Market Talk

The stock market has recovered all its losses suffered after the Japan earthquake/tsunami/nuclear crisis, shrugging off at least the economic consequences of the event. That’s a posture that seems entirely premature, and the New York Times had a story Saturday that illustrates why it’s too soon to make conclusions about the disaster’s impact on the global economy.

The NYT headline reads “Global Supply Lines at Risk as Shipping Lines Shun Japan,” and the gist is that some shipping companies are reluctant to call on ports in Tokyo Bay because of concerns about radiation spewing from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Cargo carriers have a lot at stake. As the story notes, they’re obviously concerned about the safety of their crews, but they also don’t want to risk contaminating cargo or their ships. One industry source explained that a vessel may need to be scrapped “if quarantined even temporarily for radioactivity, because they would face extra coast guard checks for years at subsequent destinations.”

Sounds extreme, but those extra inspections would make it hard for a ship to stay on schedule, and who wants to ship cargo on a vessel that’s always delayed?

So it’s no small matter, this reticence to sail into Tokyo and Yokohama. As the Times story says, those ports “are normally Japan’s two busiest, representing as much as 40 percent of the nation’s foreign container cargo.” Continue reading…

It took about three months (which is a little longer than we initially expected) but GM shares finally reached another milestone: they breached below their November $33 IPO price.

As you recall, it was one of the most highly anticipated and hyped-up IPOs in years, and got off to a bit of a shaky start as shares flirted with breaking the IPO price throughout its first week of trading. Of course, the underwriters weren’t about to let this thing flop right away, and the stock eventually gained a little momement, carried along by a buoyant mood in the stock market overall.

It hit a high of $39.48 in early January, but it’s been mostly downhill since then, even as the broader market continued higher. The sell-side analysts have (naturally) been unabashedly bullish, with more than 70% calling the stock a buy, or some equivalent rating.

GM made $510 million in its fourth-quarter, and full-year profit of $4.7 billion. Investors don’t appear to be impressed, with the stock currently down 4% at $33.20; earlier as low as $32.05.

GM grooved one today for the State of the Union speech tomorrow night.

You can almost hear it already. President Obama standing before Congress, citing examples of the strengthening economic recovery. “And just yesterday,” the president will say, “General Motors — back from bankruptcy, a thriving public company once again — showed us a heartening example of its increasingly brighter prospects.  It’ll add a third shift and 750 jobs at its assembly plant in Flint, Michigan.” (Pause for applause from both sides of the aisle.)

It’s a feel-good moment, no doubt, but one in which we remain just cynical enough to take some shots at.

Look at the details. Is GM planning to increase production of its best-selling fuel-efficient vehicles in an attempt to satisfy what it expects to be increased demand as oil prices climb near (or above) $100 a barrel again? Nah.

They’re expanding production of big pickup trucks, the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra. They get about 15 mpg city, 20 highway — not awful for a big truck, but not cheap to fill up, either.

Here’s the amusing part. According to WSJ’s Sharon Terlep, GM’s North American head, Mark Reuss, says the increased production is a response to an uptick in residential and commercial construction. Say what? Is that on planet Earth, Mr. Reuss? December housing starts fell more than 4% to a 529,000 seasonal rate, lowest level in more than a year. Sure, starts are up about 11% since hitting an all-time low in April 2009, but back during the halcyon days, starts were regularly clocking in at more than two million annually. Continue reading…

All that hype, and the best GM shares could muster was a 3.6% pop above the IPO price – and that was with a whip-flailing closing flourish like you’d see at Belmont racetrack.

As we noted earlier this week, the build-up to this event reminded us of the Blackstone IPO in June 2007, with the suggestion being that like BX, GM’s IPO session may produce a high-water mark for the stock, at least for the foreseeable future. The 3.6% premium to the $33 IPO price at the close seems meager. BX, at least, gained 13% in its opening day. It eventually slumped below its $31/share IPO price two sessions later.

Will it take that long for GM?

Stock trades (or we should say churns) more than 452 million shares, roughly 10% of the total NYSE composite volume for the session.

At its best, GM shares rose more than 9% to $35.99 early on, and at their worst were only up 2.7% at $33.89 during the final half-hour of trading.

General Motors is the single greatest company that has ever existed. Every American should go out today and buy a GM car, buy two, and buy GM stock, and a GM baseball cap, and GM teddy bears, and…whoa, settle down, fella. Excuse me, there, got a little caught up in the hype.

GM, the company that once was the very definition of industrial America, and then became one among the many very definitions of corporate America’s failure, is back in the public market today, courtesy of a very big, very well-hyped IPO.

Shares are up in the 7-8% range this morning in its initial trading, but the real trick will be to see where the stock is at the closing bell. And the closing bell after that, and the closing bell after that, and the closing bell after that. But for now, this GM thing is being celebrated as a true success story.

But let’s not kid ourselves. GM still has a lot of hurdles. This isn’t some Google, some hot tech IPO for a company with a seemingly limitless future in front of it. This is a failed car company that is trying to get back into a highly competitive business, both here and overseas. We already know the very probable limits of what GM can achieve in an industry where the major competitors are Ford and Chrysler (I know, it’s Chrysler, still,) as well as Toyota, Nissan and Honda. Still, that’s not the main focus today.

“This was the single best decision of the bailout era,” Barry Ritholtz writes about GM over at The Big Picture. “It seemed to be the only decision that was not made in a panic. It adhered to the rules of capitalism — when your company is insolvent, it goes into reorganization or dissolution. The brutal, Darwinian rules of the market and of bankruptcy applied — not the influence of lobbyists, or special favors from Senators.”

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GM stock is on track to return to public trading Thursday, and the hype is ramping up, which reminds us of another highly anticipated and sought-after IPO: Blackstone Group.

Remember that one? Everybody wanted a piece of Blackstone when it first offered shares to the public in late June 2007, just a few months before US stock markets hit an all-time peak. “Shares are so oversubscribed that some Wall Street analysts fear that irrational exuberance will send investors tripping over themselves to get the first publicly traded piece of the private-equity boom,” the Washington Post wrote on the day of BX’s IPO. Some headlines wondered: “Is Blackstone the Next Google?” Continue reading…

How do you spell deflation? From Kipplinger’s, via Yahoo:

Retailers have long manipulated consumers by marking up merchandise, then promoting sales to clear inventory. Car dealers know how to play the game, too. Their marketing ploys often take the form of manufacturer’s cash rebates and low-rate financing. But car companies hate offering these incentives because relying on them to sell vehicles lowers long-term resale values across the product line.

So carmakers have introduced a fresh marketing strategy to attract your business: lower sticker prices. For the 2011 model year, several redesigned vehicles feature more amenities at prices that are the same as or less than prices for the outgoing models. This follows a trend that began with the 2010 model year.

- Considering the “uncomfortably uncertain” mood heading into this morning’s jobs data, the report wasn’t that bad. “The overall picture is of a labor market that continues to chug along in the right direction, albeit far too slowly,” Ryan Avent notes. “The pace of employment recovery implies several long, hard years ahead for American workers. But given the mood on markets and around dinner tables lately, one has to appreciate the continuation of the upward trend.”

- Stocks popped Friday on the jobs data, but Capital Gains and Games blogger Andrew Samwick says the report merely represents “more of the same” for the labor market. “There is nothing in here that merits joy,” he writes. “Expect the spinmeisters to focus on the rise in private sector employment (up 763,000 since the low in December 2009) and the upward revisions (to smaller job losses) from the two prior months.”

- The positive vibe (at least for stocks) generated from nonfarm payrolls data can’t be sitting well with former labor secretary Robert Reich. “The Great Jobs Depression continues to worsen,” Reich writes on his blog. “The last time we saw anything on this scale was in the 1930s…The practical choice we face is this: Either major action to reverse the jobs emergency or years of intolerably high unemployment coupled with demagoguery and scapegoating.”

- August jobs report offers a “small sigh of relief,” but the big takeaway is the labor market remains essentially flat, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon says. “Flat, then, is the new up — which only goes to demonstrate just how worried the markets are about a double-dip recession,” he writes. “We’re not remotely in full-bore recovery mode yet.”

- August auto sales, released earlier this week, were portrayed as worst sales in 27 years. But that’s not best way to interpret the data, James Hamilton writes at Econbrowser. “The story for autos remains pretty much what it has been for some time — we’ve bounced off the bottom, but remain stuck at a point far below what would normally be expected. Double dip? Not here, not yet. Disappointingly sluggish growth? Very much so.”

- “The outlook for subpar growth and weak job creation — although superior to a new recession — is a real and present danger, and today’s employment report doesn’t offer much reason to dismiss the danger,” James Picerno writes at The Capital Spectator. “If the economy continues to struggle, eventually the risk of a recession will become more than a low-probability prediction.”

- Mark Thoma uses the central valley in California as a metaphor for economic recovery. “It’s narrow east to west, but very long north to south,” he notes at Economist’s View. “We went down into the valley as we went into the recession, and the question for me has always been whether we are heading east to west so that we will climb out of the valley relatively quickly, or north to south as we trudge along at the bottom of the valley for considerable time…The fact that we’ve had essentially no growth for a year now, and no hint of change any time soon, makes the north to south fear very real.”

- Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) battle with activist investor Ron Burkle is symbolic of a “big fish swallowing a small fish only to be itself swallowed by an even bigger one,” Josh Brown writes at The Reformed Broker. “Founder Len Riggio built the largest bookseller on earth by putting thousands of mom & pops under his sword across the country,” Brown notes. “Now he himself is facing his own possible destruction from the twin threats of shareholder activist Ron Burkle and the disintermediation of the digital age.”

- With Dell pulling out of the 3Par (PAR) bidding war, Robert Cyran wonders if Dell shareholders are on Xanax. Dell investors “displayed neither much concern about overpayment nor relief about the deal being dropped,” he says. “After a decade of scandals, missed opportunities and dismal performance, they may have stopped caring.”

- Just your typical brawl at the US Open.

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.

One year after the government’s cash-for-clunkers mission juiced auto sales for a hot second, pundits still remain critical of the program.

A Boston Globe op-ed earlier this week by Jeff Jacoby calls cash for clunkers a “classic government folly.” He notes the used car market is still feeling the consequences from last year’s program. Used-car prices are way up, in part because supply is down and demand is high as a weak economy leads people to opt for a used car rather than splurge on a new one. That may be great for car salesmen, it’s not so hot for anybody looking to buy a car.

From Jacoby:

Congress and the Obama administration trumpeted Cash for Clunkers as a triumph — the president pronounced it “successful beyond anybody’s imagination.’’ Which it was, if you define success as getting people to take “free’’ money to make a purchase most of them are going to make anyway, while simultaneously wiping out productive assets that could provide value to many other consumers for years to come. By any rational standard, however, this program was sheer folly…

When all is said and done, Cash for Clunkers was a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy. Other than that, it was a screaming success.

The main critique of the program was that it failed to create additional demand. Instead, it pulled demand forward — so people who were thinking of buying a car in late 2009/early 2010, likely made the purchase a few months earlier knowing they could take advantage of the clunker program.

The idea sounded great at the time, but one year later, it’s unintended consequences are screaming loud and clear. And that makes it even harder to imagine that Obama last year pronounced clunkers “successful beyond anybody’s imagination.’’

Go figure.

Of all the missing-the-forest-for-the-trees, rose-colored glasses stories I’ve read, hell, probably even written, this story in the NY Times Friday about the Big Three auto makers is one of the worst offenders I’ve seen in a long time.

Start with the headline, “Detroit Goes From Gloom to Economic Bright Spot.” When I first saw that, I thought, the city of Detroit? They have got to be kidding. The city of Detroit is the most depressed American city I’ve ever been in, and I live outside Newark, N.J. I haven’t been to the Motor City since the 2007 auto show, but last time I was there it shocked me how abandoned downtown was. I am not kidding, I’ve seen Third World cities more vibrant than Detroit.

But, no, they weren’t talking about the city of Detroit. They were talking about the car companies: GM, Ford and Chrysler.

After a dismal period of huge losses and deep cuts that culminated in the Obama administration’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, the gloom over the American auto industry is starting to lift.

You know what? I’d be feeling pretty un-gloomy too, if the government gave me $50 billion and shepherded me through bankruptcy court. Covered my mortgage, paid my grocery bills, let me lay off the kids, then bring them back at half wages (that’s John’s joke, by the way.) I mean, come on, let’s get real here. Don’t sell me some fairy tale about the Phoenix-like rise of the scrappy American auto industry. It’s just not happening, Jack.

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