Bill Gross

[LenaHuat]

Hi MM
Thanks a million for the link. I always pay attention to BG.

[kennynah]

interesting he started his article with these paragraphs... indeed, there comes a time when every man will come full circle...

and perhaps, more appropriately filed under " Life" thread...

****************
(an excerpt)
Investment Outlook
Bill Gross | November 2009

Midnight Candles


A cold wind from the future blows into my nighttime bedroom, more often than not during those midnight hours when fear dominates and hope retreats to a netherworld. This wind is a spectre, an oracle of darkness and eventual death, not easily dismissed. Once merely a whisper, its decibels intensify with the advancing years. It will be heard, this reaper – this grim reaper, yet in the nights when it howls the loudest I fight back, silently screaming for it to get out, to leave me alone, to let it all be a bad dream. It never is. Shakespeare’s Macbeth expressed it more subtly: “Out, out, brief candle!” Yet the finer words provide no solace; the final act is always the same.

Those of you in your sixties and older know of what I speak; even during daylight hours you read the obits and notice that contemporaries have passed into the beyond. Those of you much younger must wonder what has come over me, yet I was young once too. I remember as a teenager camping out under the stars with friends wondering aloud at the mystery of it all, knowing the reaper was far off in the distance, so far away that death was more a philosophical discussion point than an impending reality. In my thirties, I recall standing in front of a mirror in my physical prime and instructing my image that I would never grow old, that I somehow would live forever, that I, the me, the ego, would be eternal. Now when I face the glass my eyes avoid the unmistakable conclusion: I am everyman – everyone that ever was and ever will be. This world will outlast me.

What to do? Enjoy these senior years and take advantage of the gifts I have been given – a healthy 65-year-old body, an amazing job where I can still make a vital contribution, a wonderful wife who shines brightly and muffles the sound of my nighttime intruder. Still there is no acceptance of Macbeth’s or any of our “dusty deaths.” At midnight there is only fear and rage – rage against this night whose wind will one day take us all.

[LenaHuat]

I am everyman – everyone that ever was and ever will be. This world will outlast me.

Here's a everyman that I treasure and will outlast me :

Milton’s words, “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose to a life beyond life” were printed on the title-pages of the first two Everyman volumes. However, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and every Everyman title ever since has carried the motto, ”Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side” from the medieval morality play, where the character Everyman is comforted by another character, Knowledge, as he sets out on a journey, long hard and dangerous. These lines had come into the head of Dent’s general editor Ernest Rhys as he walked down Garrick Street one day in 1905, giving him, at last, a name for the new series. As he recalled: “Here, unexpectedly, was the waiting word, Everyman’s Library. It took me ere long into the office of the old Chief saying: ‘Eureka! I have found a title.’ For a moment he stared incredulously, and then repeated: ‘Everyman’s Library, you have it!’”

I have a pretty big collection of Everyman titles. I like to hold them in my hands

[winston]

China Will Face Its Own Bubble, Pimco’s Gross Says (Update2)
By Susanne Walker and Carol Massar

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., said Chinese growth is likely to be hurt by an absence of consumer demand from trading partners such as the U.S.

“The Chinese, I suspect, will have a bubble of their own to confront,” Gross said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday from Pimco’s headquarters in Newport Beach, California. “It’s gearing up for export that doesn’t find an end consumer, that’s the real problem in China.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... IJEMLV5FaA

[kennynah]

Hi L : thanks for educating me about "Everyman"
clearly, i'm a literary infant...

[LenaHuat]

Hi K
Oh, not at all. You know, I dare not even tiptoe into your thread on "Options" cuz I know my brains will fail me. Yours dazzle

Treasuries auctioned yesterday showed that there is a yield grab at the short end. Instituitional investors have wrapped up for the year and moved their bundles into safe treasuries from risky assets like equities

From Bloomberg:

Bill Gross Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., increased his holdings of government-related debt to 63 percent, the highest proportion since July 2004.

Gross boosted his $192.6 billion Total Return Fund’s investment in Treasuries, so-called agency debt and other U.S. government-linked bonds from 48 percent of assets in September while reducing his position in mortgages to the smallest since May 2004, according to data on Pimco’s Web site yesterday.

[millionairemind]

Here's the full article if anyone is interested...

Pimco’s Gross Increases Government Debt to Most in Five Years
Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A
By Daniel Kruger

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., increased his holdings of government-related debt to 63 percent, the highest proportion since July 2004.

Gross boosted his $192.6 billion Total Return Fund’s investment in Treasuries, so-called agency debt and other U.S. government-linked bonds from 48 percent of assets in September while reducing his position in mortgages to the smallest since May 2004, according to data on Pimco’s Web site yesterday.

Gross said in his December investment outlook last week that the “systemic risk” of new asset bubbles is rising with the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates at record lows. Under what Pimco has termed the “new normal,” investors should be prepared for lower-than-average historical returns with heightened government regulation, lower consumption, slower growth and a shrinking global role for the U.S. economy.

With unemployment at a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, Gross said the central bank is unlikely to raise interest rates until nominal gross domestic product increases 4 percent to 5 percent for another 12 months.

“With unemployment in the double digits and likely to stay close to that for the next six months despite job creation ahead, the Fed has no where to go,” Gross, co-founder and co- chief investment officer of Pimco, said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Nov. 19 from Newport Beach, California.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said after a Nov. 16 speech in New York that it’s “not obvious” that asset prices in the U.S. are out of line with underlying values after a 64 percent jump in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index from its March low.

Government Debt

Treasury three-month bill rates turned negative on Nov. 19 for the first time since financial markets froze last year on concern that the rally in higher-yielding assets has outpaced the prospects for economic growth.

Mark Porterfield, a Pimco spokesman, said in an e-mail that the company doesn’t comment on fund holdings.

Pimco’s government-related debt category can include conventional and inflation-linked Treasuries, agency debt, interest-rate derivatives and bank debt backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., according to the Web site.

The fund’s holdings of mortgage debt fell to 16 percent of the portfolio by market weight from 22 percent the month before, matching their smallest percentage of the assets since May 2004. Investment-grade corporate securities rose to 18 percent of the fund from 17 percent in September, while high-yield bonds fell to 1 percent from 2 percent, according to the Web site.

Cash Equivalents

The Total Return Fund returned 19.7 percent in the past year, beating 54 percent of its peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The one-month return is 1.04 percent, outpacing 85 percent of its competitors. Pimco is a unit of Munich-based insurer Allianz SE.

Cash and equivalent securities comprised negative 7 percent of holdings in October. These assets can include commercial paper, short-term government and mortgage-backed securities, short-term company bonds and money market derivatives.

The fund can have a so-called negative position by using derivatives, futures or by shorting.

Derivatives are financial obligations whose value is derived from an underlying asset such as debt, stocks or commodities. Futures are agreements to buy or sell assets at a later specific price and date.

Shorting is borrowing and selling an asset in anticipation of making a profit by buying it back after its price has fallen.

[winston]

Bill Gross: Fed will keep rates near zero through 2010

The Federal Reserve will keep interest rates near zero in 2010, but longer-term rates will gradually tick higher because of supply and demand, Bill Gross, founder of Pimco, told CNBC Monday.

“We have a lot of supply and perhaps not as much demand to satisfy that supply, and that may actually reinforce the move towards higher rates on the longer end of the yield curve,” he said.

Gross said that stocks will perform “alright” in the long term, but investors should not expect double-digit returns as the Fed pulls excess liquidity out of the markets.


Source: CNBC

[kennynah]

this would be expected if and only if dollar stops declining unspuriously against other major currencies...

[millionairemind]

Investment Outlook
Bill Gross | December 2009

Anything but .01%


I'm not so much concerned
about the return on my money
as the return of my money.
- Will Rogers, 1933

Toothpicked, straw-hatted Will Rogers was a journalists’ dream, combining common sense with a sense of humor that could trump any newsman of his day, an era that was characterized more by its hopeless and helpless ennui, than its promise for a better tomorrow. During the Great Depression, just breaking even by stuffing your money in a mattress was considered to be a triumph of conservative investment. Likewise, during the past 18 months there have been similar “Will Rogers” moments. Perhaps remarkably, during the week surrounding the Lehman crisis in September of 2008, yours truly frantically called my wife Sue to empty our two local bank accounts into apparently safer Treasury bills. I was not the only PIMCO professional to do so. Preserving principal as opposed to making it grow was the priority of the day – digging a foxhole instead of charging enemy lines seemed paramount.

My how things have changed! With the global financial system apparently stabilized, returns “on” your money are back in vogue, and conservative investors who perhaps appropriately donned a Will Rogers mask nary a fortmonth ago are suddenly waking up to the opportunity cost of 0% cash versus appreciated assets at renewed double-digit annual rates. That 0% yield is not a joke. Almost all money market accounts – totaling over $4 trillion dollars, shown in Chart 1 – yield close to nothing, so close to nothing that I mistakenly did a double take when reviewing my monthly portfolio statement. “Yield on cash,” read the buried line on page 15 of the report, “.01%.”

Well now, I say to myself, this is very interesting from a number of different angles. If I was hoping to double my money, it would take approximately 6,932 years to get there at that rate! Somehow, that wouldn’t satisfy even Will Rogers, who might be choking on his toothpick or at least eating his straw hat in amazement. Secondly, being a savvy professional investor and all, I knew that money market funds actually earned 20 basis points or so on my money, but in this case were allocating a paltry one basis point to me. The words of the Beatles’ “Taxman” immediately popped into mind: “That’s one for you, nineteen for me – TAXMAN!” Ah yes, but in this case it was the Fed and Wall Street that were passing the collection plate. Whether it was really “God’s work,” as Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein asserted, I wasn’t quite sure. If there was a “temple” in the vicinity I was thinking that God should be driving the moneychangers out as opposed to inviting them in for a pep talk.

Ah, but this is not a vindictive diatribe, although to me, money changers resemble Mammon more than archangels, and they all make too much money, including PIMCO. My point is to recognize, and to hope that you recognize, that an effective zero percent interest rate, as a price for hiding in a foxhole, is prohibitive. Like the American doughboys near France’s future Maginot line in WWI – slumping day after day in a muddy, rat-infested pit – when the battalion commander finally blew his whistle to charge the enemy lines, it probably was accompanied by some sense of relief; anything, anything but this! Anything but .01%!

Recently, approximately $20 billion a week has been exiting those payless, seemingly godless funds in search of a higher-yielding Nirvana. Yet, as Will Rogers knew, and Lehman Brothers demonstrated to another generation, the pain of the foxhole can immediately transition to the dodging of real bullets on the investment battlefield. Moving out on the risk asset spectrum has worked wonders since March of this year, but it comes with the risk of principal loss – failing to receive the return of your money. When viewed from 30,000 feet, there is even a systemic risk that new asset bubbles are in the formative stages – perhaps because of the .01%. Gold at $1,130 an ounce, global equity markets up 60-70% from their 2009 lows, a cascading dollar now 15% lower against a basket of global currencies just 12 months ago, oil at 80 bucks, mortgage rates at 4% thanks to a $1 trillion dollar credit card from the Fed; the list goes on. The legitimate question of the day is, “Is a 0% funds rate creating the next financial bubble, and if so, will the Fed and other central banks raise rates proactively – even in the face of double-digit unemployment?” As Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said in a recent speech, “This notion is often described as an imperative to ‘lean against a bubble,’ meaning that a central bank should act to lower asset prices that by historical standards seem unusually high.”

Yet even if the Fed and others are becoming sensitized to the dangers of up as opposed to exclusively down asset prices, it would seem that now is not the time to be affirming their bipolarity. Asset price rebounds (aside from the historic highs in gold) have followed even more dramatic slumps. A 60% rise in the stock market does not compensate for a 60% decline. Strangely enough, investors are still out 36% of their money once this down elevator/up elevator example plays out. And the simple analysis is that the private sector has still not taken the baton from government policymakers: There has been no public/private sector handoff. Bank lending is still contracting in the U.S. and weak in most other G-10 countries. Unemployment is still rising and approaching historic (ex-Depression) cyclical peaks.

Raise interest rates with 15 million jobless and 25 million part-time working Americans? All because gold is above $1,100? You must be joking or smoking – something. We will need another 12 months of 4-5% nominal GDP growth before Bernanke and company dare lift their heads out of the 0% foxhole – mini-bubbles or not. Instead, the heavy lifting or the charging of enemy lines in the case of this metaphor will likely be done by other central banks – already in Australia and Norway. In addition, and importantly, China may abandon its dollar peg within six months’ time and with it, its own easy monetary policy that has fostered more significant mini-bubbles of lending and asset appreciation on the Chinese mainland. With renewed upward appreciation of the yuan may come potentially volatile global asset price reactions to the downside – higher Treasury yields, and lower stock prices – which the Fed must surely be leery of before making any upward move, of its own, and before moving on, let me state the obvious, but often forgotten bold-face fact: The Fed is trying to reflate the U.S. economy. The process of reflation involves lowering short-term rates to such a painful level that investors are forced or enticed to term out their short-term cash into higher-risk bonds or stocks. Once your cash has recapitalized and revitalized corporate America and homeowners, well, then the Fed will start to be concerned about inflation – not until. To date that transition is incomplete, mainly because mortgage refinancing and the purchase of new homes is being thwarted by significant changes in down payment requirements. The Treasury as well, has a significant average life extension of its own debt to foist on investors before the Fed can raise short-term Fed Funds.

OK, so where does that leave you, the individual investor, the small saver who is paying the price of the .01%? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Do you buy the investment grade bond market with its average yield of 3.75% (less than 3% after upfront fees and annual expenses at most run-of-the-mill bond funds)? Do you buy high yield bonds at 8% and assume the risk of default bullets whizzing at you? Or 2% yielding stocks that have already appreciated 65% from the recent bottom, which according to some estimates are now well above their long-term PE average on a cyclically adjusted basis? Two suggestions. First, as emphasized in prior Investment Outlooks, the New Normal is likely to be a significantly lower-returning world. Diminished growth, deleveraging, and increased government involvement will temper profits and their eventual distribution to investors in the form of dividends and interest. As banks, auto companies and other corporate models become more regulated and therefore more like utilities and less like Boardwalk and Park Place, they will return less.

Which brings up the second point. If companies are going to move toward a utility model, why suffer the transformational revaluation risk of equities with such a low 2% dividend return? Granted, Warren Buffet went all-in with the Burlington Northern, but in doing so he admitted it was a 100-year bet with a modest potential return. Still, Warren had to do something with his money; the .01% was eating a hole in his pocket too. Let me tell you what I’m doing. I don’t have the long-term investment objectives of Berkshire Hathaway, so I’m sort of closer to an average investor in that regard. If that’s the case, I figure, why not just buy utilities if that’s what the future American capitalistic model is likely to resemble. Pricewise, they’re only halfway between their 2007 peaks and 2008 lows – 25% off the top, 25% from the bottom. Their growth in earnings should mimic the U.S. economy as they always have, and most importantly they yield 5-6% not .01%! In a low growth environment, it seems to me that a company’s stock should yield more than its less risky debt, and many utilities provide just that opportunity. Utilities and even quasi-utility telecommunication companies now yield between 5 and 6%, whereas their 10- and 30-year bonds yield less and at a higher tax rate to you the investor.

So come on you frustrated Will Rogers lookalikes. Join the wimp who pulled his money out of the bank just 14 months ago. Look at your monthly statement, zero in on that .01% yield and say to yourself, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m just not going to take this anymore!” You can’t buy the Burlington Northern – Warren Buffett has scooped that up – and most other choices offer tempting returns, but potential bullets as well. Buy some utilities. It may not be as much fun as running a railroad, but at least you’ll know who to call if the lights go out.

William H. Gross
Managing Director