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Trump can get what he wants from Saudi in 2019

BY GEORGE HAY AND LAUREN SILVA LAUGHLIN

Even by his own standards, Donald Trump has been contradictory on oil. The U.S. president spent much of 2018 berating the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries for keeping crude prices high by undersupplying the market. At the same time, he exacerbated the problem by reinstating export sanctions on Iran. An early December cut by OPEC and Russia is an irritant, but relatively low prices still look attainable.

On current projections, the reduction of 1.2 million barrels per day removes much of a potential glut caused by epic pumping by Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States, now a net oil exporter. Combining the International Energy Agency’s forecasts for oil demand in 2019 and its estimate for non-OPEC supply, the oil-producing bloc only needs to pump 31.6 million bpd to balance the market – 1.4 million below its October output.

Given Trump’s targeting of Iran’s 3 million barrels of daily production, the OPEC+, existing OPEC countries and others like Russia who are acting along with them, reduction is unhelpful. At worst, the combination could leave supply too tight, pushing prices up again.

Yet there are reasons the president can hope for a more favourable outcome. Demand growth could undercut IEA expectations – Wood Mackenzie estimates an increase of just 1.1 million bpd for 2019 while U.S crude production is seen jumping to 12 million bpd, up from 9.4 million a day in 2017. Most powerfully of all, Trump has greater scope to tell Saudi’s crown prince what to do.

The White House gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a pass in November on whether he was involved in the murder of journalist Saudi Jamal Khashoggi. The president could use this leverage to call for an end to the 18-month-old blockade of Qatar or even of the war in Yemen, which the Brookings Institution says costs Saudi $50 billion annually.

But the most obvious power play involves oil, where Trump could insist MbS resist future OPEC+ cuts. That would make any potential squeeze temporary, and allow Trump scope to enforce sanctions against Tehran.

The fly in the ointment is U.S. Congress, which could yet override Trump and punish MbS and Saudi. To keep prices low as a 2020 election nears, that may necessitate keeping Iranian crude flowing by renewing waivers allowing big importers to continue. That would make Trump look inconsistent – something he appears to easily let roll.

Memo to Theresa May: How to save Brexit as well

BY PETER THAL LARSEN

Theresa May has survived a confidence vote from her party. Now officials in the British prime minister’s office are trying to save her deal to leave the European Union. Breakingviews has obtained a copy of their make-believe memo.

Dear Prime Minister,

Congratulations on winning the no-confidence motion. We always suspected that Conservatives, who had trouble counting the 48 letters required to call the vote, would never find the 158 members of parliament they needed to remove you. Still, it’s reassuring to know that your political enemies are even more inept than the ones in your cabinet.

You asked for new ideas about how to salvage your plan to leave the European Union. After more than two years of Brexit debate, we regret to inform you the cupboard is bare. However, now you have saved your job, we have a proposal that could save the deal. It requires you to call a referendum.

Wait! Before you file this in the rubbish bin, consider your position. Your Brexit plan was heading for a hefty defeat in parliament until you postponed the vote on Dec. 3. A whirlwind tour of European capitals produced little except footage of your car door not opening as you pulled up in Berlin. At least Angela Merkel realises how awkward it is to be stuck in a transition period.

The best you can hope for from the EU is vague reassurances on the Northern Ireland backstop, or some kind of legal appendix. That’s unlikely to win over the Brexit fanatics in your party, including the 117 who voted against your leadership, or the Democratic Unionist Party on whom your government’s slender majority depends. So despite the triumph, parliament will still reject it when it finally comes to a vote.

You could keep delaying the decision, maybe even until the last minute on March 28, and hope your opponents buckle. But the longer you wait, the bigger the risk of a chaotic and damaging “no deal” will loom. The pound will tumble back down, and the economy will suffer even more. Meanwhile, opposition MPs could always intervene by voting to reverse the Brexit process. And even though you’ve seen off the no-confidence vote in your leadership, parliament could still launch one in your government. You cannot count on Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, being hopeless indefinitely.

That’s where the second referendum comes in. If you wait, parliament might take over and launch one. Better to seize the initiative and call it yourself. Doing so would allow you to dictate the timing, and the question on the ballot. We recommend offering the people a simple choice between your deal or staying in the EU. Advocates of a “no deal” Brexit won’t like it, but after their defeat they have little choice but to back you. And you’ll put Labour in a tight spot. Will Corbyn risk alienating his pro-Brexit supporters by campaigning to remain?

True, this strategy has several drawbacks. For one, you have ruled out a second referendum. But you insisted you would not call an election in 2017, and then called one. You spent two years insisting that a “no deal” Brexit was better than a bad deal, but now warn it would cause “significant economic damage”. You said your deal was the best on offer, before heading to Europe to ask for improvements. The public won’t be surprised if you change your mind again. It’s what you do.

Finally, you might lose the referendum. It won’t be so easy to charm voters with false promises of extra money for healthcare, or to scare them by suggesting Turkey is about to join the EU. The pro-Europeans will be more organised. You might finally have to come clean about the costs of Brexit. Amazingly, though, despite the mayhem of the past two-and-a-half years, opinion polls suggest about half the country is still in favour of leaving the EU. And this time the government will be campaigning to leave, not remain.

You keep saying that you want to deliver Brexit. You will either go down inhistory as the prime minister who took Britain out of the EU, or the prime minister who tried and failed to do so. Now that you’ve promised not to contest the next general election, another referendum is your best — and maybe your only — chance of it being the former.

Yours,

The Last Resort Unit, Downing Street

First published Dec. 12, 2018.

Goldman Sachs will spend 2019 in velvet handcuffs

By JOHN FOLEY

David Solomon is like the owner of a Ferrari who hasn’t been given the keys. The new Goldman Sachs boss starts 2019 with one of Wall Street’s most prestigious jobs, and something to prove. This could be the first year in over a decade that the $63 billion bank starts with a smaller market capitalization than its chief rival, Morgan Stanley.

Goldman set out in 2017 to create $5 billion of new revenue streams, and Solomon starts with half that figure already in the bag. But there’s a lot to play for. Morgan Stanley boss James Gorman runs a bank with earnings that are lower but less subject to the vicissitudes of the market. Goldman makes around 57 percent of its revenue from predictable businesses other than trading and investment. At Morgan Stanley it’s nearly two-thirds.

Solomon is growing Goldman’s private wealth business, which services the ultra-rich, adding almost one-third more advisers by 2020. He could go further by addressing one of Goldman’s least lustrous businesses: asset management. That generates stable, predictable fee income. But its operating margin of just over 20 percent is half what the group’s investment bank makes, and below the 33 percent industry average, as measured by McKinsey.

The bar for doing a big deal is extremely high, Solomon has said. But buying a rival like the $22 billion T. Rowe Price, which has double Goldman’s profitability in asset management, would help. It would take Goldman’s client assets to $2.6 trillion and boost stable revenue sources to over 60 percent of the total.

There’s one big, shadowy problem: 1MDB. Goldman is being investigated by the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve for its role raising funds for the Malaysian fund in 2012 and 2013, some of which ended up paid out as bribes. Two former Goldmanites have been indicted; others knew about the misdeeds, the DOJ says. A 10-digit fine is likely, but a time-suck for Solomon is certain.

Expect Goldman to settle as early as it can. But Solomon will probably have to oversee a sweeping internal cleanup, and — even though not implicated in 1MDB himself — could be called to Washington to answer publicly to a newly Democrat-run House of Representatives. All when he’d rather be growing his way to greatness, and showing Morgan Stanley a clean pair of heels.

First published Dec. 18, 2018.

Buyout lenders will enter a new world of pain

BY NEIL UNMACK

Leveraged buyout lenders are in the firing line in 2019. With central banks raising rates and shrinking balance sheets, the happy times for the likes of Blackstone , KKR and Apollo Global Management will subside. But buyout barons will be laughing compared to those who financed their deals.

Low rates and the hunt for yield in recent years triggered a boom in risky lending. The volume of leveraged loans in particular reached $1.3 trillion in the United States and Europe in 2018, versus $734 billion in 2007, according to LCD, part of S&P Global. The average U.S. leveraged buyout piled debt equivalent to almost seven times EBITDA in 2018, only marginally below the record in 2007, according to Refinitiv data.

The fuel powering bigger and riskier deals should now dissipate. Helped by the downgrading of General Electric , BBB-rated debt is at record levels. Now that investors can earn yields of nearly 5 percent from companies deemed investment grade, junk-fueled buyouts will get harder.

Yet dealmakers have less to fear than in 2007. Assuming 2019 is a slowdown rather than a 2008-style financial crash, companies are less likely to suddenly run out of cash. That will keep defaults far lower than the 13 percent they reached in 2009. And it may help that collateralised loan obligations (CLOs), a kind of securitised investment vehicle that buys loans, account for half of the market now. These vehicles create a stable demand for credit, reducing scope for fire sales.

Creditors face a much trickier time. Senior lenders who provide the bulk of the funding are in particular more at risk than in the last cycle, because they now provide a bigger share of the credit. With U.S. deals’ senior debt on average 5.2 times EBITDA, according to Refinitiv, versus 4.4 times in 2007, those at the top of the capital structure will absorb more losses if companies implode.

But creditors also have less control. In previous cycles, a company in danger of failing a so-called maintenance covenant would need to keep lenders on side, and pay them extra fees. Now, most deals are “cov-lite”. Debt documents give companies more freedom to take risks or siphon off assets, even when they are struggling. Private equity-held companies can also sell assets without repaying debt and pay themselves dividends. They can even move assets out of creditors reach, and use them to borrow more. That’s what happened with TPG Capital and Leonard Green’s acquisition of retailer J.Crew.

The upshot is that there will be fewer defaults, but losses will be much higher than the roughly 20 percent that senior lenders are used to. Unpredictable recoveries mean that loans will be harder to value, and vulture funds will pay lower prices for distressed debt.

There’s also still a way for both dealmakers and funders to get hosed. A sudden spate of low recoveries could spook the market and cause prices to collapse. Investors in CLOs, particularly those in the lower-ranking tranches, could lose their income and take severe losses, freezing new securitisations and funding for new deals. But of the two, lenders have far more to fear.

A made-in-America market will be a distorted one

BY RICHARD BEALES

U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America first” mantra involves barriers to trade and immigration and a sort of manufacturing nationalism. Experiences like Argentina’s show that this approach creates market dysfunction and can hit economic output and jobs. More of that kind of fallout is likely in 2019 as the White House rolls out further protectionist measures.

Agricultural tariffs have already hit American farmers, prompting the promise of $12 billion in aid to offset the damage – one glaring market distortion.

Car prices, meanwhile, could increase by up to 20 percent if the U.S. administration imposes the threatened 25 percent levy on foreign content and manufacturers pass this through to U.S. consumers, the Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated in July. This is bad news for automakers and their employees. The increased cost would also vaporize up to a quarter of the tax reductions handed to car buyers in the 2017 cuts, the PIIE reckons.

That shows how import tariffs interact with global supply chains, also critical in consumer electronics. Several analysts have suggested the cost of Apple’s $1,000 iPhone X might double if the gadget could be made entirely in the United States — assuming the company didn’t absorb any of the extra cost.

There’s more to it, though. When President Cristina Fernandez insisted in the early part of this decade that electronics be made inside Argentina, then-trendy BlackBerry gave it a go. Despite Fernandez’s Trump-worthy photo opportunity when the first handset rolled out, the device was already out of date as well as too expensive, National Public Radio explained in a 2017 podcast. BlackBerry production ended within a few years.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has noted that the company’s outsourcing — much of it centred on China — is these days not so much about cost savings. It’s about the quantity and skill level of labor that’s available. That, along with certain kinds of manufacturing know-how, can be hard to replicate at scale, even in the United States.

Uncle Sam has resources Argentina can only dream of, but the basic lessons still apply. The United States’ own history shows the failure of episodes of protectionism, the Cato Institute argued in 2017, highlighting the steep economic costs researchers have identified. A made-in-America market will be a badly distorted one.

First published Dec. 31, 2018.

General Electric can go from bad to worse in 2019

BY LAUREN SILVA LAUGHLIN

General Electric has had a terrible year: the stock has lost more than half its value and is flirting with financial crisis lows. It can get worse. As its power business struggles and its finance unit consumes cash, the $60 billion conglomerate is heavily reliant on its aviation arm. The risk is that cyclical, financial and competitive headwinds kick the strongest leg of the stool out from under shareholders.

That’s a painful prospect after its annus horribilis, which included writing down assets and the firing of its chief executive, replacing him with the first outsider in the job, Larry Culp. With other operations struggling, plane product sales and repairs accounted for some 60 percent of segment earnings in the first nine months of 2018.

Aviation is GE’s pride, benefiting from booming air travel and robust engine orders, particularly from Middle Eastern customers. These included longstanding contracts with Saudi Arabia’s carrier to build and fix airplanes, and a 2018 deal to provide engines to Turkish Airlines.

What could go wrong? Start with geopolitics. Increased tensions between the Saudis, Iranians, Turks, Qataris and others could dampen travel and slow new orders. A general economic slowdown, amid unresolved trade disputes, would do the same. Air travel is cyclical: More than a dozen U.S. cargo and passenger airlines filed for bankruptcy during the last U.S. recession.

There’s also the albatross of GE Capital. To help finance the sale of engines, GE Capital uses its parent as the backstop. That worked fine when it carried an A rating, enabling the finance arm to tap short-term markets with low rates. But ratings agencies downgraded the company after fresh writedowns in October, forcing it to slash its use of commercial paper.

This gives competitors like Rolls-Royce and United Technologies’ Pratt & Whitney an opportunity. Pratt & Whitney may be especially eager to poach GE customers following its merger with Rockwell Collins, and its parent’s decision to spin the company off as an independent entity.

Growing engines sales over the past decade could keep GE relatively busy fixing them. The global economy may continue to hum along. GE Capital may right itself, and rivals fail to chip away at GE’s aviation dominance. But like any jet trying to make a safe landing with a single engine, an unhealthy dollop of faith is required.

First published Dec. 11, 2018.

Brazil will get energy mostly right; Mexico won’t

BY MARTIN LANGFIELD

Energy-sector reform is up in the air in both Brazil and Mexico. In the coming year, new regimes in Latin America’s two biggest economies will wrestle with balancing 1970s-style nationalism against the need to open up to foreign and private capital to exploit their oil and gas resources. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president-elect, has better prospects of getting it right than left-winger Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico.

There is a strong nationalist element in ex-army captain Bolsonaro’s thinking about Brazil’s natural resources, which include massive untapped oil and gas reserves. Yet the appointments he has announced before taking office on Jan. 1, 2019 show that the influence of his pro-market economic guru, Paulo Guedes, is powerful too.

The outcome will be a compromise. Petroleo Brasileiro, the state-controlled oil firm, won’t be privatized, as Guedes and the company’s chief executive-designate, Roberto Castello Branco, have argued in the past it should be. But Petrobras will sell off non-core businesses, shedding refineries and distribution operations worth billions of dollars and paying down more of its net debt of some $78 billion. A successful program of auctions that has lured oil majors such as Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP to invest in Brazilian oil fields is likely to continue.

Prospects are murkier in Mexico, where the man widely known as AMLO, a populist like Bolsonaro though of opposite ideology, took over as president on Dec. 1. The new leader has chilled investor sentiment by saying his government will examine more than 100 contracts awarded since liberalization of the oil and gas sector five years ago. He will respect them if no corruption is found, he says, but has shown little enthusiasm for more auctions.

Instead of private and foreign investment, López Obrador wants to rely on state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos to boost dwindling production by some 40 percent during his six-year term. After decades of neglect, Pemex is in poor shape to do so. To help boost gasoline production, meanwhile, AMLO pledged to build a new $2.5 billion crude refinery in the southern state of Tabasco, a plan approved in an informal referendum in late November, albeit with a turnout of just 1 percent of voters. Not only is that no way to run an energy policy, it also leaves the sector even more stubbornly under government control.

First published Dec. 28, 2018.

Lyft, Uber IPOs will drain Tesla’s scarcity value

BY ANTONY CURRIE

Initial public offerings by Lyft and Uber Technologies will drain Tesla’s scarcity value in the next 12 months. Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle maker, whose market value hit $64.8 billion in August 2018, has, to date, been virtually the only way to invest directly in the car industry of the future. But the two ride-hailing firms will give U.S. public shareholders who factor in environmental, social and governance concerns new options.

What started as very different business models — app-enabled taxi services and vehicle production — are now converging, also joined by traditional players like General Motors and upstarts like Alphabet’s Waymo. The common vision of the future is autonomous, electric-powered vehicles that are shared, not owned.

Tesla only produces electric cars, making it an obvious choice for environmentally conscious investors. Lyft and Uber, by contrast, currently rely on people driving predominately gasoline-powered vehicles.

But the two have a lock on other car-of-the-future components. Lyft, for example, had 1.4 million drivers at the end of 2017. Assume they drive just half of the historical average for traditional U.S. taxi drivers of 70,000 miles a year. That means the company co-founded and run by Logan Green was responsible for almost 50 billion miles driven in 2017 in America, five times more than Tesla owners have clocked globally in total. Uber accounts for even more. That’s critical data for the autonomous-vehicle race.

And ESG investment, as it’s known, is not just about the environment. The “G” is for governance, and here Tesla is a laggard. The majority of its directors are friends and family of Musk. A series of missteps culminated in the chief executive’s cack-handed tweets in August about a possible buyout, resulting in the Securities and Exchange Commission imposing fines and forcing Tesla to replace Musk as chairman.

Uber had a poor record under founder and former boss Travis Kalanick, too, although current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has tried to turn a new page. At Lyft, by contrast, Green has been more of a cooperator than a bull-in-a-china-shop disruptor, working with authorities rather than challenging them and earning social bragging rights, too.

Lyft has also long invested in measures to offset its drivers’ fossil-fuel dependence. As of April all of its rides, Green says, are carbon neutral. For ESG-mindful investors eyeing the car market, a publicly traded Lyft could be the most desirable ride.

Financing drought cracks farmers’ loyalty to Trump

BY GINA CHON

A financing drought may crack farmers’ loyalty to Donald Trump. The U.S. president’s trade war has evaporated export markets for a number of crops, leaving growers struggling even more than before.

Sales of soybeans, the biggest U.S. agricultural export to the Middle Kingdom, were down 98 percent through mid-November 2018, according to Deutsche Bank. Wheat, pork and cherry sales have also been hurt. The Trump administration set aside $12 billion to offset the pain, but only about $840 million has been doled out.

Yet people in rural U.S. states have largely stuck by Trump. Montana farmer Lyle Benjamin told Breakingviews that he supports the president’s efforts to take on China. That echoes the general feeling among his peers, who tend to agree with the president’s criticisms of China’s unfair trade practices and believe he can deliver a better deal. They’ll take heart from the U.S.-China détente at December’s G20 summit. Trump said the People’s Republic will immediately start buying U.S. agricultural products. But Beijing has not confirmed that — and its 25 percent tariff remains.

Benjamin also noted, though, that credit has become tight and many farmers have used what liquidity they had. In the first few months of 2019 they’ll be looking for financing for the next harvest.

Thanks to tariffs worsening the pain low commodity prices have already inflicted, it’ll be hard to get. U.S. net farm income in 2018 is expected to almost halve to $66.3 billion compared to five years ago, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts. During that same period, farm debt rose by 30 percent to $410 billion.

That has pushed the farm sector’s return on assets down to 2.6 percent, well below the nearly 30-year average of 7.1 percent. Interest rates and delinquencies on agricultural loans are steadily increasing. In the year to the end of June, farm bankruptcies in the Midwest more than doubled to 84 compared to two years ago, according to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve.

U.S. farmers will be at a bigger disadvantage when the new Trans Pacific Partnership goes into effect at the end of 2018. It no longer includes the United States, and American products face higher tariffs than competitors. Without a quick resolution to trade tensions, farmers’ doubts about Trump may start to grow like a weed.

First published Dec. 24, 2018.

ByteDance will take over B in China’s BAT

BY ALEC MACFARLANE

ByteDance would add some oomph to China’s BAT. The fast-growing creator of news and video apps is already privately valued at $75 billion, putting it on par with web search outfit Baidu, whose public equity in early December was worth some $65 billion. A 2019 merger between the two will modify the constituent parts of the acronym shared with Alibaba and Tencent.

Software engineer Zhang Yiming started ByteDance in 2012 with Toutiao, an app that uses artificial intelligence to deliver bespoke individual news feeds. When the company learned how Chinese youth love to share short video clips with each other, it developed TikTok, known locally as Douyin. The video services claim over 500 million monthly active users, creating fresh expectations that ByteDance can spot the next big thing and use its algorithms to design new market-leading apps.

Competition for online advertising is cutthroat in China, however. About 10 companies, including Tencent and web portal Sina , share most of a pie estimated by iResearch to be some $73 billion. Pressure will only increase as China’s economy cools. Marketing budgets are often among the first to be cut. Baidu is in particularly bad shape. Revenue growth is abating and efforts to diversify have been slow.

That makes a union of Baidu and ByteDance a tantalising prospect. Aside from the potential cost savings, Baidu would provide ByteDance with a stepping stone to business customers. The web group led by Robin Li also has some powerful artificial intelligence of its own to contribute. And it would give ByteDance, backed by Sequoia Capital, KKR and other investment firms, an easier path to capital markets, which have become increasingly difficult for new tech ventures to enter at the exuberant valuations they want.

For Li, owning a slug of the combined company would give him a stake in a bigger, more promising group. What’s more, both ByteDance and Baidu are among the few sizeable Chinese technology enterprises not funded by either Alibaba or Tencent. Together, they would prove a more formidable force. The challenge will be for two strong, rival personalities to see eye to eye. Such bountiful opportunities, though, suggest a double-B deal is meant to be.

First published Dec. 28, 2018.