Dalio, Biggest Hedge Fund Manager: "developed world has reached its debt limit" | Hacker News Reader

Dalio, Biggest Hedge Fund Manager: "developed world has reached its debt limit"

nerdinvest.blogspot.com

84 pointsrajpaul45 comments

TL;DR:

"Imagine you earned $100,000 a year and you didn`t have any debt. You can go to a bank and borrow $10,000 a year. You can spend, therefore, $110 a year. When you spend $110,000 a year, somebody else earns $110,000 and they can go to a bank and there`s a self-reinforcing process in which your debt rises in relationship to your income.

And that goes on for a long time and that goes on for 50 or 75 years through history. We`ve had 50, 75-year cycles and then you reach a point where you can`t anymore get more debt and the process starts to change."

... and there's a self-reinforcing process in which your debt rises in relationship to your income.

I haven't had my coffee yet and the world is still looking fuzzy to me, so I'm probably just being dense.

But does this not make sense to anyone else? Why would my income to debt ratio change because I've spent my borrowed money somewhere?

I must be misunderstanding this argument, is he saying that as people spend more we all end up making more, and then we all end up borrowing more on what we've made? That would make sense (though in reality what happens is that most people's incomes stay level and the proceeds are funneled to investors - this is largely the reason that the top 5% fall into a more top-heavy Pareto distribution of wealth whereas everyone else is exponentially distributed, but I digress...), but that still shouldn't increase proportional debt, unless I'm missing a key part of this argument.

"But does this not make sense to anyone else? "

Most of what he says doesn't make sense to me. I think he's a blowhard protecting his job at a hedge fund and trying to drum up business, but what do I know? My prediction: his hedge fund will tank within 120 days.

Every time I've borrowed $10,000 I've paid it back with interest. Apparently in the circles he lives in, nobody pays loans off. That could be a problem.

There are bits of truth in there, e.g., "Europe`s reached its debt limits." , "you reach a point where you can`t anymore[sic] get more debt", "So we`re in a deleveraging". Well, blow me down! What insight! Where do I sign on to be a hedge-fund manager? This guy can be replaced by an 8-ball: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ssanty/cgi-bin/eightball.cgi

IMO most of it is horsepuckey PR. "We`ve had 50, 75-year cycles..." - WTF? Kondratiev waves? Hey, buddy, I've got an astrologer who can pick stocks!

You can pay your loans off but still increase your debt by taking out new loans. In the case of most governments, this is usually how they pay off the old loans.

He's talking about the debt of banks and nations.

"So when we deal with Goldman Sachs or when we deal with banks and when we deal with Europe I think you can break the world into two parts, there`s the debtor-developed world which has reached its debt limits and is going through a deleveraging."

Banks and nations, like other entities, are usually required to pay their debts or they go bankrupt (note the word itself, http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-ban1.htm ) . Of course they're leveraged.

The questions are "What does Dalio tell us that we don't already know?" "Of what use are his explanations?" and most importantly, "Why is this man appearing on Charlie Rose saying things we already know?"

Just because the answer to the question is logical and unsurprising doesn't mean it's not the answer to the question.

I think you should read more about how the world works before you say dumb things like this

I think he's saying that when you borrow money, it stimulates the economy and increases people's incomes. That allows people to borrow even more money. Which stimulates the economy and increases people's incomes even more. It's a feedback loop and we saw it break in 2008.

An example is people "using their homes as ATMs" during the housing boom. Easy credit drove up the prices of homes, people used the increase in net wroth to take home equity loans, other general debts, or buy investment properties, which in turn drove up the price of homes even more.

I think this is a very concise way of putting it. This is essentially why I don't think further stimulus or monetary policy tweaking is going to help us.

We have gotten drunk on overspending. Drinking more won't remove the hangover. We just have to sober up and wait.

Every time I hear the inebriation metaphor applied to monetary policy, it makes me want a drink.

What is described here, I think is just a symptom of the inability of a primary focus on profits to generate true value, leading to an overly uneven wealth distribution, which in turn leads to an overall economic stallout.

What about the person who earned $100k and loaned $10k, leaving them with $90k?

"Fractional reserve" doesn't help here because if I'm spending the borrowed money, it isn't being kept in the bank by either the lender or the borrower.

The problem he refers to is a classic deflationary scenario. Everybody saves money (to pay off debts, or etc). Money becomes scarcer, since nobody can borrow it (banks are deleveraging as well), and people aren't spending it.

The classic solution is to expand the money supply to get things moving again, which is the point of QE, etc. Creating inflation lessens the value of debt in real terms, too.

Not at all a new thought, in this situation or others. See wiki on debt deflation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_deflation

> The classic solution is to expand the money supply to get things moving again, which is the point of QE, etc.

Let's see, we've been through 2 rounds of QE. Maybe number 3 will be the charm.

What was that saying about trying the same thing and expecting a different outcome?

The implication is that QE has not been sufficient, if we were in a deflationary scenario. But we do seem to have avoided deflation for the most part.

There is a lot more to the economy that is out of the control of monetary policy. Companies and large organizations (Apple is a prime offender, hoarding $70B+) are sitting on a lot of cash. They are unwilling to invest it, spend it, or even to return it as dividends. Instead, they buy large amounts of treasury bonds* (which has pushed yields on them to unheard of lows).

The obvious solution to that, then, would be to use fiscal policy - to spend the money that is being dumped on the treasury at rates well below inflation. The treasury is paying negative interest, in real terms (and for a very brief period, in nominal terms!). If private entities won't spend it, the government should - provided they can step back, and reduce the debt when things get going well again.

Strangely enough, more deficit spending might be the solution to a problem caused by too much deficit spending to begin with.

One other caveat; there can be still more causes to unemployment that are not monetary in nature. Labor markets are notoriously inflexible.

*: I don't mean to imply that Apple literally holds treasury bonds (though they might). Apple might have its money in a bank, and the bank might deposit the money at the fed, or buy treasuries itself, but the net effect is the same; the money sits somewhere, unused, where the government could use it. In fact one suggested solution was to stop paying interest on federal reserve deposits, or even charge a negative interest rate on deposits above a certain threshold.

"The implication is that QE has not been sufficient, if we were in a deflationary scenario."

What would it take to prove to you that QE was a straight-up bad idea? Because you can always say it wasn't "big enough", that's a null defense. Adopting that as your first and best defense is cognitively dangerous, and sets off alarm bells in my head.

The goal of monetary policy is to manage inflation. Therefore, if there was hyperinflation, that would be a clear sign it was failing. It's hard to pick an exact number - but certainly inflation over 10% annualized would be a sign that it was not going well.

The CPI is the benchmark of the effectiveness of QE. I prefer the one without energy and food ("core"), myself, because the question I am concerned with is "What effect is the size of the money supply having on prices?" (Instead of, "how scarce has oil become?")

Bear in mind that high(er) inflation with very low nominal interest rates means you can have a 0 or negative real interest rate - which rather handily destroys debt, and encourages banks, companies, etc, to make riskier investments (because the money pile they sit on is steadily losing value).

Is combined fiscal + monetary policy working well? Of course not; there's a large output gap. The economy is not in good shape. I'm arguing that fiscal, not monetary, policy is to blame, along with the reluctance of large entities to deploy their money.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -- Albert Einstein

Nope. Not Einstein. It comes from the early 80s. There are two sources: a tennis murder mystery and the Narcotics Anonymous handbook. As you can see, we've been through this before :)

There are heaps more things Einstein never said, as well as Gandhi, Picasso, Leonardo, and other big names. Basically, the more you look into it, the more you find that if you have a favorite catchy quote by someone famous, they probably didn't say it.

One can never trust the veracity of an attribution on the Internet. -- Abe Lincoln

(That meme is funny but long past its shelf life, so I'm going to reply seriously.)

But the internet makes it trivial to check these things, where it was decidedly nontrivial before. And the phenomenon of catchy quotes "hopping" to famous names is ancient, and probably why the great figures of history all seem so witty and smart.

When I was in high school someone quoted Churchill to me as having said (hilariously, I thought, and still do): "The pleasures of fornication are overrated and those of defecation underrated." But the internet tells me that Churchill probably never said this, nor the classic "up with which I shall not put" either (http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html). Sad, but better to know.

Problem is QE has gone to ensure banks don't go bankrupt but has not increased lending.

Yes, and compare the Swedish solution: Let the banks go bankrupt, then QE. Iceland also did this recently.

It ripped the band-aid off quickly. More pain short term but their economies emerged quickly from the downturn. Too bad our gov't is so captured by the financial interests that such a solution is deemed unviable.

Sweden only let one of its smaller banks go bankrupt, in the early 90s, and has never done any QE.

> Sweden only let one of its smaller banks go bankrupt

See, eg. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/worldbusiness/23k... , note the term "series of bank failures."

As for QE: Note there was a devaluation imposed by the exchange rate, and the peg evaporated. So you are correct that Riksbank did not print, but the QE was achieved by the currency markets.

Nope, NYT is wrong on that one. I suspect they are referring to the implosion of the real estate sector which brought down a number of companies, but none of them where banks.

QE is a word with a specific meaning, it's not just a synonym for "stimulus". It refers to the buying of financial assets by the central to increase their value, and/or to increase the money supply. Ending a currency peg has nothing to do with that.

Note that the bailout operations that did take place did so after the end of the peg.

> The problem he refers to is a classic deflationary scenario. Everybody saves money (to pay off debts, or etc). Money becomes scarcer, since nobody can borrow it (banks are deleveraging as well), and people aren't spending it.

This is the propaganda reasoning and you bought it hook line and sinker. If everyone is saving then the banks have plenty of money to lend! That's what people do with their money, they put it in banks. The reason many banks aren't lending is that they made many bad loans and don't want to admit that they can't pay the savers back and they are now afraid to make new ones. Still, there is plenty of money to borrow from other banks. The Fed is giving money away at amazingly low interest rates.

Who gets this $ that's being printed non stop? Banks - who in turn don't lend shit? Why not give tax incentives for hiring people or something and help out small businesses.

"I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are."

If you want to get better at anything, the first thing you do is acknowledge that you can do better. Having recently left the investment banking world, you might be surprised how many average-at-best developers think they have no room for improvement.

EGO IS DEATH.

He has a copy of his company's and his own personal management document, Principles, on his hedge fund's site. It's a really good and interesting read.

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

Wow, that's the clearest explanation I've heard of how we got into this cycle. Good for Dalio being honest and clear!

Agreed! I just read the article with his quote (didn't have time to watch the video)and a 1 minute read helped me to understand the problem better.

A bit of a tangent, but: my wife and I have almost never bought on credit (save for cars, even our current house) - preferring to pay cash, and accept a "lesser" life style. I have taken some kidding about this over the years since we live a modest lifestyle, but in recent years some family and friends finally understand our odd viewpoint on earning and spending.

We've done the same. And now we regret it. Our pension funds and investments have tanked in the various downturns. Well, I guess we can handle that.

Our friends bought million-dollar homes they can't afford and now Obama wants the banks to renegotiate and write their loans down. And those who invested conservatively, like myself, get to bail out the banks and, along with them, my profligate friends.

IOW you and I are the suckers in this game. We can be smug about our "wise" choices, but the way this game is playing out, anyone who tried to be fiscally conservative is a loser, and the winners are the spendthrifts.

I'd like to say more, but I've got to go to the hardware store and buy a pitchfork and some torches while I can still afford them.

I hear you, but I would still rather have a less expensive paid for house right now than an expensive home that the government may or may not artificially reduce the interest payments on.

"Reduce the interest"? No, they're going to reduce the principal on underwater home loans!

But only if the banks say you qualify. I know someone going through the process (last 5 months they've tried) and it isn't fun, or beneficial at this point.

Don't buy the hype. It has really stressed them, and despite needing that help (value has fallen below their purchase value, that's why they're underwater) they expect to be refused because of how they've been treated.

Bummer, I didn't know that. That is just plain wrong.

From what I understand of it, the program is for folks who've gone upside down in their mortgage because of inflation and falling real estate value—not bad/underwater loans.

I've managed to survive without debt thus far. I still have a credit card, but always paid in full for everything that I bought on it. Just watching friends and family struggle with debt is enough to keep me far from it.

"Ok. What`s depressing -- what`s depressing jobs is that the world supply and demand for labor has changed. In other words, there`s a lot more people working as China came on and India came on and they are competitive. There`s a world supply of labor has change -- has increased and technology has had an effect.

So we`re in an interesting era because I think almost and if you think of a person as -- in a machine, an economic machine as being tool, a part of that economic machine the demand for labor has changed in a very profound way. It`s an interesting question. We might enter into a period in which we don`t need people as tools. So what does that mean?"

So he is concerned about the breakdown of the Luddite fallacy. Interesting, considering he has everything to gain from promulgating the guarantee of infinite employment opportunities for average citizens. I believe this is a fair canary in the coal mine for the structural employment nightmare we shall face in the coming decades.

I don't think he is correct. Debt can be sustained as long as there are marginal returns to be had. The real problem is that the marginal returns are no longer there because energy prices have been increasing at the same pace. This suggests that energy availability to be the limiting factor.

Once growth is throttled by expensive energy, the debt position of countries, companies and individuals start to look shaky. This is what is happening now. If companies are unable to increase their profitability, then there is less taxes to be collected, which means weaker governments, and a slower economy. This in turn affects an individual's ability to find and keep work, and service their debts.

And whose fault is that, Mr. Hedge Fund Manager?

If being a hedge-fund manager means you are responsible for the market crash, does being a computer programmer mean you are responsible for DDoS attacks by Anonymous?

Programmers in general, no; programmers who spend some of their time working on DDoS tools, so if Anonymous wins they'll have power? Come on.

The idea of a hedge fund, by which I'm meaning an investment portfolio which consistently outperforms the market, is intrinsically insane. It's like a VC trying to diversify their portfolio so that even if Silicon Valley as a whole tumbles into the sea, they'll still make money.

I don't have any philosophical problem with investment, and I think SV venture capital is a great model: You buy a piece of something because you think it will do well. If it doesn't do well, you lose your money. That's what encourages you to only give money to things you think are good ideas.

The entire discipline of investment banking stems from "managing risk"-- the ludicrous idea of "Man, losing money sometimes sucks. Maybe there's a way to stop that from happening." My contention is that the present economic collapse is evidence that, in fact, there is not.

If the "market" -- the whole value of human endeavor -- sucks, your life will suck. This is a consequence of the fact that you are a human. Trying to walk away from that with more of the value than anyone else is insane. And sure, with the right financial tricks you can pull it off, for a while; many people have died rich from doing it. But it's gonna come to a head.

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