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We held the position until late February and then reduced it significantly and started trading moretactically, particularly after the Bank of England announced its quantitative easing (QE)measures. As a result, we suffered only a minor setback when the FOMC announced its own QEinitiative in March. Since the QE announcement, we have become even more cautious, limiting,on average, gross exposure to approximately 40% of NAV. The September 30, 2009 allocation of gross exposure was approximately 50% short Treasury bond futures, 25% long long-dated oilfutures and 25% long Chinese Yuan non-deliverable forwards. While we remain opportunisticabout the size of our exposure in relation to NAV, we are likely to have a significantly higherlevel of exposure in the future than we do currently.
Infrastructure and Research
The last few months have been a time of organization-building. A number of key professionals joined the firm, including Alex Patelis, formerly with Merrill Lynch, as Chief Economist andDeanna Masters, formerly with Linklaters, as General Counsel. We have set up legal entities andtrading lines with several counterparties and are in the process of relocating our headquarters toBermuda.We have also undertaken “basic” research projects. We believe that proprietary insights arecritical to superior investment results. Even the most brilliant insights in the workings of theeconomy or the markets are unlikely to generate
alpha
if they are widely available. Our primaryresearch focus has been the interaction of private-sector leverage and aggregate economic growth.
Outlook
We remain fundamentally skeptical about the ability of the US dollar and of US dollar-denominated fixed-income assets to retain their value over time. The US dollar is a
fiat
currencyand its value depends entirely on the integrity of US monetary policy. The gravity of the USfinancial crisis and the inability of the US Administration and Congress to deal with it effectivelyhave forced the Federal Reserve to adopt a no-holds-barred monetary stimulus program, the effectof which could be destabilizing.The Federal Reserve’s “unconventional” policy measures have channeled an enormous amount of liquidity into asset markets, thereby inflating prices and alleviating the banking system problems,but they have been far less effective in healing the “real” economy. Policymakers refuse to dealwith the problem at the source: excessive household leverage.It’s hard to say whether we have reached bottom in the contraction of household demand.Presumably, after cutting discretionary outlays, households go on spending on necessities untilthey run out of cash. Even in the suspended reality of unemployment, people will delay majoradjustments until they become inevitable.In addition, the debt-service “holiday” occasioned by mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures inprocess temporarily boosts borrowers’ spending power. And the inventory of homes in theprocess of foreclosure has held supply off the market and supported prices. Eventually, however,the debt-service holiday will stop and the inventory of foreclosed homes will hit the market.Meanwhile, solvent households will continue to focus on reducing their debt. Therefore, weexpect the resulting household credit contraction to subtract significantly from future economicgrowth just as household credit expansion added to it over the last 10-20 years.So the Fed needs to do more.
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