A Bright Golden Haze

There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,

There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.

The Dow is as high as an elephant’s eye,

An’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the sky.

Oh what a beautiful morning!

Oh what a beautiful day.

It’s far too pretty for trading,

So why don’t we play golf today.

With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, it appeared as if the lovely spring day in the Northeast took its toll on market activity today. It has always been the case that good weather tended to cause trading to slow, but as trader bonuses have gradually disconnected from performance over the last few years it seems as if the pattern has been accentuated. True, there wasn’t much to trade on today…but in the past that didn’t seem to matter quite so much.

That said, I won’t stop at merely butchering show tunes as there are one or two recent stories I’d like to address from yesterday that I didn’t broach in that somewhat-lengthy article. The first is the news that President Obama’s latest tax plan includes a provision to cap IRAs at $3 million. To most of us, that’s a lot of money, although the article points out rightly that if you are a business owner who has contributed to a retirement plan as long as it has been available, it is fairly easy to get numbers above that level without needing extraordinary returns. Thrift, and compound returns, are two of the only three investing miracles that can produce great wealth with little effort (the third is rebalancing – look for my book “Only Three Miracles,” due out in roughly 2023).

But more disturbing is the fact that the White House has not said whether this $3mm level would be indexed for inflation (or, for that matter, whether it would affect defined benefit plans or Roth IRAs on which you’ve already paid taxes). If it is not indexed for inflation, then any readers of this column could be ‘capped out’ of tax-advantaged structures with sufficient inflation. And, since there is no reason that inflation could not reach scary levels, given the right circumstances, this is something that every investor should be aware of.

It is also disturbing to me, personally, that according to the story:

 “The White House said in an April 5 statement that under current law ‘some wealthy individuals’ can accumulate ‘substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.’”

Maybe I am the only person who is concerned about the use of the word “reasonable” here, as if my decision for what amount of savings I want to accumulate, rather than spend, is open to someone else’s validation of whether my savings is “reasonable.” But I suspect not. This statement isn’t part of the law, but it is part of the context under which laws are being proposed, and I think this means that we investors (including unreasonable ones, who should be spending much more and saving less, darn it) ought to be paying attention.

The other topic I want to include concerns the remarks of Chairman Bernanke yesterday at a conference in Georgia. I’ve previously pointed out in this space that selling assets from SOMA or letting those bonds run off are not feasible approaches for the Fed to take when it comes time to tighten. Apparently, the Fed now agrees, after having previously discussed (publicly) these options. Bernanke remarked in his response to audience questions that “asset sales are late in the process and not meant to be the principal tool of policy normalization” and that rather the Fed prefers to adjust the interest rate paid on excess reserves (IOER) as its main policy tool.

My main complaint about the IOER tool is that we have no idea how it is calibrated, and whether a small adjustment can cause important amounts of liquidity to be pulled back from the market. Moreover, I think this is a defensive tool – the Fed needs to keep the Excess Reserves from becoming Required Reserves by having banks expand lending too quickly. But consider the difficulty: if a bank has $1bln in excess reserves and $50mm in required reserves (for example), and increases lending by 50% so that required reserves rise to $75mm and excess reserves fall to $975mm, then by how much does the Fed need to raise IOER, currently at 25bps, to induce the bank to hold $1bln rather than $975mm in excess reserves? This is the problem – the Fed isn’t operating on the variable that they actually want to control.

The picture below is a slide from the presentation I will be delivering this month at the Inside Indexing event in Boston. Notice the relative sizes of the excess and required reserves slices. The Fed needs to take big swipes at the excess reserves piece without damaging the required reserves piece too much. This strikes me as being somewhat more challenging than the Federal Reserve currently seems to believe.

I continue to think that the best solution for the Fed, and also the one least likely to be deployed, is to raise reserve requirements to make official the unofficial policy of de-leveraging banks. By doing that, they will with one wave of the magic monetary wand cause excess reserves to vanish and they can operate again on required reserves.

Do you want to discuss any of this with me directly? Long-time readers know that I value the interaction with readers, as that feedback is the main compensation I get for writing this column. Well, I am introducing today a new way to interact with me, (and more importantly, for me to interact with you). I am offering (free) “office hours” to anyone who wants to sign up, to talk about pretty much anything in a free-form give-and-take. I’m starting with four 15-minute sessions per week, and we’ll see how it goes (of course, anyone who wants a deeper dive on an inflation topic is welcome to contact me about consulting through Enduring Investments). To sign up for my free office hours, click here and pick a date and time.

My December Bloomberg Radio Appearance

I’d noted in mid-December on this list that I was a guest on Bloomberg Radio on the “Bloomberg on the Economy” program with Carol Massar.

I promised to post a recording of the interview once I got it. Well, I’ve got it! Here it is, about 10 minutes. (It would be 8 minutes without my stammering. I’ll work on that.)

Thanks to the people at Bloomberg for chasing down a copy of this for me.

Liability-Driven Investment for Individuals

I will have another comment out over this long weekend, and it may well mention the S&P ratings downgrades of most of Europe, which just hit the tape. However, I just learned that the Society of Actuaries finally published a paper of mine in their “Retirement Mongraph,” available here, and I figured I would mention it to followers of this blog.

Here’s my abstract:

To date, the financial literature has focused on very simple algorithms designed to improve the solution to the two-part challenge of determining the optimal portfolio asset-allocation strategy and determining the maximum sustainable withdrawal rate for retirees. Most research, for example the well-known “Trinity Study” of Cooley, Hubbard, and Walz, pursues the asset-allocation problem by maximizing long-run asset growth subject to a withdrawal rule and a given acceptable probability of remorse (a.k.a. shortfall). However, the Liability-Driven Investing (LDI) thought process improves the approach by seeking instead to maximize return for a given level of volatility of the portfolio surplus, rather than optimizing on the basis of the volatility of the assets themselves; by more closely matching assets and liabilities, the sensitivity of the strategy to unexpected returns, risks, and correlations is greatly decreased. I updated the Trinity Study to incorporate inflation-indexed bonds and then illustrate how the LDI thought process may be applied to individual investors.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments!