https://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-flat-out-sill...
As Charlie Munger says, always look at the incentives to understand people's behavior. Markopolos' sponsoring hedge funds are shorting GE:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-15/ge-drops-...
"Markopolos is working with a hedge fund he didn’t identify and stands to benefit from bets that GE’s stock will decline, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported earlier on the accounting report. Markopolos and his colleagues also hope to collect a whistle-blower reward by reporting their findings to regulators, the Journal said."
They're going to want to do this again. They need to preserve their brand, "the guy who busted Madoff and wrote a best selling book about it" is a really valuable brand.
All you need to do is convince the market that you're right long enough for the price to drop and cover your short.
With your logic one might also claim that promoters of pump-and-dump schemes should be commended for having skin in the game.
Should that include looking at the fact that GE constitutes ~7% of Bronte Capital Management’s portfolio?
I’d want to spin things positively for them too, with that much skin on the line.
https://whalewisdom.com/filer/bronte-capital-management-pty-...
Reminds me of something someone pointed out. GE hit it's quarterly numbers to the point for 20 years under Jack Welch.
Perhaps it is an obvious evolution of their complex asset leasing models from forty years ago to "financial engineering", but the implications of a USA engineering firm, outsourcing all the work and focusing on money tricks instead.. it just shouts everything that went wrong with American Business, to me.
It's better to think of GE as a mutual fund. Management and financial engineering is what holds it together.
Financial engineering is usually concerned with building and valuing pointless derivatives.
In most cases, the derivative will pay equity-like returns with low volatility or income (stupid financial advisers go nuts for both). Invariably, these products self-destruct in a crisis (when the lads are off in their Ferraris) due to some bizarre optionality that is built in.
The other side is valuation which is about employing a combination of inapplicable maths with a wilful ignorance of common sense (usually to satisfy regulators who will approve your bullshit and then come to work with you next year to make up more nonsense).
The first task is dressing the pig up. The second task is inventing a mathematical formula that explains why the pig is actually a human. French banks are pretty much ground zero for this (I have no idea why).
Also, nothing is particularly wrong with American business. Most firms are not involved in anything like this, and when they do get involved it is rarely a case of them deciding to do so. They do so because they feel they have no other choice (i.e. engineering firms provide finance so that people buy their stuff, GE Capital existed because of the torrent of cheap money that flooded the market in the 2000s). The general move to greater financial efficiency, however, has been a massive boon (look at places that haven't done that...Japan is a great example, you want to work 12 hours for a day for like $35k/year?).
They did? TFA (and Markopolus’ report) doesn’t seem to reflect that:
> In January 2018, GE reported a $6.2 billion charge based on liabilities in its long-term care business, which is run by the company’s financial services unit, GE Capital. To make up for the costs, GE Capital said it needed to set aside $15 billion to hold against potential losses, and stopped paying a dividend to its parent company for the “foreseeable future.”
A cursory glance at Wikipedia suggests some subdivisions were sold off between 2015 and 2017, which is...not the whole thing and definitely not “over a decade ago”
> The Company ended the second quarter with $16.9B of Industrial Cash excluding BHGE, $12.5B of liquidity at GE Capital and access to $35B of credit facilities.
https://www.genewsroom.com/press-releases/ge-addresses-claim...
I am in no position to argue and it is not my intention to do so. Instead, I have a question based on things I (causally) read.
For example, this piece from a conservative source: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-mo...
Sample quote serving as TL;DR:
> In fact, the destruction of America’s once vibrant military and commercial industrial capacity in many sectors has become the single biggest unacknowledged threat to our national security. Because of public policies focused on finance instead of production, the United States increasingly cannot produce or maintain vital systems upon which our economy, our military, and our allies rely.
It is not really only about the military, but about a larger context. They seem to be quite concerned about the industrial base of the US, including in high-tech industries. In support of their point, when I look up chip manufacturing capacity worldwide - https://anysilicon.com/semiconductor-wafer-capacity-per-regi... - Asia is 75% and the US ~10%.
What is your opinion about the point made by the article? In the larger context, not necessarily the military focus.
No, they spun off some of their LTC and Life Insurance business into Genworth, which, incidentally is suffering from some pretty severe LTC woes themselves.
LTC is literally the textbook case study in shitty actuarial assumptions. A combination of low interest rates, huge medical expense inflation, adverse experience (i.e. people staying on claim for 2x as long), and low lapse rates have bankrupted at least one insurer in the last two years (Coloniel Penn). Genworth may be next.
GE's auditor KPMG has had some "strikes" against them in recent years that are bad enough to draw attention from the PCAOB.
GE Power made a bad bet against renewables and went with gas but that's a business mistake, not an engineering one. They recently hit a milestone with one of their biggest wind turbines. So they're slowly fixing themselves. This is again a management error, not a lack of engineering abilities.
GE Healthcare is still a leader in their field and also VERY valuable (along with Aviation, these two parts are the best parts of GE).
What the problem for GE is that they've saddled themselves with financial engineering and moved away from their core competency to generate the numbers they want. At one point that made a lot of sense because it enabled their customers to make those large capital investments but then GE managers started using GE financial engineering to smooth over earning reports. Anyone remember when GE was the darling of Wall Street? GE was touted as this well managed firm that gave steady dividends. Well part of that steady dividend and growth came from these financial engineering methods and rather opaque accounting practices (to be fair other companies did similar things).
I can't tell you if GE is a good investment or not. I am long on GE but this new report is pretty damning but as someone pointed out, the person behind the report is far from neutral. Then again, having followed GE for so long (I was long on them starting 2008, sold it all before the plunge, and now long again), there are no real neutral voices in this debate. This though is the fault of GE management, which is not as transparent as they should be.
American banks and "financial engineers" are good at screwing over the 80% of the population, and transferring wealth to the 1%, and the fact that they are able to pull in great American companies into their schemes is embarrassing, disheartening, and in the case of GE Capital, foreboding.
For decades they were screwing me over and then when I joined the 1% it was suddenly, "hey, come open a bank account with us and we'll give you $5K!" Shameless.
Ignore your twitching knee when I say this, but it's one of the things I like about Apple: "here's some money. Might I have one of those fine devices you have on display?"[0]
"Certainly my good sir! Let me fetch one from the back...here you are. Apple Care? No? A fine choice, sir! Have a nice day!"
No cajoling about some card. If you don't want the extended warranty, it's a simple "no" and done. No popups on their internet properties asking to join their mailing list. I give money, they give me stuff. I'm sure there's some dark pattern I've missed, but for the most part the experience seems to be free of such jackassery.
[0] Admittedly, this part needs work lately at their retail stores.
Quite the opposite. Sound financial management implies financial engineering. I recommend you study and understand the field before criticising it; it's not "tricks" at all.
In many cases the finance guys have (legally?) embezzled large amounts of money while loading the companies with debt and then dumped them, leaving customers, employees, suppliers, and other investors holding the bag.
I’m sure this process is considered to be “sound financial management” by some.
I would say most laypeople would agree that using applied mathematics to hedge investments and reduce risk is okay. Most would probably also say that creating overly technical mechanism to obfuscate what is really going on would not be acceptable. I think this is why people cringe at the prospect of more and more derivative financial products being 'engineered' to create value.
I personally say it gets gross from the standpoint that it is almost entirely a field of contrived rules of convenience. In other words, the 'system' is entirely human-created which comes with all the shenanigans humans bring to the table. This is in contrast to traditional engineering disciplines that are generally rooted in some sort of physics. A mechanical engineer can improve their understanding of reality, but cannot wave a magic wand and make different a different reality for their system to operate within.
> Despite its name, financial engineering does not belong to any of the fields in traditional professional engineering
> It is generally (but not always) a disparaging term, implying that someone is profiting from paper games at the expense of employees and investors.
>Many other authors have identified specific problems in financial engineering that caused catastrophes: Aaron Brown[23] named confusion between quants and regulators over the meaning of “capital”, Felix Salmon[24] gently pointed to the Gaussian copula, Ian Stewart[25] criticized the Black-Scholes formula, Pablo Triana[26] dislikes value at risk and Scott Patterson [27][28] accused quantitative traders and later high-frequency traders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_engineering#Criticis...
The top skill of most MBAs is sorting an Excel sheet by salary, in descending order, and deleting the top 10 rows to "restructure".
Because of this narrow view of the world, the tech crowd is constantly perplexed by the continuing dominance of that other tribe in their organisations as well as society at large. This inferiority complex causes them to indulge in ritualistic in-group demonisation, whereas the reverse manifests mostly in brief interludes of eye-rolling whenever the internet goes down.
To specifically call it that, publicly, is interesting. Was this a recent ad?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik
I wonder if the bullshit taught at top tier business schools starting in the 1980s isn't as responsible or perhaps even more responsible for the destruction of American industry than outsourcing, bad trade policy, and other more familiar villains. A generation or two of business leaders were systematically educated on how to trade away deep proficiency and substance for financial smoke and mirrors. GE is a microcosm of what the entire country has done.
Americans have no appreciation for businessmen and businesswomen with experience. Sales people at Levi's who don't know how to measure your waist, roofers who don't know how to repair roofs, only replace them, dealerships who don't know how to repair, only upsell to the newest car.
Too much bullshit and not enough hardwork. Too many charlatans and not enough seasoned tradesmen, salesmen, and otherwise.
https://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-flat-out-sill...
It looks like Markopolis claimed GE’s margins were too good to be true, even though they’re below the industry average.
Also he compares this section of the business with another company that GE spun off, seemingly not knowing that they were originally linked.
Doesn’t seem like a very credible report if these 2 things are true.
For example, this sentence raises red flags to me:
> I won’t reveal every technique we used because every wannabe accounting fraudster out there is going to be reading this section closely looking at it as a “how not to get caught” primer. There’s no point in making them harder to catch than they already are.
We're just supposed to take him at his word in order to protect ourselves from "wannabe accounting fraudsters" who might try to repeat what GE has done? That doesn't make sense to me. Revealing GE's supposed tricks would allow everyone else in the industry to better monitor for them.
Back in the 1990s and maybe early 2000s, GE would 'beat' analyst profit estimates every quarter by 'a penny' per share (occasionally by a few pennies). This went on for _many_ years.
I don't have any special insight, but this always struck me as _fishy_. You have a stable of presumably competent analysts prognosticating on your next quarter's revenue and profit and you consistently beat their average estimate _by a tiny bit._ You would think that you would come in _under_ the estimate every-so-often, but that was incredibly rare and the consistency always had a whiff of impropriety.
It wasn't just GE that did this. Many Fortune-500 companies had similar behavior, so perhaps it has an innocuous explanation, but I always wondered how it was possible to consistently beat estimates like this.
Releasing the statement is meant to fight the implications of the saying, "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." In other words, they want the market to move faster toward the correction they believe GE should undergo. They are not disinterested, they need people to believe them.
In fact, this type of statement in retrospect has been the biggest sign that Enron was a fraud that should have been discovered earlier. Typically a fund that has a black box producing returns trades at a lower price than its yields alone would justify. You get punished for not showing your work. Enron on the other hand claimed that their black box deserved a premium.
GE could be a fraud, but when the messenger says not showing their work is a feature, there should be a presumption of shadiness.
In general though, I find the claims plausible, but what sort of access did he & his organization have as outsiders? It's not like they had full audit access. Access of publicly accessible documents doesn't seem like it would be enough.
https://whalewisdom.com/filer/bronte-capital-management-pty-...
Given their stake, this seems like bronte capital trying to do damage control.
The report itself would be more persuasive (IMHO) if written less flippantly, but this is definitely not a sane criticism of it ...
If you remove the flippancy, there are some serious issues exposed by this report (the GAAP vs SAP accounting tricks GE keeps claiming won't matter but will, double counting BHGE, etc)
If their accusations are correct they already made a hefty profit with shorting the stock.
If their accusations do not hold water SEC will fine them for the market manipulation - would be quite hard to dispute it in this point.
Why would anybody take a risk of getting SEC coming after them?
But then it gets quite murky if some of the claims are true and some untrue.
Why make things when you can just make money?
That soon? I've known companies with cash flow issues try to turn contractors' Net 30 or Net 90 into Net 180 and beyond.
It seemed to me like large corporations feel that they can strong-arm their vendors into unsavory terms because of their clout.
Shorting GE before making the accusations is profiteering in my book. If it turns out they were wrong they'll still be able to make money on the short, buy back in with the profits and then when the stocks rebound they cash in again.
The entire stock market is a ponzi scheme for insiders.
It's also how you call companies out on their bullshit and counter their PR deflection game.
And yep, if I do a shit load of accounting research, figure out one of the biggest conglomerates has about $38 billion in fraud, you bet your ass I expect to get paid for the effort. I'm morally on board with the authors getting the first shorts in.
Explain
This would be called "short and distort". That'll win you a friendly visit from the SEC.
The line is very difficult to draw between constitutionally protected speech and securities fraud. [1]
[1] - https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ref...
I posted a column related to short-selling a while ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017060.
No, as the author stated all of the information used is publicly available
I would never invest 100% of my 401k into my employers stock. Even 10% seems risky.
You’d recognize all the customers names and likely own their products.
http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editorial...
Edited to add: there was originally a lot of vague insinuations about the GE Affinity turbofan in the parent comment, but it was edited down from five paragraphs to one after I replied.
The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, “Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!”
Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, “Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.”
Strange to think that incentives like this are/were considered the best solution and can last so long.
If you’re looking for a loan, why would you care what the average rate is between a number of providers? You’re going to take the lowest rate, right?
And then why would you throw out the lowest and highest values? One of those is the most competitive rates!
It also didn’t say anything about depth of market. A bank may have loaned you $1 at a low rate, but maybe not any more than that.
And then it was all self-reported, not based on market.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/01/08/open-secrets-3
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/-the-amer...
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/02/behind-ges-takeover-...
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/01/17/how-the-americ...
Edit: Guys, I understand the logic behind shorting GE, what I found funny was that they made it public that they had short positions in their disclaimer. IF I were in their position I would've shorted GE just like any other individual with this information.
I believe adding the disclosure serves as a mitigating factor if it turns out your analysis was bullshit, if the SEC tries to come after you for fraud.
