The consequences of a collapsing oil price will be deep and wide ranging. Brent oil has crashed from $115 per barrel in mid June to around $70 today, and WTI from $107 to $66. Here are the likely ramifications, the obvious and the less obvious:
1- Pressure on US shale oil producers: “Tight” shale oil is more expensive to produce than conventional oil. A lower oil price means lower profits for shale producers, or losses in many cases. OPEC’s alleged strategy and gamble are to put some of these people out of business in order to maintain the cartel’s long-term control on pricing. See next two charts.
On this, four issues should be considered.
First, the breakeven oil price for shale producers is a moving target. It may be $70 today but it will be lower than $70 in the future thanks to new technology and cost cuts.
Second, the breakeven oil price, for example $70 for a given shale well, includes upfront investments which means that the marginal cost of production is lower. In many cases, this marginal cost is below $40 at wells which are already up and running. After the crash, producers will treat upfront investments as sunk costs and will continue to operate these wells for their attractive cash flows.
Third, US law does not allow oil exports from the lower 48 states which means that the shale oil produced in the US ex-Alaska must today be processed domestically. OPEC’s calculation may be that the price of Brent will go low enough to displace domestic US producers, but this looks unlikely as long as there is a discount between WTI and Brent prices. If shale oil production slows down, one would expect the discount to narrow and disappear. In fact, factoring in the cost of transport, Brent would have to trade at a discount to WTI, instead of the current premium, before OPEC’s strategy could be considered a success. WTI is still trading at a $4 discount to Brent today, essentially unchanged in the last two months, albeit lower than it was in the earlier part of the year.
Fourth, there is some risk of financial turmoil. Several US shale oil producers are highly indebted and will suffer from declining cash flows. Marketwatch has compiled a list of companies that “are in big trouble if oil prices remain low”.
“Based on recent stress tests of subprime borrowers in the energy sector in the US produced by Deutsche Bank, should the price of US crude fall by a further 20pc to $60 per barrel, it could result in up to a 30pc default rate among B and CCC rated high-yield US borrowers in the industry. West Texas Intermediate crude is currently trading at multi-year lows of around $75 per barrel, down from $107 per barrel in June.
A shock of that magnitude could be sufficient to trigger a broader high-yield market default cycle, if materialised,” warn Deutsche strategists Oleg Melentyev and Daniel Sorid in their report.”
In 2010, energy and materials companies made up just 18pc of the US high-yield index – which tracks sub-investment grade borrowers – but today they account for 29pc of the measure after drilling firms spent the past five years borrowing heavily to underwrite the operations.
In the end, a lower oil price may deter some new shale investments, but it will not, or not yet, shutter existing wells. It is difficult to make a case that $70 per barrel is low enough to significantly alter the shale oil dynamic, unless a large number of companies run into financial distress.
2- Pressure on oil-dependent governments: The outcome here may be the difference between a manageable shock for some, and a much more challenging situation for others. Stratfor has compiled the table below which shows the energy dependence of several government budgets. Countries such as Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria need an oil price well in excess of $100.
In the right column are each country’s financial reserves which are a measure of each government’s firepower to withstand the shock. Budgets with a high breakeven and low reserves relative to their populations will experience greater strain than others. Venezuela and Nigeria appear vulnerable. Russia will also feel pressure but it has larger financial reserves and a falling currency which will dampen the shock internally.
3- Relief for US consumers and manufacturers: The fall in oil and slower fall in gasoline prices are a clear positive for US consumers. Deutsche Bank analysts estimate that every cent decline in the price of gasoline results in $1 billion of annual energy savings in the United States. A one dollar decline would free up $100 billion every year for investing or spending. The Wall Street Journal estimates that, since 2007, Americans have underspent on apparel, household textiles, appliances and real estate, all sectors which stand to benefit from years of pent-up demand.
More broadly, the US economy will experience a new stimulus from lower commodity prices. All sectors (ex-energy) are beneficiaries but transport and manufacturing companies could enjoy significant windfalls.
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Below are charts of country and regional dependency ratios.
First some definitions:
The total dependency ratio is the ratio of the population aged 0-14 and 65+ to the population aged 15-64. They are presented as number of dependents per 100 persons of working age (15-64).
The child dependency ratio is the ratio of the population aged 0-14 to the population aged 15-64. They are presented as number of dependents per 100 persons of working age (15-64).
The old-age dependency ratio is the ratio of the population aged 65 years or over to the population aged 15-64. They are presented as number of dependents per 100 persons of working age (15-64).
In theory, the economy does better when the dependency ratio is falling and less well when it is rising. But, as discussed in this previous post, two important mitigating factors are a country’s rate of innovation and its institutional strength.
United States, Europe, Japan
Figure 1 shows the total dependency ratios of Europe, Japan and the US from 1950 to 2050.
Fig. 1. Total Dependency Ratio, Europe, Japan, USA
Key takeaways are:
The ratio bottomed in Japan two decades before it bottomed in Europe and the US, which may explain Japan’s stagnation relative to the US and Europe in the 1990-2008 period.
In the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, Europe and the US benefited from a declining ratio.
All three ratios will rise from now into the foreseeable future. But Japan’s ratio will rise faster due to its older population.
BRIC countries
Figure 2 shows the total dependency ratios of the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Fig. 2. Total Dependency Ratio, BRIC countries
Key takeaways are:
The ratios of Russia and China are both bottoming in the middle of the present decade and will rise for the foreseeable future.
Brazil’s ratio will bottom later this decade and will subsequently rise.
India’s ratio will continue to fall until about 2030 and will level off until 2050, which may help its economy grow faster.
Country Charts
Following are charts for a few individual countries and for Europe and Africa, showing all three dependency ratios as defined above. The blue line is the total ratio, the red is the child ratio and the green is the old-age ratio.
Fig. 3. Dependency Ratios, USA
In the case of the US, Europe, Japan and China, it is clear that the rise in the total dependency ratio is mainly driven by a rising old-age ratio. Japan has the fastest rising old-age ratio. None of these countries is expected to see a big rise in its child ratio.
Fig. 4. Dependency Ratios, Europe
Fig. 5. Dependency Ratios, Japan
Note the steep 40+ point decline in China’s total dependency and child dependency ratios between 1970-2010. It is due to the country’s one-child policy and it provided a big boost to the Chinese economy in recent decades.
Fig. 6. Dependency Ratios, China
The following chart compares the total dependency ratios of the US and China. China’s ratio fell faster and will also climb faster.
Fig. 7. Total Dependency Ratio, USA, China
India and Sub-Saharan Africa have a more promising demographic profile. A declining total ratio could markedly improve their economies, if other obstacles can be overcome. In addition, unlike other regions, Sub-Saharan Africa will not have a rising old-age ratio for the foreseeable future.
America’s anemic recovery can be explained by its slowing demographics.
Politicians tend to overstate the positive impact of their policies on the economy and to also exaggerate the negative impact of their opponents’ policies. In all likelihood, there are other more potent factors at work.
Instead of GDP, we look at wealth creation as the main measure of the economy. GDP measures economic activity which means that building roads to nowhere is a positive contributor to GDP in the near term because of the jobs provided and the material and services purchased. But building roads to nowhere is a waste of money. By contrast, wealth creation accounts for the return on invested capital and differentiates between good and bad projects.
And wealth creation has three main drivers: innovation, demographics and the economy’s institutional framework.
To illustrate the importance of innovation, consider a country where there is little innovation and therefore little creation of intellectual property assets. The main assets in such an economy are hard assets, such as real estate, natural resources and the like. Unless there is strong demand for these assets from foreign markets, the economy of that country would stagnate or grow slowly with its population. Good examples of such countries today are commodity economies like the leading oil producers, industrial metal producers etc.
Now consider a country where there is innovation but where the population is small. Here the amount of wealth created by innovation would be quite small unless there is strong foreign demand for the products and services brought about by that innovation. A new iPhone that can only be marketed to a small population would create a lot less wealth than one marketed to a large population. Good examples are Switzerland and Finland which are quite innovative, have relatively small populations but export their products in large quantities.
Innovation is back.
Finally, consider a country that has lots of smart innovators and a large population but that suffers from a poor institutional framework. It is a country where the government and citizens are corrupt, where contract law is nonexistent, where capital markets are small, where property rights are not protected. There would be little wealth creation in such a country because the innovators would emigrate to another country where they could more readily prosper from their innovations.
Since 1945, the United States has been blessed by all three major contributors to wealth creation: strong innovation, strong demographics and a stable and supportive institutional framework. The same has been true for Europe, albeit with slower innovation and slightly worse demographics. The same has been true for Japan, with still worse demographics.
So where do we stand today? Of the three main engines in the US, innovation and the framework are still going strong. But demographics have weakened in several ways. First, after declining for several decades, the dependency ratio (number of dependents per worker) has been rising since 2005. Second, the number of Americans aged 30-60, arguably the most economically active age bracket, has stagnated at a little over 120 million people. Previously, the 30-60 group had grown steadily in every year from 1978 to 2005.
Presidents Reagan and Clinton are credited with a successful economy but their years in office also benefited greatly from a falling dependency ratio. The same is true for the second President Bush until mid-decade when the dependency ratio bottomed out and started to rise.
The anemic recovery since 2008 can largely be explained by our deteriorating demographics. The US population used to grow by 1 to 2% every year, which meant that companies could count on real growth of 1 to 2% and another 2 to 4% of inflation. But since 2007, annual population growth has fallen below 1% and inflation has also fallen. So what used to be safe annual domestic revenue growth of 3 to 6% is now looking more like 1 to 3%.
In Europe too, the dependency ratio bottomed and started to rise in the middle of the 2000s decade. In addition, Europe has been less innovative than the US in the past ten years, which explains its stock market lagging the US market. The rise of Google, Facebook and others and the resurgence of Apple have all taken place in the new millennium. Europe has had no such large success stories. Worse, one of its former superstars, Nokia, has nearly disappeared. So Europe still has a strong institutional framework but its other two engines of wealth creation are sputtering.
Japan’s dependency ratio bottomed in the early 1990s which may explain the country’s stagnation since then. It remains highly innovative but perhaps not sufficiently so in new focused companies with higher returns on capital.
The lesson of recent years is that US innovation may be strong enough to counter the effect of weakening demographics, but not strong enough to produce strong GDP growth. In addition, revenue growth in several industries has become highly dependent on exports to emerging markets. The economy and markets will do well if export demand continues to grow. But if emerging economies experience an important slowdown, our worsening demographics means that there will not be sufficient demand at home to pick up the slack.
For more data on US and world demographics, please refer to these previous posts:
First the two world wars, then a decline in the birth rate.
Newspapers these days are full of stories on World War I which started 100 years ago. They are also full of stories on today’s anemic European economy, as for example with Italy’s negative growth rate in the second quarter and France’s struggle to reach 1% GDP growth this year. At first blush, these two sets of stories are unrelated. But on closer look, it is apparent that the economy today is a distant echo of the war a century ago. And it all comes down to Europe’s demographics.
4 August 1914 (via Wikipedia)
In my view, there are essentially three main catalysts of economic growth: innovation, demographics, and a favorable institutional framework. To illustrate this, imagine that a firm develops the best smartphone in the world but that there is only a potential market of 1 million buyers. Clearly, the wealth created by this innovation would be far smaller than if the potential market was 100 million buyers. Thus the importance of demographics.
Now imagine that there is a market of 1 billion people but that there is no innovation of any kind. In this case, wealth creation would be greatly stunted and, with few new assets being created, wealth would become essentially a game of trading existing resources. Thus the importance of innovation. Finally, imagine a country where institutions are weak, where contract law is weak, where access to capital is difficult, where the government is corrupt and political risk is high. Here again there would not be much innovation because there would not be much capital or much incentive to innovate. Thus the importance of a favorable institutional framework.
Too many deaths
So going back to Europe, we could say that it has some innovation and that it has a favorable institutional framework, though in both cases to a lesser extent than the United States. What Europe lacks most is a strong demographic driver. It is enlightening in this regard to look at the sizes of European populations in the year 1900 vs. today:
Population (millions)
1900
2014
Growth
CAGR
TFR
France
38
66
74%
0.5%
1.98
Germany
56
81
45%
0.3%
1.42
Italy
32
61
91%
0.6%
1.48
Russia
85
146
72%
0.5%
1.53
Spain
20.7
46.6
125%
0.7%
1.50
United Kingdom
38
64
68%
0.5%
1.88
Brazil
17
203
1094%
2.2%
1.80
China
415
1370
230%
1.1%
1.66
Egypt
8
87
988%
2.1%
2.79
India*
271
1653
510%
1.6%
2.50
Indonesia
45.5
252
454%
1.5%
2.35
Japan
42
127
202%
1.0%
1.41
Mexico
12
120
900%
2.0%
2.20
Nigeria
16
179
1019%
2.1%
6.00
Philippines
8
100
1150%
2.2%
3.07
United States
76
318
318%
1.3%
1.97
* includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma.
Source: Various, United Nations. Data may include errors. Estimates vary due to shifting borders and uneven reporting.
Two important points stand out:
First, in 1900, European countries were not only the world’s economic and military powers. They were also among the most populous countries in the world. By contrast today, Russia is the only country in the top 10 most populous. Then Germany is 16th and France is 20th. More importantly, some of the new demographic powers, India, Nigeria, Egypt, Mexico, the Philippines and Indonesia, are growing at a healthy clip, as can be seen from their Total Fertility Ratios (TFR, see table) whereas European countries are growing very slowly at TFRs that will ensure stagnation or shrinkage in the sizes of their population. A ranking ten or twenty years from now may show no European countries in the top 20 most populous countries.
Second, comparing European population sizes in 2014 vs. 1900 reveals a very slow annual increase in the 114 year period. And this is where the effects of the two World Wars, of the Spanish Influenza and of communism can be seen. Populations have grown with a CAGR of less than 1% per year for the last 114 years.
The United States had fewer casualties in the two World Wars, more immigration and a strong post-war baby boom, resulting in a healthy 1.3% population CAGR and a near quadrupling of the population over the past 114 years. However, as I wrote previously, the US faces slower, sub 1% population growth in the next few decades.
Here is the tally of deaths for some countries in the two World Wars:
Millions of deaths
WW1
% of pop
WW2
% of pop
France
1.7
4.3%
0.6
1.4%
Germany
2.8
4.3%
8.0
10.0%
Italy
1.2
3.3%
0.5
1.0%
Soviet Union
3.1
1.8%
22.0
14.0%
UnitedKingdom
1.0
2.0%
0.5
0.9%
United States
0.1
0.1%
0.4
0.3%
Source: Various. Estimates vary widely and may include errors.
Estimates of deaths from the Spanish Influenza of 1918-19 vary widely from 20 to 50 million people worldwide. And Stalin’s purges are estimated to have killed over 20 million. Tens of millions of people and a larger number of descendants would have been added to today’s European population had these events not occurred. I made the case last year that Europe’s economies and markets suffer from weak domestic demand and have for a long time been driven by events outside of Europe itself.
Too few births
In general, a large number of countries are facing a more challenging demographic period in the next fifty years compared to the last fifty. Since the 1970s, there had been a steady decline in the dependency ratios (the sum of people under 14 and over 65 divided by the number of people aged 15 to 64) of the US, Western Europe, China and others. This decline is explained by a lower birth rate and was accelerated by large numbers of women joining the work force in several countries. There were fewer dependents and more bread winners than in previous decades.
In future years, dependency ratios are expected to rise due to the aging of the population in most countries and a decline in the number of workers per dependent. In the United States for example, baby boomers are swelling the number of dependents who rely on younger generations to support them in retirement (whether through taxes or through buoyant economy and stock market). But because boomers had fewer children than their parents, the burden on these children will be that much greater than it was on the boomers themselves.
In effect, our demographics have pulled forward prosperity from future years. Had there been more children in the West in the 1970-2000 period, there would have been less overall prosperity during that time, but we would now look forward to stronger domestic demand and a stronger economy going forward.
Note in the table below that the dependency ratio of Japan bottomed around 1990 which is the year when its stock market reached its all-time high; and that the dependency ratios in Europe and the US bottomed a few years ago around the time when stock markets reached their 2007 highs. The fact that several stock indices are now at higher peaks than in 2007 can be largely credited to America’s faster pace of innovation and to near-zero interest rates. Case in point: Apple’s market value has more than tripled since 2007.
India will soon be the most populous country in the world but because its dependency ratio is still declining, its growth profile may improve in future years. The same is true of Subsaharan Africa where the fertility rate is still high but declining steadily thanks to improved health care for women and declining infant mortality. As such both India and Subsaharan Africa could see faster economic growth than elsewhere, provided the institutional framework can be improved towards less corruption and more efficiency.
Europe is in a bind in the sense that, even if it had the wherewithal to do so, it cannot now raise its birth rate without making its demographic situation worse in the near term (by raising its dependency ratio faster). For the foreseeable future, its economy will become even more dependent on exports towards the United States and emerging markets. The new frontier for European exports may well be in the old colonies of the Indian subcontinent and of Subsaharan Africa.
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Research suggests that when investors influence each other, the stock market becomes less efficient.
A different perspective
Conventional theory holds that the stock market is efficient and that it does a good job pricing stocks at or close to their fair value, in particular the stocks of large widely followed companies. But could the opposite be true? Could it be that the larger and more followed companies are the less efficiently priced by the market? Could it be that their market value is chronically 20%, 30%, or 40% off from their fair value?
Here is the theory. Assume that there is a finite number of investors, say 1,000 investors, who are active in the stock market and that they each independently derive a value for each stock in the S&P 500. ‘Independently’ here means ‘without sharing thoughts with each other and without letting themselves be influenced by other sources’. Under these admittedly improbable circumstances, the resulting level of the S&P 500 would be quite close to ‘intrinsic value’. We could say that the market would be ‘efficiently’ priced.
Now assume instead that the 1,000 are not working independently but that they influence each other, sharing valuation models, qualitative opinions, price targets, etc. Under these circumstances, the level of the S&P 500 would deviate, in some cases significantly, from its intrinsic value. The market would be inefficiently priced.
When can we expect a crowd to head us in the right direction, and when can’t we? Recently, researchers have begun to lay out a set of criteria for when to trust the masses.
Democratic decision-making works well when each individual first arrives at his or her conclusion independently. It’s the moment that people start influencing each other beforehand that a crowd can run into trouble.
Philip Ball, writing for BBC Future, describes a 2011 study in which participants were asked to venture educated guesses about a certain quantity, such as the length of the Swiss-Italian border:
“The researchers found that, as the amount of information participants were given about each others guesses increased, the range of their guesses got narrower, and the centre of this range could drift further from the true value. In other words, the groups were tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy.”
“This finding challenges a common view in management and politics that it is best to seek consensus in group decision making. What you can end up with instead is herding towards a relatively arbitrary position.”
If the research is valid, it debunks the idea that a widely followed stock is efficiently priced. It is not uncommon to hear someone say: “this company is followed by so many people that I have no edge investing in it”. The opposite is almost certainly true: the more widely followed a stock is, and the more ‘influence’ is traded between the participants, the more certain you can be that its market price is wrong, and possibly wrong by a substantial margin.
Take Apple stock for example which is followed by a large number of analysts and investors. When it comes to AAPL price targets, can we say, to paraphrase the article, that the “range of their estimates got narrower, and the center of this range has drifted further from the true value?” And are investors as a group “tending towards a consensus, to the detriment of accuracy?” Investors tend to cluster their price targets not far from the current price which is now $95. But we can theorize that Apple’s intrinsic value is not $100 or $90. It is probably much further from its current market price, say $70 or $120, or indeed much lower or higher.
Another conclusion can be drawn. When discussing their investment process, fund managers tend to put emphasis on the individual expertise of sector analysts and on their team’s collaborative discussions. In a typical model, the sector analyst will initiate an investment idea and pitch it to a fund manager or to a team who will then reach a decision on how to proceed. In this case, the sector analyst may have been influenced by his peers, by the sell-side and by other sources. And the deciding team members, while searching for a consensus, may have been influenced by each other, by the analyst, and by some willingness to defer to the analyst’s expertise.
If you believe the research described above, this is not the best approach to choosing investments for a portfolio. A better approach would be to have 5 or 10 analysts value the same stock independently, without looking at other sources. It might also be better if these analysts were generalists instead of sector specialists who may be biased in favor of their sector. Once the work is done, there is no point in having any discussions which may prove to be counterproductive. In theory, ‘discussion’ means ‘influence’ and it would result in more bad decisions. It is better to simply look at the valuations derived by these independent analysts. If the average of their price targets is way off the market price, it would be worth initiating a position.
The Wednesday Letter is no longer available at the populyst site. Please subscribe to The Wednesday Letter Substack to read the latest Letter and to access the archive.
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