from Bank of America to Bankinter led to some discoveries about international wire transfer costs. If you move a small amount in euros, Bank of America says that they won’t charge you any fees:

But the exchange rate was actually 1.17 on 9/24. So this is a 2.65 percent fee (still only about $31, plus whatever Bankinter will charge to receive the wire (0.05 percent, minimum €5, maximum €30)).

What about for the million euro transfer that is necessary to get the golden visa/passport process kicked off? Compared to the quoted market, the hidden fees within Bank of America were about 0.75 percent (e.g., about $7,500 on $1 million). If sent in USD, however, and converted by Bankinter, the non-hidden cost is 0.5 percent, a little cheaper than BofA, but still about 80X more than the cost of a Bitcoin transaction on the blockchain, right? (right now roughly $60 to the miners?). Given that we supposedly live in a seamless global economy, I’m kind of surprised at how much it costs to change a couple of database records at two banks that are already tightly coupled.

Could this be an argument for cryptocurrency, assuming that just one of the Ponzicoins prevails and becomes a worldwide currency?

(Why is it fair to call these Ponzicoins? Whoever creates a cryptocurrency can mint the first few million or whatever at almost no cost and then they gain value when he/she/ze/they convinces others to buy in.)

Separately, let’s look at the motivational factors from May:

At least to judge by our media, the U.S. is embroiled in white v. Black, white v. Asian, white v. Latinx, and hetero cisgender v. LGBTQIA+ fights. We’re also adding $trillions in debt, welcoming millions of new welfare-dependent citizens, and instituting dramatic changes in government (every day we hear a new and exciting idea for a bigger more powerful central government!). It seems like a good time to ensure that children have the option to study, work, and live in Europe. The Europeans bumped up against the limits of how much government could be responsible for and don’t seem anxious to go back to the 1970s.

There is no way to predict whether Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, or Sweden will be a better place to live than the U.S. in 2030, but keeping only a U.S. passport is essentially a bet that the U.S. will be a better place to live than anywhere in the E.U. Would we want to make that bet?

Now that we’ve had a full summer of rule by Joe Biden and the Democrats, do the above factors still apply to the U.S. as reconceived from Washington, D.C.? Let’s take them one at a time.

embroiled in white v. Black, white v. Asian, white v. Latinx, and hetero cisgender v. LGBTQIA+ fights

The conflicts described in May don’t seem to have been resolved. To these we’ve added roughly half of Americans who now hate Texas and Texans (see “Boycott Texas,” for example, from The Nation, 9/14: “With SB 8 following a crazy new gun law and mandatory mask ban, the Lone Star State has more than earned the cold shoulder”). We also have the hatred of the vaccinated for the unvaccinated, a new-since-May phenomenon.

adding $trillions in debt

“America’s Need to Pay Its Bills Has Spawned a Political Game” (NYT, 9/26): “The Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage the United States in waves, frequently disrupting economic activity and the taxes the government collects, complicating Treasury’s ability to gauge its cash flow.”

In other words, the U.S. will continue to bury itself more deeply in debt so long as coronapanic continues. And, absent an enormous advance in treatment, we know that coronapanic will continue so long as the virus has the capability of evolving.

(Of course the U.S. also buried itself more deeply in debt before COVID-19 emerged, but at a somewhat slower pace (St. Louis Fed))

welcoming millions of new welfare-dependent citizens

This one might have changed. In order to hit our goal numbers for Americans dependent on government-provided housing, health care, food, and smartphone, we’re no longer relying on immigrants (the “welcoming” part of the headline). We’ve got the new $3,600 per year per child handout, which started in July. Going forward, the NYT tells us that what we used to call “welfare” is our common destiny: “From Cradle to Grave, Democrats Move to Expand Social Safety Net” (9/6, regarding $3.5 trillion in new spending, “a cradle-to-grave reweaving of a social safety net frayed by decades of expanding income inequality, stagnating wealth and depleted governmental resources, capped by the worst public health crisis in a century.”). Tens of millions of additional residents of the U.S. will be dependent on government support (no longer called “welfare”) going forward, but, due to the massive expansion of the welfare state, most of them will be native-born.

On the third hand, once chain migration (wives, cousins, kids, parents, etc.) is mostly complete, we’ll have at least 1 million new citizens from Afghanistan as a result of our spectacular defeat in August and decision to evacuate mostly men mostly at random rather than simply pay the Taliban not to bother people on a list. If these folks are like previous immigrants from Afghanistan to the U.S., they and their descendants will be among the poorest of the poor here, eligible for every form of government assistance for at least three generations. (See “Challenges to the economic integration of Afghan refugees in the U.S.”: “Afghan refugees’ earned incomes are the lowest of seven refugee/immigrant comparison groups”)

instituting dramatic changes in government (every day we hear a new and exciting idea for a bigger more powerful central government!)

Other than the welfare state expansion that the NYT describes above, I can’t think of anything new since May from the Biden administration or Congress.

If an EU passport was a good idea in May 2021, therefore, it seems like it might be an even better idea today. If you want to buy yourself and your children the option to study, work, or live in Europe (or simply travel back and forth during lockdowns), I would recommend acting ASAP. The Portuguese love hardcopy, notarization, etc. and it will take a two months to jump over the bureaucratic hurdles, even with two-day FedEx delivery of signed hardcopies. Email if you need recommendations for a lawyer and bank over there.

Related:

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Should investors react to the change in Germany’s government?

by philg

After 16 years of rule by Angela Merkel and the Christian Democrats, the government in Germany is changing. I talked to some European bankers and a former hedge fund manager to find out what, if anything, investors should do about this.

The general consensus was that very little would change in Germany. As in the U.S., grand plans from a party can be derailed by an individual member of parliament who thinks that the grand plan will have a negative impact on his/her/zir/their own little corner of the country. For better or worse, this tends to make the German system stable.

Nobody said that Merkel would be missed. One banker pointed out that Merkel was likely voted out by the low-skill welfare-dependent migrants that she was instrumental in bringing to Germany (welfare in Germany is much less generous than in the U.S., but still leads to a better material lifestyle than trying to work for a living in a lot of countries). “They’re betting that the Social Democrats will increase the handouts,” he said. “The conservatives bring them in saying that they’ll work and they turn around and vote for liberals so that they don’t have to work.” (After five years in Germany, about 51 percent of migrants don’t work, which is considered an improvement and a success story by pro-migration Germans.)

Another banker said that Merkel was responsible for the UK leaving the EU. “The British could have just ignored the EU’s demands to accept migrants, as the Eastern European countries did, but they’re too bound up in being law-abiding,” he said. “The Eastern European countries just refuse and dare the EU to throw them out, but there isn’t really a mechanism for kicking a country out of the EU.”

The former hedge fund manager said that Merkel was an unprincipled follower of public opinion. While she initially told Germans that most would be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and therefore most resistance would be futile (e.g., masks and shutdowns would just slightly delay the inevitable), when people demanded lockdowns she locked them down.

How’s Europe doing? “Euro zone inflation hits highest level in 13 years as energy prices soar” (CNBC, October 1, 2021):

Headline inflation came in at 3.4% last month, according to preliminary data from Europe’s statistics office Eurostat. This was the highest level since September 2008 when inflation stood at 3.6%. It comes after German consumer prices rose by 4.1% in September — the highest level in almost 30 years.

The rise has been driven higher by surging energy prices, deepening concern among policymakers. The front-month gas price at the Dutch TTF hub, a European benchmark, has risen almost 400% since the start of the year.

What’s more, this record run in energy prices is not expected to end any time soon, with energy analysts warning market nervousness is likely to persist throughout winter.

France has become the latest country to step up measures to mitigate the costs for consumers. Prime Minister Jean Castex said Thursday the government would be blocking further natural gas price increases as well as rises in electricity tariffs. However, before these measures kick in, gas prices will rise by 12.6% for French consumers as of Friday.

I.e., France is copying Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls and hoping for a different result. (See also “Nixon Taught Us How Not to Fight Inflation” (WSJ): His price controls led to an exponential increase in demand, which caused a shock when they ended.)

I asked the hedge fund manager if the European inflation numbers were cooked like the U.S. numbers (e.g., food and energy costs are excluded from some measures, the cost of buying a house is excluded from all measures (the government comes up with a fictitious world in which people can rent their houses from themselves for a government-determined price)). “Completely fake of course,” he responded. “However, there is one reality of their own making. To ‘save the world’ (read: tax more) they recently yanked up taxes on natural gas and the such. Together with rising oil prices, this has created quite a bit of inflation as you can imagine.”

If the Europeans are inflating away the value of their currency just we are inflating away the value of ours, what is an investor to do? Move money to China, as BlackRock has recently started to do? That’s a bridge too far for a lot of non-Chinese investors. How about “Mining Stocks Offer a Cheap Play on Growth. Dig In.” (Barrons, September 17, 2021), in which we learn that iron and copper miners have P/E ratios of 5-7 (compare to over 30 for the S&P 500):

We have no idea where the euro and dollar will be after the politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are done with their manipulations of the respective economies. I’ve always hated gold as an investment because it isn’t productive. And, in fact, once you factor in dividends paid (“total return”), gold has underperformed U.S. stocks going back to the beginning of our galloping inflation (1971):

(black is the total return; silver is bumping along on the bottom; the S&P (without considering dividends), the Dow Jones, and gold are clustered in the middle)

Could mining iron and copper be considered a hybrid of gold’s inflation hedge and the return to be expected from investing in a productive activity? People will still need steel even if there is a lot of inflation in one or more currencies. On the third hand, aside from the low P/E ratio, why are raw materials miners better investments than upstream manufacturers? And if the P/E is 5 or 7, is that because a company is heavily indebted and can go bust (rather than simply slim down) in the event that demand is reduced?

Related:

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