Stimulus, Bailouts, Bernanke… And The Great U.S. Cash Grab
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
by Martin Denholm, Managing Editor, Smart Profits Report
Dear Smart Profits Report Reader,
Just a week to go now before Barack Obama finally gets his feet under the Oval Office desk.
Priority #1: Getting the much-discussed economic stimulus package pushed through Congress and approved.
Question is: Will the oft-dithering Congress actually take some action to enact this proposal? You can bet that the hallowed halls of the Capitol are buzzing with debate and counter-debate at the moment, but trying to get blustering lawmakers to agree on something requires the patience of a saint.
Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is 3,000 miles away, where he made a speech at the London School of Economics today. I was struck by this tasty soundbyte:
“It is unacceptable that large firms, which government is now compelled to support in order to preserve financial stability were among the greatest risk-takers during the boom period… The existence of too-big-to-fail firms violates the presumption of a level playing field among financial institutions.”
Unacceptable, yes. But apparently not unacceptable enough to bail them out anyway - and then going on record to advocate more of the same. I wonder if his helicopter ever runs out of fuel.
Specifically, Bernanke stated that, “Fiscal actions are unlikely to promote a lasting recovery unless they are accompanied by strong measures to further stabilize and strengthen the financial system.” And in Fed-speak, that also means leaving the door open for more corporate bailouts for firms that don’t deserve it - but will get it anyway. In return, Bernanke says they must accept the additional regulation that will follow.
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Cash Grab
On Monday, almost-President Obama asked for the remaining $350 billion of the initial $700 billion bailout package to be released into the economy. And while Bernanke says Obama’s rescue package proposal should provide a “significant boost” to the economy, it might not be enough.
The most pressing need appears to be an effort to remove the “large quantity of troubled, hard-to-value assets” from banks’ balance sheets. That would involve setting up what Bernanke calls “bad banks” to hold the assets in exchange for cash and equity in the bank. Another move could be for the Treasury to simply buy the assets (using public money, of course).
But until this situation plays out further and we see what kind of effect all this stimulus has, we simply don’t know whether it will work. In addition, there’s a real concern about how the economy and market reacts once the government begins to return to “normal” economic and monetary policy and some have questioned whether the Fed has an exit plan.
Bernanke is right about one thing, though: “The world is too interconnected for nations to go it alone in their economic, financial and regulatory policies… International co-operation is thus essential if we are to address the crisis successfully and provide the basis for a healthy, sustained recovery.”
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Tech Is Dead? Not At This Firm…
Speaking of international affairs, it’s rare to find a company whose quarterly profits just jumped by 33%… but that’s the case for Indian tech giant Infosys (Nasdaq: INFY).
Thanks to signing a range of new contracts, the firm raked in 16.4 billion rupees ($343.4 million) during the fourth quarter.
And despite Infosys CFO V. Balakrishnan calling it a “one-off event,” Infosys still stands to reap some reward from the fallout of the accounting fraud at its chief rival, Satyam Computer (NYSE: SAY), which boasts General Electric (NYSE: GE) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) among its clients.
Infosys is likely to continue to see growth in 2009, thanks to the Satyam situation, plus the recent multi-year contract it signed with Astra-Zeneca (NYSE: AZN), and the devaluation of the Rupee, which makes it more competitive.
Infosys is a current holding in the Xcelerated Profits Report (XPR) portfolio - one faring well for us, thanks to our strategy of selling covered calls against our shares, in addition to picking up a dividend on the stock.
To find out how you can join the XPR team and discover which companies you should add to your portfolio, check out this report.
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Profit Slump In U.K. As Economy Experiences “Frightening Deterioration”
In Britain, however, many firms aren’t faring as well as Infosys.
Accountants Ernst & Young said the number of publicly traded companies that issued profit warnings jumped by 17% in 2008 - a seven-year high.
And with the British Chambers of Commerce stating today that there’s a “frightening deterioration” in the U.K. economy (one report just out stated that the British GDP growth slumped by 1.5% during the fourth quarter - the worst performance in 28 years), it doesn’t bode well for an improvement in 2009.
In Japan, the situation is even worse…
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Japan: “Closed For Business”
Research firm Tokyo Shoko said today that corporate bankruptcies shot up by 27.7% in December, compared with a year earlier.
In all, 1,362 companies filed for bankruptcy, as the fallout from the financial crisis clobbered Japan’s economy. And 33 publicly traded firms also went out of business in 2008 - the most in postwar history - as the nation saw bankruptcies rise by 11% for the year - the most since 1997.
The news isn’t surprising, given the steep drop in Japanese exports like cars, and the fact that the country slid into its first recession in seven years during the third quarter.
Talk to you again tomorrow.
Martin Denholm
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[...] days, the Obama Administration is putting together a plan to set up a so-called “bad bank” to clean up the many toxic loans eating through the American financial system. Doing this [...]