Subprime Scenario: What Smart Money Say!! อ่านดูครับ

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Marking to myth
Warren Buffett
Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

Many institutions that publicly report precise market values for their holdings or CDOs and CMOs are in truth reporting fiction. They are marking to model rather than marking to market. The recent meltdown in much of the debt market, moreover, has transformed this process into marking to myth.

Because many of these institutions are highly leveraged, the difference between "model" and "market" could deliver a huge whack to shareholders' equity. Indeed, for a few institutions, the difference in valuations is the difference between what purports to be robust health and insolvency. For these institutions, pinning down market values would not be difficult: They should simply sell 5% of all the large positions they hold. That kind of sale would establish a true value, though one still higher, no doubt, than would be realized for 100% of an oversized and illiquid holding.

In one way, I'm sympathetic to the institutional reluctance to face the music. I'd give a lot to mark my weight to "model" rather than to "market."

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The most dangerous words on Wall Street
Wilbur Ross
Chairman and CEO, WL Ross & Co

I recently overheard two men arguing about who was better off. One boasted about his new car, the other about a plasma TV and so on, until one proclaimed, "I am better off because I owe more than you are worth." The second man conceded defeat. This anecdote summarizes the mortgage bubble. Americans spent more than they earned in 2005 and 2006 and borrowed the difference. The federal government did the same. Everyone secretly feared this was unsound but wanted immediate gratification, so there was applause for talking heads who said global liquidity would make these borrowings safe. Alan Greenspan went so far as to suggest that people take out adjustable-rate mortgages.

Liquidity, however, is not about physical cash; it is mainly a psychological state. Subprime problems have consumed only trivial amounts of global cash but already have burst bubbles by shocking lenders. Clever financial engineering effectively had convinced lenders to ignore risk, and not just in subprime. A major hedge fund participated in a loan to one of our companies, but sent no one to a due diligence meeting. So I called the senior partner to thank him and tell him about the non-attendance. He responded, "I know. For a $10 million commitment, it wasn't worth going to a meeting."

When subprime issues first surfaced this spring, many major institutions said they had none, but recent quarterly write-offs show they did. They weren't lying; they just didn't know what they had. Their embarrassment has brought risk control back into vogue. It was always silly to lend to weak credits at discounted interest rates, and without documenting income and balance sheets and without appraisals. No amount of model building should have enabled Wall Street to take $100 of such paper and alchemize it into securities sold for $103. Models inherently assume a future similar to the past and therefore they fail when multiple standard deviations occur. Subprime models also did not capture ever more lax credit standards nor that real estate might suffer severe and protracted price declines, again proving that the two most dangerous words in Wall Street vocabulary are "financial engineering."

Now that we have identified the cause of the disease, how severe and how contagious is it? The present $200 billion of delinquencies will grow to $400 billion or $500 billion next year because $570 billion more low, teaser-rate mortgages will reset to market and consume more than 50% of the borrowers' income. Therefore most of the loans will be foreclosed or restructured. Probably 1.5 million to two million families will lose their homes. Meanwhile, few lenders will put mortgages on the foreclosed houses, so the prices will plummet. Despite these tragedies, total losses will probably be less than 1% of household wealth and only 2% to 3% of one year's GDP, so this is not Armageddon. However, even prime jumbo mortgages will be more expensive and more difficult to obtain.

Similar excesses occurred in corporate debt markets. Leveraged buyouts were financed with few or no restrictive covenants and with some borrowers able to "toggle," or issue more bonds to pay interest in lieu of cash. The debt-to-cash-flow ratio hit record highs, and more than 60% of junk bonds issued are rated B or lower. Only 13% of high-yield issuance proceeds was for capital expenditures for expansion--87% went for sponsor dividends, stock buybacks, LBOs, or refinancings, none of which inherently advance credit worthiness. And this exotic lending paid only 2.5% to 3.0% more interest than Treasury bonds' 5.5%. Therefore investors received only 8% or 8.5% interest on bonds that had a 25% probability of defaulting, the same ignoring of risk as in subprime.

The cause was also the same. Wall Street made $100 of these credits into tranches of securities that sold for $102 or more. Again we had securitization pseudo-alchemy creating fool's gold. The weakest 5% or so of a $2 trillion universe of leveraged loans and high-yield bonds will crater. This is only 1% of GDP, but lending standards will tighten for a while, just as they did after the telecom bubble burst.

Because of this outlook, WL Ross portfolio companies raised $2 billion this year to eliminate outside financing needs. More recently, we provided a modest $50 million debtor-in-possession financing to American Home Mortgage, the tenth-largest subprime lender, as it entered bankruptcy. Ultimately, we will make a major move into mortgages, because lending to weak borrowers makes sense at premium rates with proper due diligence and appraisals. After Japan's real estate bubble burst, we used a similar strategy to rehabilitate Kansai Sawayake Bank. It was earning 17% a year on equity after one year, almost twice the return typical of a Japanese bank.

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A wake-up call for Wall Street
Henry M. Paulson
Secretary of the Treasury of the United States

While we are unmistakably experiencing volatility in our financial markets, global economic fundamentals remain healthy. That provides a solid base for financial markets to continue to adjust. The lesson here is not new--in a long period of economic expansion and benign markets, there is a temptation to give way to excesses. This has been a wake-up call. It's a reminder that all participants need to completely understand the risks they take and be vigilant.

The current strained situation will take time to play out, and more difficult news will come to light. Some investors will take losses, some organizations will fail--but the overall economy and the market are healthy enough to absorb all this. As I have said, a repricing of risk is occurring, not just in the subprime credit markets but across all capital markets. Market liquidity will ultimately be realized as investors reassess risk and return, relative to the underlying fundamentals. But again, the fundamentals are solid, our markets are resilient, and they ultimately follow the economy.

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The dealmakers are dialing back.
John Mack
Chairman and CEO, Morgan Stanley

Is this a crisis? Anytime you have this kind of market dislocation, it is. It's not so much a credit crisis as a liquidity crisis, largely because of the subprime market meltdown. As a result, the quant funds de-leveraged. We processed 8.25 million tickets in one day. Just for perspective, we thought we had set a record two weeks before, when we processed 3.6 million tickets.

I was around in 1987, and that crisis was more disruptive and much more alarming than this is. So was the 1998 foreign-debt crisis. It's not all bad news now. There's still liquidity in the markets. There's plenty of investor money in China, Russia, the Middle East, as well as the U.S.≠The rest of the world has developed to the point that, if the U.S. goes into a recession, I don't think we'll have a global recession. I don't think a recession is going to happen, but it's what our central banks have to worry about.

It's too early to tell how this will shake out. The markets will eventually normalize, but things have changed. Investment banks and commercial banks will be much more conservative with their leveraged loans (for private equity buyouts). They'll demand full flexibility. There will be much stronger covenants structured into deals so that if things go wrong, the deals can be repriced. When buyers start paying a higher price for liquidity, clearly their returns have to go down. Six months ago I was saying that we'll eventually see a $100 billion private equity deal. We got halfway there. (BCE, the Canadian phone giant, is the biggest pending buyout to date, at $48.5 billion.) A deal that size is on the back burner now. The Street is not going to structure these giant transactions as they have in the past.

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Watch for buying opportunities.
Bill Miller
Chairman and chief investment officer, Legg MasonCapital Management

These sorts of things are what's known to the academics as "endogenous to the system"--that is to say, they're normal. They happen usually every three to five years. So we had a freezing up of the market for corporate credit in the summer of '02. We had an equity bubble just before that. In '98 we had Long-Term Capital. In '94 we had a mortgage collapse like we're having right now. In 1990 we had an S&L collapse. In '87 we had a stock market collapse. These things flow through the system, and they're part of the system. I saw one quant quoted over the weekend saying, "Stuff that's not supposed to happen once in 10,000 years happened three days in a row in August." Well, I would think that you would learn in Quant 101 that the market is not what's known as normally distributed. I'm not sure where he was when all these things happened every three or five years. I think these quant models are structurally flawed and tend to exacerbate this stuff.

But these events represent opportunities. When markets get locked up like this, it's virtually always the case that you'll have opportunities if you have liquidity. Instead of worrying how bad it's going to get, I think people should be thinking about where the opportunities might be.

The NYSE financial index is probably the best barometer of what's to come. The financials tend to be a very good indicator of where the market's going. They tend to lead the market because they're the lubrication for the economy. So I think the financial index will tell you if this thing is over, and so far it's telling you it's not over. It's still falling. But just as financials lead on the downside, they will lead on the upside.

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This could be a major turning point.
Robert Shiller
Stanley B. Resor professor of economics, Yale University

We have been in a spectacular boom in both stock and housing, and there's a psychology associated with that. That boom psychology brought us lower lending standards and a lot of wishful thinking about how easy it is to make money, and both real estate and stocks have been at record highs. But now they seem to be heading downward. We've seen home-price drops in most major cities in the U.S. Futures markets for single-family homes based on our index are predicting home-price declines ranging from 3% to 8% for the next year. And of course we've already seen big stock drops.

It's possible that we are at a major turning point, but I'm not sure. So far, I don't see any major change in investor psychology. I've been doing questionnaire survey work on homebuyers and stocks, and the results there differ from the futures markets. Regarding real estate, for example, we found that, among homebuyers in Los Angeles a few years ago, the median expected price increase for the next ten years was about 10% annually. With our latest survey this year, it's down to 5%. So expectations for buyers have diminished, but people are still expecting home prices to go up 5% a year, which is pretty good. The question is, Where will expectations go from here? If people lose their optimism, as indeed some have, they won't have the same incentive to buy housing. That could lead to a substantial drop in home prices.

My more optimistic thought is that lower housing and stock prices wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. It makes housing more affordable and provides better opportunities for younger investors. It's not any kind of big disaster. It might slow down the economy and put us in a recession, but we'll emerge from it, and many people will be better off.

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Market corrections are coming.
Jim Rogers
Founder of the Rogers Raw Materials Index

We've had the worst bubble in credit we've ever had in American history. As the bubble got bigger and bigger, it spread to emerging markets and leveraged buyouts and all sorts of things. And it hasn't been cleaned out yet. I don't think you can have a bubble like this and clean it out in six months or even a year. It has always taken longer.

Look at homebuilders, for instance. Historically, when an industry goes through a retrenchment like this, you have two or three big companies going bankrupt and most of the companies in the industry losing money for a year or two or three. Well, we haven't gotten anywhere near that in the homebuilding business, so I think that bottom is a long way off. As far as the credit bubble, we have another several months, if not more, of mortgages that are going to reset and people who are going to find themselves with even higher monthly payments. There are many, many more losses to come, most of which we won't know about for weeks or months.

Normally you have markets go down 10% or so every couple of years. We haven't had a 10% correction in the stock market in nearly five years. I don't know if this is the beginning of it, but we've got a lot of corrections coming. It wouldn't surprise me to see a little bounce--say if a central bank cuts rates. But that will just lead to the markets falling further late this year or next year. It would be better for the market, it would be better for investors, and it would be better for the world if we went ahead and cleaned out the system. If they do cut rates in the U.S., it would be pure madness. Because the market's down 7% or 8% from an all-time high? My gosh, what's that going to say about the dollar? What's that going to say to foreign creditors? What's that going to say about inflation? The Federal Reserve was not founded to bail out Bear Stearns or a few hedge funds. It was founded to keep a stable currency and maintain its value.

I have been and continue to be short the investment banks and the commercial banks. If they bounce up, I'll probably short more. I'm certainly not buying anything. The market's only down 8%. I don't consider that a buying opportunity. The things that I'm short, some people probably think are buying opportunities, but I don't. I've been short the banks for close to a year, and for a while it was not fun. But I added to my positions, and now it's a lot of fun.

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We don't know how bad this gets.
Jim Chanos
President and founder of KynikosAssociates

People keep pointing to the fact that capital spending is great. But they pointed to the same thing in 2000, when the market was tanking even as telecom was booming. We pointed out then that the telecommunications build-out was almost over--and was increasingly focused on projects that didn't make any sense. Today, whether it's the 48th planned community in Dubai or the marginal factory in rural China, you're going to find out that the capital projects in the works don't make a whole lot of sense either. But there's a huge lag effect on that. Financial firms are the canaries in the mineshaft, and the laggards are the capital-goods companies.

We don't know how bad this gets. The problem is we don't know how bad the hole is. And by "the hole," I mean not only what the bad credit is but also the accounting of it. I think we're seeing that a lot of financial institutions probably weren't as profitable as we thought they were. That is, they showed big profits and everyone got big bonuses on the way up, and there are going to be big write-offs on the way down.

At the individual level, what's happening right now is probably an argument for indexing and not taking the risk of individual stocks. Certainly anything that looks suspect because of its accounting is going to get broad-brush--and harsh--treatment from Wall Street. The areas of excess are going to get pulverized, and any overreactions will be areas for people to look for bargains ultimately. But I don't think we're anywhere close to that yet.

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The failure of central banking
Stephen S. Roach
Chairman, Morgan Stanley Asia

For the second time in seven years, the bursting of a major-asset bubble has inflicted great damage on world financial markets. In both cases--the equity bubble in 2000 and the credit bubble in 2007--central banks were asleep at the switch. The lack of monetary discipline has become a hallmark of unfettered globalization. Central banks have failed to provide a stable underpinning to world financial markets and to an increasingly asset-dependent global economy.

The current post-bubble shakeout is hardly an isolated development. Basking in the warm glow of a successful battle against inflation, central banks decided that easy money was the world's just reward. That set in motion a chain of events that has allowed one bubble to beget another--from equities to housing to credit.

When the bubble burst in early 2000, the optimists said not to worry. After all, Internet stocks accounted for only about 6% of total U.S. equity-market capitalization at the end of 1999. Unfortunately, the broad S&P 500 index tumbled some 49% over the ensuing 2 1/2 years, and an overextended corporate America led the U.S. and global economy into recession.

Similarly, today's optimists are preaching the same gospel: Why worry, they say, if subprime is only about 10% of total U.S. securitized mortgage debt? Yet the unwinding of the far broader credit cycle gives good reason for concern--especially for overextended American consumers and a U.S.-centric global economy. Central banks have now been forced into making emergency liquidity injections, leaving little doubt of the mounting risks of another financial crisis. The jury is out on whether these efforts will succeed in stemming the rout in still overvalued credit markets. Is this any way to run a modern-day world economy? The answer is an unequivocal "no."

It is high time for monetary authorities to adopt new procedures--namely, taking the state of asset markets into explicit consideration when framing policy options. As the increasing prevalence of bubbles indicates, a failure to recognize the interplay between the state of asset markets and the real economy is an egregious policy error.

That doesn't mean central banks should target asset markets. It does mean, however, that they need to break their one- dimensional fixation on CPI-based inflation and also give careful consideration to the extremes of asset values. This is not that difficult a task. When housing markets go to excess, when subprime borrowers join the fray, or when corporate credit becomes freely available at ridiculously low "spreads," central banks should run tighter monetary policies than a narrow inflation target would dictate.

The current financial crisis is a wake-up call for modern-day central banking. The world can't afford to lurch from one bubble to another. The cost of neglect is an ever-mounting systemic risk that could pose a grave threat to an increasingly integrated global economy. It could also spur the imprudent intervention of politicians, undermining the all-important political independence of central banks. The art and science of central banking is in desperate need of a major overhaul--before it's too late.

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A timeout to assess uncertainty
Amy Brinkley
Chief risk officer, Bank of America

There's no question that the risk of a slowdown has increased due to the hit to business confidence and the wider credit spreads. Also, consumers' reduced ability to get credit could impact spending. There will continue to be pain in both the subprime mortgage and the leveraged loan markets. In the leveraged loan market, unlike the subprime market, the credit fundamentals haven't changed. But there's an oversupply of new issues--$237 billion worth of leveraged loans in the pipeline. They will have to work through the system before we have equilibrium.

We knew these corrections would come. The surprise is the degree of volatility and the effect on liquidity, especially short-term liquidity. The very substantial changes in the financial markets over the past five years have presented new challenges. We have new players: foreign investors, hedge funds, and private equity firms. And we have new products--more complex products than in the past. The changes do distribute risk more broadly, but they've contributed to the uncertainty. Getting a handle on where the risk is isn't as easy as it used to be when banks made loans that defaulted when they were bad. These more complex products are less transparent, so it's difficult to determine the value. And the hedge funds are less transparent. The uncertainty creates a higher level of risk aversion. That, in turn, creates liquidity risk. People want to sit on the sidelines until they think they have it all figured out.

Where does it go from here? The longer there's risk aversion, the greater the impact on the markets. The oversupply of leveraged loans will take a few months to go through the system. The subprime issues will continue to be problematic through 2008. But these are healthy corrections for the long term. We don't see broad signs of weakness in the economy, and that's what matters most. Global economic growth is expected to remain strong. The U.S. economy continues to be sound. One of the most important indicators is low unemployment, at 4.6%. We're seeing steady gains in personal income. There's a continued acceleration in exports. And corporate balance sheets are strong.

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Financial market crises and the Fed
Laura Tyson
Professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

During his tenure Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave a speech to the entering MBA class at the Haas School of Business at the University of California. In the weeks before the speech, the global financial crisis that began in Thailand's real estate market more than a year earlier had driven Russia to devalue its currency and default on its debt, triggering shock waves in financial markets around the world. By the date of his speech, Chairman Greenspan was convinced that global financial markets were on the precipice of a major liquidity crisis that threatened not just the emerging markets but the global economy itself.

During his remarks he warned that the U.S. could not remain an oasis of prosperity unaffected by a world experiencing greatly increased financial market stress. And he clearly signalled that the Federal Reserve stood ready to do whatever was necessary to provide adequate liquidity to safeguard the payment and credit systems on which economic activity depends.

In the weeks following his remarks, Long-Term Capital Management collapsed and the Federal Reserve organized a bailout by private financial institutions, not to reward LTCM for bad behaviour but to contain the effects of its collapse on global financial markets. In addition, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates twice in rapid succession, and along with several central banks in Europe and Asia, provided substantial short-term liquidity to the global banking system.

To the outside observer, it looked like the Federal Reserve and its counterparts knew exactly what to do to avert a crisis. But the truth is they didn't. The best financial minds had not foreseen the Asian financial crisis and its tsunami effects around the world and they had made big highly leveraged bets on Russian government debt on the assumption that Russia would never default.

In our conversation before his speech, Chairman Greenspan said that central bankers were like drivers of a fancy new car whose mechanics they did not understand. When the car broke down and they looked under the hood, they didn't know how the new system worked. But they did know their responsibility was to get the car running again even if they had to do some unintended damage in the process. Many critics still argue that the Fed's dramatic monetary easing in 1998 inadvertently laid the foundation for the stock market bubble of 1999-2000. I disagree.

Today, the Federal Reserve and the other major central banks have been forced to look under the hood of the global financial system once again to try to understand how growing defaults on subprime real estate loans in the U.S. have triggered declines in the prices of high-quality assets and the drying up of credit even for sound borrowers around the globe. Unfortunately for the central bankers trying to contain the damage and keep the system running, its mechanics have become even more complex and difficult to understand than they were in 1998.

Financial market innovation in the form of credit derivatives has broadened the range of investors willing and able to hold risky new assets like securities backed by subprime mortgages despite the fact the markets for such securities are both illiquid and non-transparent. Proprietary quantitative trading models, designed by the best possible minds using the best possible information technology, have yielded lemming-like behaviour that has fed market gyrations. And the extent and location of market losses are hidden behind hedge fund walls.

Despite the new features of the global system, the basic responsibility of the central banks, as the lenders of last resort, remains unchanged: to provide the liquidity needed to protect the collective good of a smoothly functioning payment and credit system that retains the trust of market participants. But there is a lot of uncertainty about how this should be done. How much additional short-term liquidity will be required? At what rate should it be made available and against what collateral? Will it be necessary to cut interest rates to head off a recession caused by the disappearance of wealth? The central banks must remain ready to act even though they do not know the answers to these questions, even though there is no practical way for them to provide needed liquidity without letting at least some foolish investors and institutions off the hook, and even though stabilizing the market today creates moral hazard problems for tomorrow.

Once the turmoil has subsided, the Federal Reserve should look under the hood once again to try to figure out exactly what went wrong with the mechanics of the global financial system this time around. Based on what we know now, it is a good bet that hedge funds played a major role and that tougher reporting requirements and supervision of their activities are warranted to enhance the access to reliable information on which wise investment decisions depend.

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A bubble of liquidity
Jeremy Grantham
Chairman, GMO



The world was moving slowly but very steadily against risk. They've been taking far too much time. The risk premiums had hit a world record low back in February. It was probably the lowest point in history and across a very broad base of assets. But the essence of the bubble was risk-taking.

It was a bubble of liquidity and a consequence of liquidity.

The proximate cause of this is subprime. That does not seem that profound a problem globally. Of course, unfortunately, that is the local cause. The general cause is that risk was mispriced on an extensive basis globally. By risk, I am referring to elaborate fixed income instruments typified by subprime but also to leveraged debt to private equity, junk bond spreads, credit default swaps. They're using this as an excuse, which they refer to in China as the U.S. subprime problem. But really they're using this as an excuse to reflect the real problem, which is the broad-based mispricing of risk.

The selling might accelerate. On the other hand the markets could easily rally. But in the end risk will be repriced. Whether it's now or in 18 months, risk premiums will be more normal.

The focus of the mispricing is in fixed income. That was more impressive than mispricing in equity markets. But the equity markets were also mispriced. The junky companies were selling at a premium to the blue chips. We had never seen such a deviation in performance between the junky rated companies versus the really high quality companies. It's been going on since September of '02.

The leakage into the equity markets from the fixed income is of course private equity. Private equity is a function of how much debt you can get, the cost of the debt, etc. That fed right through into overpaying for fairly expensive companies. And then of course the ordinary investor, both institutional and individual, began to guess where the next deal would be. And when they saw one, they tried to position around similar ones. That was a real mechanism to feed easy credit and low rates.

I think this is the very early stages of repricing risk, particularly in the stock market. It may be rapidly entering the middle stages in the fixed income market, although I think it will go quite a lot further in the next couple of years. But the equity markets have barely started to address this issue. Still, today the risky stocks are badly mispriced relative to the blue chips. They have a long, long way to go. I have no doubt they will do it. The pendulum always swings completely. In other words, you can guarantee that one day there will be a substantial premium for high quality companies.

There is a lot of pain still to be had in the equity markets, particularly aimed at the risky end of the spectrum. We think the fair value on the market is about a third lower in the U.S and EAFE from today and about a quarter less in emerging markets.

Most of that is not because P/E's are high. The great weakness in equities is that profit margins are off the scale globally. They're off the scale for the same reason that the risk premium got so low--that we've had wonderful global conditions, wonderful global growth, wonderful global liquidity, wonderfully low inflation. That will do it every time, without fail. So the profit margins went steadily up under a constant series of pleasant surprises: Global growth was always a little better than expected, consumption in the U.S. was always a little stronger than expected.

Pleasant surprises are the key to profit margins. If you can put together three years of constant pleasant surprises, you will have fabulous profit margins. It isn't to do with productivity, it isn't to do with China or India. It's to do with pleasant surprises. And of course, the longer the pleasant surprises, the higher the hurdle. The hurdle is now desperately high. It is virtually impossible to pleasantly surprise the world now. And profit margins will of course drift or drop down to normal and below. That's the pressure on the markets. That is what causes the market value to be a third less than it is today.

And people don't get that. People always look at P/E and take great comfort. Often it's perfectly fine to do that. But today it's horribly misleading because the main pain is in profit margins.

In five years, I expect that at least one major bank (broadly defined) will have failed and that up to half the hedge funds and a substantial percentage of the private equity firms in existence today will have simply ceased to exist.

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Ben Stein มันดีครับ ชอบ

"Stupid" investors, rejoice!
Ben Stein
Economist, writer, lawyer, and actor

No one is too stupid to make money in the stock market. But there are many who are too smart to make money.

To make money, at least in the postwar world, all you have to do is buy the broad indexes domestically--both in the emerging world and in the developed world--and, to throw in a little certainty about your old age, maybe buy some annuities.

To lose money, pretend you're really, really clever, and that by reading financial journalism and watching CNBC, you can outguess the market day by day. Along with that, you must have absolutely no sense of proportion about money and the world at large.

For example, right now we are stewing over what everyone calls "the subprime mess" and going crazy, mourning all day and into the night--falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right, to paraphrase Evita. I'm writing this on Aug. 13, 2007, and in the past four or five weeks, the markets of the U.S. have lost some 7% of their value, or about $1 trillion.

But read on: The subprime mortgage world is about 15% of all mortgages, or $1.5 trillion worth, very roughly. About 10%--approximately $150 billion--is in arrears. Of that, something like half is in default and will likely be seized in foreclosure and sold. That comes to about $75 billion. Roughly half to two-thirds of that will be realized on liquidation, leaving a loss of maybe $37 billion. Not chump change by any means--but one-thirtieth, more or less, of what has been knocked off the stock market.

The "smart" investor nevertheless reads the papers, bails out, heads for the hills, and stocks up on canned foods. He gets a really big charge out of reading in the press that there are also problems in the mergers and acquisitions market and that some deals will not go through because there are problems raising the funds for the deal. He does not see that the total value of the U.S. major stock markets (the Wilshire 5000) is roughly $18 trillion. The value of the deals that have failed in the private equity world is in the tens of billions or less. The loss to investors--what the merger price was compared with the normalized premerger price--is in the billions. It's real money, and I could buy my wife some nice jewelry with it, but it's pennies in the national or global systems.

The "smart" investor also reads that the Fed has injected, say, $100 billion into the banking system in the last week or ten days, and says, "Aha! The whole country is vaporizing. Look how desperate the system is for money!" What he does not see is that the Fed is always either adding or subtracting liquidity and that recent moves are tiny in the context of a nation with a money supply in the range of $12 trillion. No, the "smart" investor is far too busy looking for reasons to run for cover and thinks he can outsmart long-term trends.

The stupid investor knows only a few basic facts: The economy has not had one real depression since 1941, a span of an amazing 66 years. In the roughly 60 rolling-ten-year periods since the end of World War II, the S&P 500's total return has exceeded the return on "risk-free" Treasury long-term bonds in all but four ten-year periods--the ones ending in 1974, 1977, 1978, and 2002. The first three of these were times of seriously flawed monetary policy that allowed stagflation, and the last one was on the heels of the tech crash and the worst peacetime terrorist attack in the history of the Western world.

The inert, lazy, couch potato investor (to use a phrase from my guru, Phil DeMuth, investment manager and friend par excellence) knows that despite wars, inflation, recession, gasoline shortages, housing crashes in various parts of the nation, riots in the streets, and wage-price controls, the S&P 500, with dividends reinvested, has yielded an average ten-year return of 243%, vs. 86% for the highest-grade bonds. That sounds pretty good to him.

The "smart" investor, in a bunker in the Montana wilderness, keeps his money in gold bullion. After all, he's heard that home prices are falling slightly nationwide and a lot in some areas (he ignores areas of rising prices like San Francisco and New York City). He says that this will discourage the consumer and lead to a severe, bottomless recession. He even has bald people on TV telling him he's right to worry.

The stupid investor, the guy who just lies on his couch, knows that the consumer is always about to stop buying and never quite does. Maybe someone in his bowling club has told him there has only been one year since 1959 when consumer spending fell--and that was barely, in 1980. Somehow, if the consumer could keep spending after the bursting of the tech bubble wiped out $7 trillion or so of wealth, maybe the consumer can keep spending even if the subprime "mess" wipes out roughly half of 1% of that tech-bubble loss and the stock market has a fit. And maybe he knows that, even if there is a recession, recessions rarely last more than two quarters, and the economy and the stock market revive mightily after that--and that buying stocks in a recession is a good idea, not a bad idea.

Now, the alert reader may at this point be saying, "Hey, that `stupid' guy who's really smart is a long-term investor. That's why he's doing so well." Correctamundo, alert reader. There used to be a saying: "Bulls make money and bears make money, but hogs get slaughtered." I am not sure that was ever true, but it sure ain't now. The real story is that long-term investors who have some sense of proportion make money. Short-term investors who live and die by the sweep-second hand of the $300,000 watch get rich fast and poor fast and sometimes are slaughtered faster. I have no advice for them except that the next train may be bringing in someone a little younger who's a little faster on the draw and a lot hungrier, so they'd better enjoy their Gulfstream while they have it.

For the rest of us, the stock market is cheap on a price-earnings basis, profits are fabulous, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani are far from being socialists and in the long run, both here and abroad, stocks are a lovely place to be. I have no idea what the S&P will be ten days from now, but I am confident it will be a lot higher ten years from now, and for most Americans, that's what we need to think about. The subprime and private equity and hedge fund dogs may bark, but the stock market caravan moves on.

[สุมาอี้]

สุดยอดนักลงทุนมากันครบทีม

[Muffin]

ถ้ามีเวลาอยากให้อ่านกันทุกคนเลยนะครับ

[humdrum]

Ben Stein
Economist, writer, lawyer, and actor

 ครั้งแรกจริงๆ ครับ  ที่ได้ยินชื่อคนนี้ หลายอาชีพดี
 ขอบคุฯครับคุณมัฟฟิน
 ต้องขอเก็บไว้ เป็น Great Speech เลย
 เบน พูดได้ดีมากครับ เป็น Great speech ที่ผมไม้ได้ยินมานานแล้ว
 ไม่แปลกใจเลยครับ ที่เขาเป็นทนายได้

  วอเร็น
  อ่านบทความของปู่ทีไร ต้องอ่านหลายรอบครับ
  อุปมาแกเยอะ

[Blue planet]

Big thank krab.
   

[woody]

นานๆ โพสท์ที แต่หมัดยังหนักทุกครั้งนะครับ  :D พี่มัฟ

[จิบชาหน้าคอมฯ]

               

ขอบคุณมากครับ

[oatty]

ถ้ามีเวลาอยากให้อ่านกันทุกคนเลยนะครับ

ถ้า ดร.มัฟ ว่าง ๆ แปลเป็นภาษาไทย อ่านง่าย ๆ ให้หน่อยจะได้ย้ายไปที่ห้องบทความ

เห็นช่วงนี้ โหงวเฮ้งอาจารย์สอนเด็ก ขึ้นเต็มหน้าเลย  :P  :lol:  :lol:

[Muffin]

การแปลและตีความคำพูดที่ลึกซึ้งเหล่านี้ ให้ครบความหมายทั้งหมด ทำได้ยากมากๆ ยิ่งคำพูดของ เงินฉลาดเหล่านี้ด้วยแล้ว (เขาฉลาดกว่าผมมากเกินไป)
ผมจะลอง พยายามแปลดูแล้วกันนะครับ มันยาวมาก...ถือว่า ฝึกภาษาอังกฤษกันไปบ้างแล้วกันครับ... แปลหมด..ตายแน่...

หวังว่า คงช่วยแปลให้เข้าใจได้มากขึ้นบ้างนะครับ ความหมายและความหมายแฝงบางอย่าง มักจะหายไประหว่างแปล (lost in translation) เสมอครับ สนับสนุนให้ลองอ่านภาษาอังกฤษนะครับ

ผมแปลของปู่ให้อ่านก่อนแล้วกันนะครับ จะพยายาม

ตี (มูลค่า) เอาจากเรื่องแต่ง
คุณปู่ Warren Buffet

สถาบัน(การเงิน)หลายแห่ง ที่ได้เที่ยวป่าวประกาศมูลค่าตลาดที่ได้ประเมินเอาไว้อย่างแม่นยำของตราสาร CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligation) และ CMOs (Collateralized Mortgage Obligation) ที่ตัวเองถืออยู่ ที่แท้จริงแล้ว สิ่งที่ประกาศออกมา ก็ไม่ต่างจากการเล่านิทานให้ฟัง  พวกสถาบันพวกนี้ได้มีการตีมูลค่าเอาจากแบบจำลองมากกว่าที่จะตีค่าจากมูลค่าตลาด  และ ที่มากไปกว่านั้น การล่มสลายที่เพิ่งเกิดขึ้นของตลาดตราสารหนี้ก็เท่ากับเป็นการเปลี่ยนรูปแบบของกระบวนการที่ว่า (ตีมูลค่าเอาจากแบบจำลอง) ว่าไม่ต่างอะไรจากการตีมุลค่าเอาจากนิทานเรื่องแต่งนั่นเอง

เพราะว่า สถาบัน(การเงิน)หลายแห่งเหล่านี้มีสัดส่วนของการกู้ยืมที่สูง  ความแตกต่างระหว่าง แบบจำลอง และ (มูลค่า)ตลาดที่ว่า ก็สามารถเท่ากับหวดแส้ลงบนฝั่งของส่วนของผู้ถือหุ้นได้เลย  จริงๆแล้ว สำหรับสถาบัน(การเงิน)จำนวนหนึ่ง ความแตกต่างในการประเมินมูลค่า ก็คือความแตกต่างระหว่าง สิ่งที่ทึกทักเอาว่าแข็งแรงกับการล้มละลาย  สำหรับสถาบัน(การเงิน)เหล่านี้  การกดมูลค่าตลาดลงไปก็คงไม่ใช่เรื่องยากอะไร  พวกเขาก็ควรจะแค่ขาย 5% ของ(ตราสาร)ขนาดใหญ่ทั้งหมดที่พวกเขาถืออยู่เท่านั้น   การขายในรูปแบบนี้จะทำให้สามารถสร้างมูลค่าที่แท้จริง ที่ซึ่งไม่น่าแปลกใจเลยว่ามันก็ยังอาจจะยังมีค่ามากกว่าการรับรู้ 100% ของสิ่งที่ใหญ่เกินไป และขายไมได้

[จิบชาหน้าคอมฯ]

มิว่าอ่านแล้ว งงๆ งั้นรอ อาจารย์มัฟ ช่วยชี้แนะครับ
:lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:          

[Luty97]

อ่านแล้วมึน ขอผู้รู้ชี้ทางสว่างด้วย  

[Muffin]

โอ้โห ใช้เวลามหาศาลและเข้าใจยากมากครับ
ผมหมดแรงทำแล้ว แปลเสร็จอ่านเองยังไม่รู้เรื่องเลย หนักกว่า version ภาษาอังกฤษอีก   :lol:

พยายามแล้วครับ หมดแรงแล้วครับ ส่งไม้ให้คนอื่นแล้วกัน

คำพูดที่อันตรายที่สุดของวอลล์สตรีท
วิลเบอร์ รอส
ประธานและซีอีโอ (แปลไม่เป็น) WL Ross & Co

ผมเพิ่งได้ยินคนสองคนคุยกันโดยบังเอิญเรื่องใครมันแน่กว่ากัน คนนึงก็โม้เกี่ยวกับรถใหม่ของเขา อีกคนก็โม้เกี่ยวกับทีวีจอแบน แล้วหลังจากนั้น คนนึงก็ประกาษออกมาว่า อั้วะ แน่กว่าแน่นอน เพราะว่า อั้วะ กู้ได้มากกว่าที่ลื้อถูกตีมูลค่าซะอีก อีกคนยอมรับว่าแพ้ไปเลย เรื่องที่เล่าอยู่นี้ก็เป็นการสรุปให้เห็นภาพของฟองสบู่ของตลาดจำนอง  คนอเมริกันใช้จ่ายมากกว่าที่ตัวเองหาได้ ในปี 2005 และ 2006 และพวกเขาก็กู้ยืมในส่วนต่าง  รัฐบาลกลางก็ทำเหมือนกัน  ทุกคนก็แอบกลัวอยู่ว่าสิ่งเนี้ยมันไม่มั่นคง แต่ก็อยากได้ความพึงพอใจแบบแดกด่วน ดังนั้นมันก็เลยมีเสียงปรบมือให้กับพวกที่พูดๆกันอยู่ว่าสภาพคล่องของโลกก็จะทำให้พวกเงินกู้ยืมเหล่านี้ปลอดภัยไปเอง

อย่างไรก็ดี สภาพคล่อง มันก็ไม่ใช่เงินแบบจับต้องได้ หลักๆแล้วมันก็คือสภาวะทางจิตเท่านั้นเอง ปัญหา สินเชื่อชั้นด้อย (subprime)ได้กินในส่วนที่อาจจะไม่มากสำหรับเงินสดของชาวโลกและก็ได้ทำให้ฟองสบู่ของผู้ให้กู้ทีกำลังช็อคอยู่น่ะแตกไปแล้ว วิศวกรรมการเงินที่ชาญฉลาดมีประสิทธิภาพอย่างยิ่งในการทำให้พวกผู้ให้กู้เหล่านี้หลงเชื่อว่าความเสี่ยงน่าไม่ต้องไปสนใจ แล้วมันก็ไม่ใช่แค่เรื่อง สินเชื่อชั้นด้อย (subprime) เท่านั้นหรอก  กองทุนบริหารความเสี่ยงกองหลักกองหนึ่งที่ได้เกี่ยวข้องกับสินเชื่อที่ให้กับหนึ่งในบริษัทของเรา แต่ก็ไม่ได้ส่งใครมานั่งประชุมเกี่ยวกับ due diligence (การลงรายเอียดสอบทานมูลค่าสินทรัพย์และการตรวจสอบอื่นๆ...แปลยังไงจะตรงเนี่ย :S) ดังนั้นผมก็เลยต้องโทรไปหาหุ้นส่วนระดับสูงเพื่อที่จะไปขอบคุณเขาแล้วก็บอกเรื่องที่ไม่มาประชุม  เขาก็ตอบผมมาว่า ผมรู้แล้ว แต่สำหรับข้อผูลมัดระดับสิบล้านดอลล่าร์ มันไม่มีค่าพอที่จะเข้าไปนั่งประชุมด้วยน่ะ)

เมื่อเรื่องราวของสินเชื่อชั้นด้อยมันเริ่มปูดมาในฤดูใบ้ไม้ผลิ สถาบันการเงินหลักหลายๆแห่งก็พูดว่ามันไม่มี แต่เพิ่งไม่นานมานี้การตัดหนี้เสียในช่วงไตรมาสแสดงให้เห็นเลยว่ามันมี พวกเขาไม่ได้โกหกนะแต่พวกเขาแค่ไม่รู้เท่านั้นเองว่ามันมี  ความน่าอับอายของพวกเขาเนี่ยเท่ากับเป็นการดึงให้เรื่องการควบคุมความเสี่ยงกลับไปเป็นเรื่องสมัยนิยมไป   มันจะเป็นเรื่องงี่เง่าอย่างแน่นอนที่จะให้กู้กับผู้ที่มีเครดิตไม่ดีด้วยอัตราการกู้ยืมที่ถูก โอยที่ไม่ได้มีเอกสารทางรายได้และงบดุลที่ยืนยันได้ แล้วก็ยิ่งไม่มีการประเมินสินทรัพย์กันซะเลย  มันคงจะไม่มีรูปแบบการสร้างแบบจำลองไหนที่สามารถทำให้วอลล์สตรีทจะเอา 100 ดอลล่าห์ของตราสารเหล่านี้ มาเล่นแร่แปลธาตุให้กลายเป็นตราสารที่สามารถขายได้ 103 ดอลล่าร์  แบบจำลงอในตัวของมันเองได้ตั้งสมมติฐานว่าอนาคตจะเหมือนกับอดีตและดังนั้นมันจะใช้ไม่ได้เวลาที่มีการเบี่ยงเบนหลายๆอย่างเกิดขึ้น  ทั้งแบบจำลองสินเชื่อชั้นด้อยก็ไม่ได้พิจารณาถึงมาตรฐานทางเครดิตที่หละหลวมหรือการที่ภาคอสังหาริมทรัพย์อาจจะเดือดร้อนจากการไหลลงของราคาอย่างรุ่นแนง และก็อีกนั่นแหละมันก็เลยมีคำศัพท์สองคำ ที่อันตรายที่สุดในวอลล์สตรีท ซึ่งนั่นก็คือ วิศวกรรม การเงิน

มาถึงตรงนี้ พวกเราก็ได้เห็นแล้วถึงต้นตอของเชื้อโรค และรับรู้ถึงความรุนแรงและความเป็นโรคติดต่อของมัน  การกระทำผิดในปัจจุบันที่มีมูลค่า 200 พันล้านดอลล่าร์ จะโตขึ้นเป็น 400 พันล้านดอลล่าร์ หรือแม้แต่ 500 พันล้านดอลล่าร์ในปีหน้า  เพราะว่า ยังมียอดสินเชื่อจำนองที่มีเรทต่ำๆขำๆที่จะต้องมาตีค่าใหม่ที่ราคาตลาดและก็จะกินไปมากถึง 50% ของรายได้ของผู้กู้ ดังนั้นส่วนใหญ่ของสินเชื่อเหล่านี้ก็จะถูกยึดทรัพย์สินที่จำนองไว้และนำมาจัดใหม่ บางที 1.5 ล้านถึง 2 ล้านครอบครัวจะเสียบ้านของตัวเองไป  ในขณะเดียวกัน ผู้กู้ไม่กี่คนจะให้จำนองกับบ้านที่ถูกยึดทรัพย์สิที่จำนองไว้ ดังนั้นราคาก็จะดำดิ่งลง  แต่แม้ว่าจะมีโศกนาฏกรรมเหล่านี้ ความเสี่ยหายทั้งหมดอาจจะน้อยกว่า 1% ของความมั่งคั่งครัวเรือน และอาจจะแค่ 2%-3% ของผลผลิตมวลรวม(GDP)หนึ่งปี ดังนั้นนี่คงไม่ใช่เรื่องโลกแตก  อย่างไรก็ตาม แม้แต่ สินเชื่อที่อยู่อาศัยใหญ่พิเศษชั้นดีก็จะแพงขึ้นและก็จะกู้ยากขึ้น

ส่วนเกินที่คล้ายๆกัน ก็เกิดขึ้นในตลาดสินเชื่อบริษัทด้วย    Leverage Buyouts (การเข้าซื้อบริษัทโดยใช้เงินจากการกู้ยืม)ได้เงินกู้มาจากการใช้การรอนสิทธิ์เป็นจำนวนน้อยและผู้กู้บางคนก็สามารถ สลัก หรือออกตราสารหนี้เพิ่มเพื่อจ่ายดอกเบี้ยแทนที่เงินสด อัตราส่วนหนี้ต่อกระแสเงินสดได้เพิ่มสูงเป็นประวัติการณ์ และมากกว่า 60% ของ Junk Bones ที่ออกมาได้ถูกประเมินไว้ที่ระดับ B หรือต่ำกว่า  มีเพียงแค่ 13% ของตราสารผลตอบแทนสูงที่ออกมาที่เป็นเพื่อรายจ่ายทางต้นทุนที่ใช้ในการขยายธุรกิจ (เพราะ) 87%ไปเพื่อเอามาจ่ายปันผล หรือมาซื้อหุ้นคืน มาทำ leverage buyouts หรือมาเอามา refinance ไม่มีอันไหนเลยที่ทำไปเพื่อเพิ่มความน่าเชื่อถือทางเครดิต และไอ้เรือ่งการให้ยืมแปลกๆเนี่ยก็จ่ายดอกเบี้ยเพียงแค่ 2.5% ถึง 3% เหนืออัตราของตราสารหนี้รัฐที่ 5.5% ดังนั้น ผุ้ลงทุนจะได้อัตราดอกเบี้ยเพียงแค่ 8% หรือ 8.5% จากตราสารหนี้ที่มีความน่าจะเป็น 25% ที่จะไม่จ่าย เฉกเช่นเดียวกับการเพิกเฉยถึงความเสี่ยงทีเกิดขึ้นในกรณีสินเชื่อชั้นด้อย (subprime)

ต้นตอมันก็เหมือนกัน วอลล์สตรีทเอา $100 ของสินเชื่อเหล่านี้มาแปลงร่างเป็นตราสารที่ขายได้ที่ราคา $102 หรือมากกว่า แล้วก็อีกครั้งหนึ่งที่เราได้ทำการ เปลี่ยนเป็นตราสาร (securitization) สิ่งที่เหมือนกับการเล่นแร่แปรธาตุ   ประมาณ 5% -ของจักรวาลของ สินเชื่อที่มีการใช้การกู้ยืมและตราสารหนี้ผลตอบแทนสูงที่อ่อนแอที่สุดจะระเบิดออกมา  นี่ก็เป็นเพียงแค่ 1% ของผลิตภัณฑ์มวลรวม (GDP) แต่ว่า มาตรฐานการให้กู้ยืมก็จะยากขึ้นไปอีกพักหนึ่ง เหมือนกับที่เคยเกิดขึ้นหลังจากฟองสบู่ภาคสื่อสารโทรคมนาคมแตกไป

ก็เพราะรูปแบบของสิ่งที่เราเห็นนี้เอง พอร์ทบริษัทของ WL Ross ถึงระดมทุนป็นจำนวน สองพันล้านในปีนี้เพื่อที่จำขจัดความจำเป็นที่จะต้องการแหล่งเงินกู้จากภายนอก และเร็วๆนี้ เราได้ให้เงินเล็กน้อยประมาณ 50 ล้านเหรียญของสินเชื่อที่ผู้ก่อหนี้ถือครองแก่บริษัท American Home Mortgage ผู้ให้สินเชื่อชั้นด้อย (subprime) ที่ใหญ่เป็นอันดับสิบ ในขณะที่มันกำลังจะล้มละลาย  ที่สุดแล้ว เราจะขยับตัวอย่างมีนัยสำคัญเข้าไปในตลาดสินเชื่อที่อยู่อาศัย เพราะว่าการให้สินเชื่อแก่ผุ้กู้ที่มีเครดิตไม่ดีก็มีเหตุผลเพียงพอที่จะทำได้เช่นกันหากใช้อัตราที่สูง และมีการทำ due diligence และการประเมินที่เหมาะสม หลังจากฟองสบู่อสังหาที่ญี่ปุ่นแตก เราก็ใช้กลยุทธเดียวกันเพื่อฟื้นฟู ธนาคาร Kansai Sawayake  ธนารนี้ สามารถทำผลตอบแทนได้ที่ 17% ต่อปีต่อส่วนของผู้ถือหุ้น หลังจากนั้นหนึ่งปี เท่ากับเกือบสองเท่าของอัตราผลตอบแทนของธนาคารญี่ปุ่นทั่วๆไป

[Kuruni]

ขอบคุณมากครับ    

[tum_H]

ขอบคุณครับ สำหรับ ข่าวสารดีๆๆ

[naris]

ขอบคุณ ดร.มัฟฟิน มากๆครับ มีประโยชน์ในการตัดสินใจของผมมากๆ

[bummy]

Watch for buying opportunities.
Bill Miller
Chairman and chief investment officer, Legg MasonCapital Management

Instead of worrying how bad it's going to get, I think people should be thinking about where the opportunities might be.

ขอบคุณมากๆค่ะ

[thumbman2001]

thank krub    

[Muffin]

พี่ Ben Stein จ๊าบที่สุดในทั้งหมดเลยครับ ไปอ่านดูดิ สะจายยยย

แดกดันสุดฤทธิ์ แต่เตือนสติได้ผลมากๆ