Boom in Dodgy Wall Street Deals Points to Market Trouble Ahead
106 points by imjk 6 years ago | 68 comments- chewz 6 years ago> The timing of the IPOs only serves to further stoke the suspicions of those Wall Street observers who see a plot to transfer a private-market bubble into public hands.
- TAForObvReasons 6 years agoIn a world of ample private capital, there are only two real reasons to IPO: providing an exit for investors and raising monies that can't be raised in private. Neither reflect well on the future prospects of the company.
- brycesbeard 6 years agoA third option - raising capital from a public market may be cheaper holistically. Perhaps the private money is heavy into competition, and you’re worries about onerous terms.
I’m sure we could think of other options if we tried really hard.
- brycesbeard 6 years ago
- llamataboot 6 years agoThe whole business model of modern capitalism seems to be to exernalize every cost and privatize every profit, so just par for the course. At least let the public pension funds eat that bubble pop and not the VCs.
- turk73 6 years agoBreaking News: Every IPO is a money grab after all the other pigs got to eat. It's been this way forever.
- dang 6 years agoYou've posted so many flamebait comments recently that I've banned this account. This simply isn't what the site is for, and users who don't respect the guidelines can't post here. Creating accounts to post like this will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? We need everyone to take care of the commons if HN is to survive what's happening in society and on the rest of the internet. It's in all of our interests to do that, because that's how HN can stay interesting in the long run. Scorched earth: not interesting.
- dang 6 years ago
- TAForObvReasons 6 years ago
- johnwheeler 6 years agoThe 2009 fiscal stimulus gave us negative interest rates which fueled high equity valuations. Add in 2016 US tax law, and that’s why we’re where we are today.
- snarf21 6 years agoAgreed. I'm curious how it is all going to break. Is it just the pension funds that will be left holding the bag? How much of a bailout is going to be required? It seems like companies are in a cycle of extracting all equity and selling worse debt to make payments on the already created bad debt.
- jjoonathan 6 years agoMy bullshit theory: it'll break next year because bonus depreciation effectively boosted this year by borrowing against the next {3,5,7,10}.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6 years agoCan you ELI5? What's {3,5,7,10}?
- onlyrealcuzzo 6 years ago
- turk73 6 years agoHonestly, the high gas prices we paid for a few years there took care of most of it and the rest was written off. It's already pretty much done.
- jazzyjackson 6 years agowhat do gas prices have to do with it?
- jazzyjackson 6 years ago
- jjoonathan 6 years ago
- snarf21 6 years ago
- jimbob45 6 years agoIf I've learned anything about the stock market, it's that no one knows what it's going to do. The only good plan is to make sure that you're going to be able to stay afloat if the market tanks tomorrow.
- bryanlarsen 6 years agoLots of people know what it's going to do. Nobody knows when it's going to do it nor the magnitude, so the knowledge is basically useless.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6 years agoThat's functionally equivalent to not knowing what it's going to do.
- BubRoss 6 years ago'I wasn't wrong, I was just early'
'Thats the same thing Michael's
-The Big Short
- onlyrealcuzzo 6 years ago
- bryanlarsen 6 years ago
- RickJWagner 6 years agoI closely align with 'Boglehead' investing philosophy. This school of thinking tries to minimize risk by emphasizing consistent investment over time, avoiding attempts to time the market and pick stock 'winners'.
One of the best parts of Boglehead culture is a set of short, easily remembered phrases that describe core principles. In this case, I think of the phrase "Nobody knows Nothing!", which means there has never been anyone who can consistently tell when the market is about to spike upward or downward.
- faissaloo 6 years agoI concur, something definitely feels very off recently. The question is what can we do to ensure our survival?
- neoflex 6 years agoSo... what term put option would be best?
- MrMember 6 years agoAs the saying goes, the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Even if someone can correctly predict a market crash, correctly timing it to make money is extremely difficult. You could go all in on far out of the money January 2020 puts only for the market to continue climbing and then crash hard in February 2020.
- findjashua 6 years agoOne could keep rolling the puts forward, though it would be a drag on returns if the market stays above the strike and the options stay out of the money.
- findjashua 6 years ago
- maxxxxx 6 years agoI tried to play this game before 2000 and it's amazing how often market can have an even steeper upturn before it finally crashes.
- pmart123 6 years agoSusquehanna made a killing during the dotcom crash by selling near-dated options and buying longer-dated options. Essentially, the majority of the market was pricing the dotcom crash to be very similar to the 1987 crash. Instead, it was closer to a slow bleed.
- TheOtherHobbes 6 years agoThe flip side of "The markets can stay irrational..." is "Someone will probably get lucky anyway. But just because they did, doesn't mean you can learn anything useful from them."
- TheOtherHobbes 6 years ago
- dralley 6 years ago"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
- pmart123 6 years ago
- preommr 6 years agonobody knows and anyone that says they do is speculating.
- JudgeWapner 6 years agoprobably around the next presidential election.
- MrMember 6 years ago
- AtHeartEngineer 6 years agoI honestly don't know how we've been in a bull market this long. Trump's been turning a lot of economic knobs and the market hasn't really responded drastically like it has in the past. When it does crash, it's going to crash hard. Just my opinion.
- AznHisoka 6 years agoWhy would it crash hard unless interest rates go up by a significant amount? The financial industry is filled with tons of money that is looking for returns - it's just not going not sit in a bank and let inflation rot its value. If there's a downturn, it will be very temporary as Wall Street is so anxious/trigger happy. They'll immediately get greedy and buy any dips.
Everyday, there is new money flowing into the system automatically, without any conscious decision. It's coming from 401Ks, IRAs, etc. That money needs to be put into action.
- roenxi 6 years ago> Why would it crash hard unless interest rates go up by a significant amount?
The 2008-era crisis in theory should have resulted in a whole heap of financial managers taking their companies bankrupt/to a place of horrid returns and being blacklisted from ever managing a lemonade stand. But they were bailed out, so now they got promotions instead for record returns or whatever it is they've been doing since. Since the finance industry has substantial control over what everyone else does, that leaks out into the real world.
So, the intuition is that the system is being corrupted and people with no ability to make good decisions are being put in charge. At some point that should boil over. You can fit math models to that and guess which metric will blow out first.
I'm not sure how much I buy that argument; people have an incredible ability to put up with suboptimal circumstances. But when you put idiots in charge there is always a risk that they do something spectacularly stupid so my personal guess is at some point the pensions crack and trigger something. It is a spectator sport in a way. Maybe America is productive enough that they can cope with a few bad eggs in the financial markets. Maybe the taxpayers can shoulder all burdens!
POSTSCRIPT
Just for fun, veering off topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_mergers_in_the_Un...
My interpretation is that something went wrong with bank regulation in the late 70s or early 80s. That is when the too-big-to-fail snowball started rolling; since then the stresses in the system seem to have been building. 2008 was a nasty blow.
- supergauntlet 6 years ago>My interpretation is that something went wrong with bank regulation in the late 70s or early 80s. That is when the too-big-to-fail snowball started rolling; since then the stresses in the system seem to have been building. 2008 was a nasty blow.
Yes, it's called "Ronald Wilson Reagan" and was worsened when Glass Steagall was repealed by Clinton in a remarkably short-sighted move. Another poster already mentioned the Savings and Loan crisis that happened in the 90s that took taxpayers for a ride to the tune of 130 billion dollars (around 250 billion dollars today). We should have learned from it but for some reason (probably greed) we made the same mistakes again with Glass-Steagall and then not even 10 years after repealing that we reaped our rewards: subprime mortgages falling apart and taxpayers footing the bill while thousands were foreclosed on. The same is happening with auto loans right now.
For some reason, if you are a white collar criminal, the rules don't apply to you. No matter how much you fuck up and how much illegal shit you do, none of it sticks. Look at Boeing. 346 people died, but I honestly bet the worst thing that happens to any of the managers that OK'd that plane is they lose their jobs; realistically they probably won't even lose that. Maybe not get a bonus.
The common thread here is not just with deregulation being seen as the magical cure all that fixes all our problems (because as it turns out, sometimes we have regulations for very good reasons!) but that there are simply no consequences for doing bad things if you are stealing from or hurting the average American taxpayer. The only difference between Bernie Madoff and the bankers in 2008 that grifted us all is that Madoff made the mistake of trying to steal from the rich.
- edoceo 6 years ago
- AnimalMuppet 6 years agoIIRC, that was when banks first were allowed to operate across state lines. Before that you might have "national associations" (banks that were connected to banks in other states), but the banks in each state were separate corporations.
- mtberatwork 6 years ago> something went wrong with bank regulation in the late 70s or early 80s.
I'm assuming you are referring to the repeal of Glass-Steagall?
- supergauntlet 6 years ago
- stillbourne 6 years agoDid you even bother reading the article? It basically states that we haven't learned out lessons from 2008. Was the 2008 crash because of fed interest rates? No, it was because of poorly designed high-interest junk bonds. The article says the same behavior that caused the market to tank in 2008 in happening again. Furthermore, if we take a look at past crashes we can see that there has been quite a few that were caused by the same issue, the early 80s Savings and Loan Crisis, the 89 bust of the high-yield bond market, the Dot Com Bubble of the early 2000s, and the Financial crisis of 2008 we all caused by Junk Bonds NOT the Fed.
Additionally the idea that new money flowing into the system from 401Ks, IRAs, etc is extremely naive. These are long term investment instruments sure but as they are generally not actively managed they are not immune to fluctuations in the market and the market is not immune to people who have the misfortune to retiring in an economic bust. I have observed this in the second person as my grandfather was well to do before 2008, did not listen to my advice to allocate his retirement money to a guaranteed interest plan until after the market hit bottom (which was the wrong time to do that) he basically lost 500k.
- maimeowmeow 6 years agoMy take is that financial crises only happen on years that contain 8, 9, 0, but you should be more careful if the year ends in those numbers.
Looks like 2020 is going to be an unfortunant year.
- zzzzzzzza 6 years agothe big reason why the economy cyles is due to speculative cycle in land values, the booms/busts that aren't, are more like tulip bulb manias than real recessions/depressions
you could fix it by raising land value taxes high enough to extract all land rent and thus almost eliminating land speculation. At the same time you could get rid of most of our other taxes like capital gains and income taxes.
- turk73 6 years agoDon't lose sight of the fact that in the case of 2008, we had absolute fraud taking place in both the mortgage bond market (abetted by the ratings agencies) as well as in the banks through fraudulent loan originations. Not only were there no-doc mortgages (NINJA loans), but also just outright fake people in the end. I don't think the same level of fraud is going on right now, okay maybe in cryptos...
Also, your grandfather shouldn't have had all his money in equities. He should have retired and lived out of a savings account while the markets rebounded then re-balanced into bonds/CDs as the market bounced back. I got whacked in '08, but then made it all back and more. 2 yrs. of living expenses in cash would have prevented losing 500K.
- maimeowmeow 6 years ago
- lambdasquirrel 6 years agoEvery dollar in issues debt is effectively multiplied. When you turn back the knobs even a little bit, you’d be surprised by the amount of contraction. The “dodgy” money being described is more or less the froth that ends up at the very top.
The danger is that with such a long bull market, only God knows how many non-survivable companies there are beyond the Ubers and Lyfts.
What’s unsustainable will have to end eventually. Pushing money into the system doesn’t make the economy magically better by itself.
- tobltobs 6 years ago> It's coming from 401Ks, IRAs, etc. That money needs to be put into action.
Not too long anymore then we will reach Peak 401K.
- benj111 6 years agoYou could say this at any time.
If anything the danger is increased because there isn't room to cut rates because they are already low.
It isn't long since organisations were happy to pay central banks to have their money stored safely.
- westpfelia 6 years agoUnless the fed raises interest rates by 15% in one day raising interest rates dont cause crashes. Interest rates are raised partly in effort to stem the damage caused by economic downturns.
- michaelt 6 years agoSame as any crash: If people think the market is going to do worse than a bank account in the near term, they sell. If enough people agree, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- stillbourne 6 years agoMarket Crashes are not that simple. More often than not they are a form of liquidity crisis on debt instruments that are poorly designed and lack the advertised returns after long term investment. Typically these bonds have low security collateral and high risk. In 2008 this was related to the subprime mortgage bubble, the coming bubble is sometimes referred to as the everything bubble. This will probably be escalated by the Trump Tax Cuts as many in the middle class ended up paying more in the last year than in previous years due to punitive removal of certain deductions designed to punish blue states.
- stillbourne 6 years ago
- roenxi 6 years ago
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- AznHisoka 6 years ago