Saturday, May 29, 2010

What Hugh Hendry Said About The PIIGS Back On Jan 2009

Dedicated to Solomon:

  • solomon said...
    Is this Mr Hugh, the same hedge fund manager that predicted the last fall of Wall Streets?If it is, I think he is the person who bet China economy will slow too.
Regarding Mr.Hugh.

He had feared so for the PIIGS since Jan 2009! This was from a posting from ZH...

  • ........ the esteemed Columbia professor, at 4:50 into the clip, asks "How long has this Greek question been on the table. Ablout 10 weeks maybe?" A rather violent explosion from Sachs follows when Hendry calls him out on his tenured stupidity. All this was discussed yesterday. However, we wanted to provide a response to the Ivy League professor, as he did pose a legitimate question. In the following FT interview from January 2009, Hugh Hendry discussed the future of the eurozone and the PIIGS, and at 24 seconds into it, he provides the response Sachs is seeking: "I fear [the collapse of the Eurozone] is becoming more likely." He follows "If we saw parity with the euro, my goodness, that would be deemed to be unthinkable." And concludes, "There is a shortage of dollars. People think I'm crazy - they are printing billions, trillions of dollars. But keep in mind America has $50 trillion of debt outstanding. And that was fine because they thought it had $50 trillion of assets. And what we are discovering is these asset prices deflate - it's vaporization..." Dear Mr. Sachs - the very person you were sitting across the table from foresaw everything to the dot, just as it would happen 16 months later, even as you were calling up old buddies to get that Teacher of the Year award, or get that extra fellowship (in demagoguery?). Our advice to you is do what your parents did, get (an honest) job sire.... which will never happen - pouring the Kool Aid is easy and pays well. So here is our second bit of advice: watch all Hendry appearances, and listen to what he says. He will always ends up right, and you will always be wrong, since you defend a broken system which is fated for implosion. And just as Hendry sees deflation first, then hyperinflation (and watch this clip for some more brilliant insight), so it shall be. And for some reason people like Sachs will once again be invited to roundtables, in which they will goundlessly claim that nobody foresaw any of ensuing Keynesian collapse... So now that we have answered your question, we have one of our own - how does Columbia allow this level of mediocrity to be publicized on national television?

23 Jan 2009.





3 comments:

Avatar said...

Thanks for the interesting video. Now that's someone who knows what he's talking about.

Rgds

solomon said...

Many thanks for your dedication, the most important thing is the general public who like to read your blog get to the knowledge base.

Moolah said...

Regarding China:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-18/hugh-hendry-shorts-china-betting-on-1920s-japan-like-crash.html

May 18 (Bloomberg) -- British hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry is betting China’s “credit bubble” will burst, causing its economy to contract and triggering a global crisis.

Hendry’s Eclectica Asset Management has bought options on 20 companies in international markets that will profit from “a dramatic collapse” of China’s growth that’s been fueled by an unprecedented lending boom, Hendry said in a May 17 telephone interview from London.

Hendry joins hedge fund manager James Chanos and Harvard University professor Kenneth Rogoff in warning of a potential crash in China. The nation’s 13 trillion yuan ($1.9 trillion) of new lending in the past 16 months, bigger than the economies of South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong combined, is spurring industrial capacity expansion in the same way Japanese credit built inventory during and after World War I, Hendry said.

“There are striking parallels with Japan in the 1920s, when ultimately the whole system collapsed,” said Hendry, 41, whose firm manages $420 million in assets. “China could precipitate a much greater crisis elsewhere in the world.”

Japan’s export boom collapsed after the war amid excess global capacity, slashing growth and sparking a stock-market crash and bank runs.

Hendry’s flagship Eclectica Fund, a global macro hedge fund with $180 million in assets, may gain almost $500 million from its options if China’s economy plunges into a recession, he said. The options cost the fund about 1.5 percent of its net asset value annually, Hendry said.

Lending Binge

China’s vulnerability to a crash comes from the “inherent instability” created by a lending binge for infrastructure projects that’s “unprecedented in 400 years of economic history,” Hendry said. The country is also exposed to exports to a U.S. economy that could shrink from $14.6 trillion at the end of March to $10 trillion within 10 years, he said.

Chinese officials allowed lending to surge starting in late 2008 to fight the global financial crisis. New loans rose to a record 9.59 trillion yuan in 2009 and banks advanced another 3.38 trillion yuan in the first four months this year.

“China’s at the mercy of a credit bubble,” Hendry said. “Once you’ve unleashed the genie it’s out there. They are ultimately unstable and it’s that instability that creates their demise.”

The Shanghai Composite index of stocks has plunged 21 percent this year, the worst-performing index in Asia, as investors sold Chinese assets on concern a withdrawal of stimulus spending and a slowdown in construction could choke off growth after an 11.9 percent expansion in the first quarter.

Property Crackdown

China has cracked down on property market speculation and drained cash from the financial system via three increases this year in the proportion of deposits banks must hold as reserves.

China’s bubble may burst within a year or it may take three years, as Citigroup Inc. economists Willem Buiter and Shen Minggao estimate, Hendry said.

Hendry co-founded Eclectica in 2005 after six years at Odey Asset Management, where he won What Investment magazine’s fund- manager-of-the-year award in 2003 for the CF Odey Continental European Fund.