Going postal, and liking it

In recent years I have noticed that the service provided by the US Postal Service has improved a lot. Most letters I send to people in Massachusetts seem to get there in the next day or two, and letters to the rest of the country take two or three days. This is a far cry from thirty years ago when a letter to New York City from Boston could take a week or ten days, or three days, or five days (one never knew), while a letter to Washington usually took three days, but not always. The post office performance had been unpredictable, but now it has become fast, cheap and reliable.

I remembered this when I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning on page B4, “Postal Service is Profitable.” It said the postal service in Q4 2015 earned $307 million and had its first quarterly profit since 2011. It also delivered 660 million holiday packages more than either UPS or Fedex and more than it had forecast. In fact, the post office is gaining market share from these rivals.

This interested me enough to glace at the post office FY 2015 report to Congress. In FY 2015, USPS revenues were up 1.6% to $68.9 billion, employees numbered 491,863, flat from the previous year, mail deliveries were down 1% to 154.2 billion pieces, and packages were up substantially to 4.53 million from 3.96 million. (+14%)

The USPS reported a net loss of $5.1 billion in FY 2015, about the same as in the two previous years, so the 4th quarter profit is particularly notable. It should be remembered that the USPS has been subject to unique charges by Congress. Unlike ordinary corporations, the service is required to amortize over a ten-year period the PSRHBF Prefunding Expense, which is the present value of the future health benefits of future retirees; this amount exceeds $5 billion/year. The service must also credit toward the pension of any military veteran it hires his full number of years of military service as if they were years at the post office; this transfers liabilities from the Department of Defense to the Postal Service and represents a subsidy to the defense budget.

So the post office is not in bad shape and it’s getting better. It has stopped shrinking and is growing slowly. One may conclude that a government-owned corporation can be efficient when subject to competition. This is one of those rare instances in which the thesis propounded by John Kenneth Galbraith in The New Industrial State has been realized, at least partly.

But what of UPS and Fedex? I remember reading years ago that Fedex had made few inroads into the domestic Swiss market because the post office there was fast, reliable and lower cost. I wonder if this sort of competition will develop in the US to an even greater extent than was evident during the holidays. I wonder if a similar threat exists in other markets, like Canada and the UK?

Marketwatch headline on Japan reveals the true situation

It makes we wonder what, with Rodan on the rampage, will Godzilla (BOJ) do?

Rosenberg's case for inflation rather than deflation

Decades ago, when economist David Rosenberg was with Merrill Lynch, from time to time he used to come by the offices of the firm in Boston where I worked. He came to talk about interest rates and the markets in general.  He was always respected by the cognoscenti for his knowledge, intelligence, and common sense, so we always looked forward to learning what he had to say.

Because of this, when he was on Bloomberg Surveillance on Thursday, I paid attention, and all the more so as I realized he was making the case that we will be surprised when we realize that inflation is much higher than assumed. "Don't worry about deflation," he argued.

The key points that stuck in my mind were that service sector inflation is already at 3% and that bank lending is now growing rapidly.  Here is a clip from his much longer interview.

(Here is the full hour from Bloomberg Surveillance, which deals with many things.  The inflation discussion begins around 1:22 .)

Is it the thought that counts? Brussels offers the UK nothing in a pretty package

If a country is not part of the euro zone, there really is no reason for it to be part of the EU, given the the worldwide free trade regime that now exists under the WTO.  A country surrenders sovereignty in exchange for . . . nothing.

Here are the symbolic concessions that Brussels is offering London.  When God received a halfhearted offering from Cain, He was not pleased.  How will Cameron react?

Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a free electrocution.

From the New York Times Dealbook:

"HOW FREE ELECTRICITY HELPED DIG $9 BILLION HOLE IN PUERTO RICO

"Puerto Rico's power authority, also known as Prepa, has been giving free power to all 78 of Puerto Rico's municipalities, to many of its government-owned enterprises and even some for-profit business, but not to its citizens, Mary Williams Walsh writes in DealBook. It has done this for decades, even as it has sunk deeper into debt and borrowed billions just to stay afloat.

"Now, the island's government is running out of cash and a movement is underway to limit the free electricity, which is estimated to cost Prepa hundreds of millions of dollars. "

The fog of emerging market debt

Inside investment: The fog of debt By: Lincoln Rathnam Published on: February 2016

Fears of a 1980s-style debt crisis in emerging markets are overblown. But to clear the miasma of statistics, investors would do as well to understand the sentiment of their peers as well as the credit fundamentals of their investments.

I had already been thinking about changing my newspaper print subscription from the Financial Times to the Wall Street Journal when I walked into the restaurant at the Boston Marriott in late January to attend a breakfast meeting. The FT is a fine paper, but it has not been delivered at all this year due to the collapse of distribution after the Boston Globe, its distribution partner, tried to save money by squeezing the paper carriers, a plan that backfired. 

I picked up a complimentary WSJ at the maître d’hôtel’s desk. An erstwhile emerging markets bond fund manager, I shuddered like the old fire horse hearing the station bell in the distance when I espied the headline 'Debt haunts emerging markets’. 

The article began: 'Underlying this month’s market turmoil runs a deeper worry that mounting debt burdens in developing nations, particularly in Asia and Latin America, threaten to become a drag on global growth.’ Intrigued and concerned, I consulted two reports. The first was: 'Capital flows to emerging markets,’ published by the Institute of International Finance in January. The second was the IMF’s paper from last October: 'Corporate leverage in emerging markets – a concern?’ 

The IMF reports that corporate debt, mostly local currency bank loans, in emerging market countries quadrupled between 2004 and 2014, from $4 trillion to $18 trillion; further, the biggest debt growth has been in construction, followed by oil and gas, both cyclical sectors. 

Easy money 

It is interesting to note that EM corporate debt had remained fairly flat in the five years preceding zero interest-rate policy (Zirp) and quantitative easing. Now we know who got the easy money. Corporate debt is now 88% of GDP for emerging countries in aggregate; it had been under 50% previously. China alone now stands at 130%, compared with the US at 70%. Latin America had a similar quadrupling of debt in the 10 years before August 1982, when Mexico suspended debt payments, so the present situation may be viewed as disturbing. 

Much as the miasma that cloaks the streets of Beijing in darkness lifted when factories were closed for the Olympics, looking deeper into the data provides clarification. While EM corporate debt-to-GDP ratios have been steadily rising, public debt has remained unchanged (38% of GDP pre-crisis to 39% today.) And while overall corporate debt has risen sharply since the crisis, there has been little change outside of China since commodity prices stopped rising in 2010. (A few countries now have lower corporate debt ratios than in 2007, including Russia, Poland, South Africa and Hungary.) 

There has been a negative net flow of funds from emerging market countries for two years, with net flows of minus $111 billion in 2014 and minus $735 billion in 2015. Two points should be borne in mind. First, the annual flows turned negative, not from an increase in outflows, which have remained fairly constant for several years, but mainly from a precipitous drop in inflows. 

Second, in 2015, almost all outflows were from China, and outflows accelerated in the fourth quarter, peaking in December when the People’s Bank of China announced that it would no longer link the yuan wholly to the dollar but to a trade-weighted basket of which 26.4% is dollars. 

The IIF opines that the December flows were primarily by Chinese companies repaying or hedging dollar indebtedness in light of the future devaluations of the yuan indicated by the new basket. China has spent a considerable amount of reserves to devalue gradually; one may surmise that this is to allow local companies time to hedge their dollar exposure, which implies further revaluation once the requisite time has elapsed. 

Considerable risk 

Below the disturbing global statistics are two points. Firstly, the surge in EM corporate debt has overwhelmingly resulted from borrowing by Chinese state-owned enterprises in local currency. Secondly, outside of China, the debt increase has been in companies in construction and resources, and mainly in Latin America. It seems a relatively safe bet that the Chinese state will look after the well-being of the SOEs, for reasons of national pride if nothing else. The rest of the problem is then theoretically manageable, despite the likelihood of defaults in the commodity/energy sector. But this does not mean that defaults will not become more widespread. There is considerable risk in the flow numbers. 

There is an investing disorder that I shall call the 'Nat Rothschild syndrome,’ in honour of the yclept gentleman’s ill-fated investment in Bumi of Indonesia. The syndrome is 'the erroneous belief that the emerging market counterparty is the source of repayment of money invested’. This is almost never true. One must, however, admire the fight Rothschild put up once he realised he had been conned.

When flows become negative, borrowers are under intense pressure not to repay, partly for fear of becoming the laughing stock of their national peers. (One can imagine the awkward silence when a local 'repayer’ walks into the bar of the Rio Yacht Club.) The ultimate counterparty for a foreign lender to an EM company is not the borrower, but another foreigner who will lend that company additional money to repay the first foreign lender or buy the stake directly. 

Here, then, is the key to EM credit monitoring: when a foreign bond holder perceives a reluctance among his fellows in London, New York, or elsewhere to advance additional money to EM borrowers, he should discreetly exit his positions.

Visit http://www.euromoney.com/reprints for additional distribution rights. For more articles like this, follow us @euromoney on Twitter.

Ground Hog Day 2016: Results just in from Punxsutawney: No more winter

The Boston Globe anticipated this happy results: