Carl Icahn Turns Apocalyptic: "I Am More Hedged Than Ever, A Day Of Reckoning Is Coming"
We profiled Carl Icahn's notorious bearishness most recently two weeks ago when we showed that for the second quarter in a row, the billionaire's hedge fund, Icahn Enterprises had kept on its record short bias, manifesting in a net -149% market exposure.
Unlike other hedge fund managers, however, Icahn does not provide monthly letters explaining his mindset which is why we eagerly watched a expansive, 40 minute interview he gave to Bloomberg's Erik Shatzker, in which in addition to a detailed discussion of Trump and how the Republican presidential candidate would change the US economy, he shared some much needed insights into his gloomy vision of the market.
Below are some of the key excerpts from his discussion of the market:
Shatzker: Why is it that the stock market is where it is? That with valuations so high that I noticed in the letter that -- or at least in a statement that you made with your son, Bret, earlier this month, that you don't feel confident making any large investments?
ICAHN: Aabsolutely, Erik. I have hedges on, I'm more hedged than I ever was. I will tell you there's certainly good companies. [The market] is way overvalued at 20 times the S&P and I'll tell you why: a lot of it is a result of zero interest rates. It's just what I said. You have zero interest and a lot of buybacks. Money is not going into capital.
So think of it as a rich family that just decides "we're just going to have a lot of fun, we're going to sit around in the pool, and we'll keep printing up IOUs to the town, we've got a good name." You keep doing it until you go broke. And this is what's happening in our economy. Zero interest rates are building huge bubbles. You have retirees that saved a million bucks, half a million bucks.
I think the market is at literally very high levels because of zero interest rates, and if you really look at it, the dollar is pretty strong right now, which is going to hurt international earnings. The S&P, they live on international earnings. That's going to be hurt. There's going to be a day of reckoning here. I've seen it many times in my life. When things look good, they look great. You go into the sky. But that's when you have to really pull down and really stop buying. That being said, I'm not going to tell you it's going to happen tomorrow, next week, even next month, even next year possibly. But it's going to happen, and you have to change the direction of our economy. I can't say it plainer than that.
* * *
[T]housands of CEOs understand the problem. They say one day, a regulatory agency, EPA, waves its wand and we're bankrupt, or almost bankrupt. We're losing a fortune. Why the hell should I invest in more capital? Why should I invest in more machinery? Therefore, we can't compete, and therefore the middle class does not have manufacturing jobs and we now say, well, we're not a manufacturer, we're a service company
What could cause a crash:
Shatzker: You say, Carl, that a day of reckoning will come for the stock market. You can't say whether it's going to be this week, this month, even this year or next year. Let's talk about the factors that you believe would precipitate such a correction. What could cause stocks to fall?
ICAHN: Erik, I think I've been talking about it to you this whole interview. One of the things that's causing it to fall is happening right under your nose, that we have no capital spending. Capital spending is going way down. In a society like us, manufacturing is important. I don't care, sooner or later, you can't just keep tweeting to each other. You can't text each other.
We say we're a service economy, that's great, we're a service economy. What does that mean? That we text more to each other. Sooner or later, everybody is going to send a text to each other and say isn't that wonderful, so why should anybody work? Just sit there and text to each other or watch TV. So I am saying to you, this is what is happening as we speak. Capital spending is down, obviously. The last two years, I mean, it's just down four percent in the last quarter which is unheard of when you don't have a recession. OK. Productivity has not grown. In fact, it's the lowest growing it's ever been as far as growth goes. These are very important things in a capitalistic system. Unless you have a dictatorship, you're going to go the way of Cuba. Well, Cuba was a dictatorship but it still went that way. But then you're going to go the way of Venezuela, Argentina. You're going to be in a major problem.
He then turns to the economy and social tubulence, where he repeats "shocking" allegations made by Trump, namely that "unemployment numbers are not accurate":
You see GDP is not going up, I could give you a lot of reasons. But the most important is that the middle class worker is really, does not have good jobs. This unemployment numbers are not accurate in one way, that a lot of these guys have left the work force, and two, these jobs aren't paying that well.
So I am saying that the middle class - that is why you saw this uprising for Bernie Sanders and you see it for Trump and you see Brexit and you see what's going on in Italy. I think there's an undercurrent of great unrest in our global economies. This "one percent", people resent it, and they resent government for allowing it to happen.
Last, and certainly not least, is perhaps the key issue at the bottom of everything: the US Dollar as a reserve currency, which has permitted all of the above to happen:
Now, the thing that goes for the country as you pointed out is, we're a reserve currency. But I don't know how long you can depend on that. So I am just saying that sooner or later, there's going to be a massive problem, I think.
The full 40 minutes interview is below.
FOMC MInutes- Comments of note - {https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomcminutes20160727.htm}
* Some of them believed that a convergence to a more moderate, sustainable pace of job gains would soon be necessary to prevent an unwanted increase in inflationary pressures. Other participants continued to judge that labor utilization remained below that consistent with the Committee's maximum-employment objective.
* Nevertheless, a few participants continued to caution about the risks to the inflation outlook from overshooting the natural rate of unemployment.
* Regarding the outlook for inflation, incoming information appeared to be broadly in line with most participants' earlier expectations that inflation would gradually rise to 2 percent over the medium term.
* In its latest report on potential risks to the stability of the U.S. financial system, the staff continued to judge that vulnerabilities overall remained at a moderate level and noted that the financial system had been resilient to the Brexit vote.
* Regarding the near-term outlook, participants generally agreed that the prompt recovery in financial markets following the Brexit vote and the pickup in job gains in June had alleviated two key uncertainties about the outlook that they had faced at the June meeting.
* Participants judged that the incoming information, on the whole, had lowered the downside risks to the near-term economic outlook. Most participants anticipated that economic growth would move up to a rate somewhat above its longer-run trend during the second half of 2016 and that the labor market would strengthen further. However, several noted that while the outlook for consumer spending remained positive, continued weakness in business investment and the possibility of slower improvement in the housing sector posed some downside risks to their forecasts.
* In addition to the situation in Europe, some participants continued to see a number of other downside risks to the medium-term economic and financial outlook from abroad, including weakness in the global economy more broadly, uncertainty about the outlook for China's foreign exchange policy, and the implications of China's run-up in debt to support its economy. A few others noted uncertainty about the strength of domestic economic activity going forward. However, some other participants indicated that they did not view the uncertainties attending the outlook to be unusually elevated and continued to see the risks to their economic forecasts as balanced.
* In addition, although near-term downside risks to the outlook had diminished over the intermeeting period, some participants stressed that the Committee needed to consider the constraints on the conduct of monetary policy associated with proximity to the effective lower bound on short-term interest rates. These participants concluded that the Committee should wait to take another step in removing accommodation until the data on economic activity provided a greater level of confidence that economic growth was strong enough to withstand a possible downward shock to demand.
Airbus to test driverless 'flying taxis' in 2017
David Reid | @cnbcdavy
45 Mins Ago
Artist’s impression of the multipropeller CityAirbus vehicle
Artist’s impression of the multipropeller CityAirbus vehicle
Aerospace giant Airbus is designing a flying driverless taxi that you can summon via an app on your smartphone.
On its website, in an article titled "Future of urban mobility: My kind of flyover" Airbus said the first vehicle prototype could be built and tested as soon as end of next year as part of a project known as "Vahana".
"Many of the technologies needed, such as batteries, motors and avionics are most of the way there," explained Airbus project executive Rodin Lyasoff in the article published in the company's online magazine Wednesday.
Airbus believes the global demand for the "flying cars" will run in to millions of vehicles and that demand will help reduce development costs.
"In as little as 10 years, we could have products on the market that revolutionize urban travel for millions of people," said Lyasoff.
Lyasoff said one major challenge will be to secure reliable technology to ensure the "autonomous taxis" can sense and avoid other objects.
And it seems the futuristic project has backing from the top of the Airbus tree.
"I'm no big fan of Star Wars, but it's not crazy to imagine that one day our big cities will have flying cars making their way along roads in the sky," Airtbus chief executive Tom Enders was quoted in the article.
"In a not too distant future, we'll use our smartphones to book a fully automated flying taxi that will land outside our front door – without any pilot."
In the same piece, Airbus said it was also developing a drone-like helicopter which could ferry multiple passengers around a city.
It said CityAirbus had been in development for two years by French and German engineers.
CityAirbus is slated to have a pilot on board at first but would switch to full autonomous operations when the technology developed.