A strong month at the end but losses for the quarter

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOXsPZnx3FA]

This will be a quick post because I am actually on vacation today and for the rest of the week, but am still reading the papers and thought I would write a quick note.

On an industry level, and certainly on a personal level, a different article caught my eye in today’s New York Times. On the front page, J.P. Morgan was called out for favoring its own mutual funds in its advisory business. The basic idea is that its brokers and advisors were encouraged to sell proprietary funds over funds from other companies that might have been less expensive or better performing.

One of the key advantages of an independent agent for consumers is the lack of institutional incentives to select one service provider over another. In a past life, I had a mortgage brokerage company, and we dealt with a wide range of lenders and investors. Often, when we talked with prospects, they would ask what we could do that their bank could not. “Maybe nothing,” was our honest answer. “But, when you buy a car, do you look only at one dealer and take what it says as the best model and price?” The answer was usually “no”—and our point was made.

One of the things I do every morning is read at least three papers, the New York Times, the Financial Times (FT), and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). I like to see what is going on—or, at least, what the paper’s editors think is going on. Even in our 24-hour Web world, I still think there is value in looking at what the editors and reporters think is worth putting on paper. With that said, I thought I would try a regular posting called Yesterday’s News that sorts among those papers to identify what is most interesting and important. I will be doing this most days.

The lead economic and business story today, from both the WSJ and FT, was the factory output report. U.S. industrial production, as shown in the Institute of Supply Management (ISM) report, was at the lowest level for three years and had the first actual decline for three years. The figure dropped from 53.5 to 49.7, which was well below expectations. Any level below 50 means a decline, and industrial production is now at 2009 levels.

I am still digging into the Supreme Court’s decision not to strike down Obamacare, and have not yet fully digested either the economic implications or what we can reasonably expect to happen in the “unintended consequences” category, which I always find the most interesting part of an analysis. While I table discussion of the act itself, though, I think it’s worth mentioning the ways that the implementation will create new political incentives and how that will play out in the political process.

First of all, the fact that the bill is now considered largely constitutional lays the groundwork for implementation. I suspect that many states controlled by Democrats will move as quickly as possible to expand the health insurance rolls while states controlled by Republicans will do the opposite, and for the same reason: once the uninsured get health insurance, they have an enormous incentive to make sure, through political action, that it does not get taken away. If estimates are correct and 30 million people will get insurance, then there are millions of votes which, through self-interest, now have an incentive to vote for the Democrats.

Back in the day, I understand, stock dividend yields were higher than bond returns. They had to be, you see, because stocks were so much riskier that investors demanded the return premium. Gentlemen preferred bonds.

I have been looking for a metaphor that usefully and accurately describes the European crisis, and I think I finally have it. The moment of enlightenment came last night when I was talking with an advisor at Commonwealth’s Retirement Symposium (which looks to be fantastic for the second year running) about our kids. This advisor has teenagers, and as we were talking, I found my metaphor. I hasten to add that this is based on my experience—not that of the advisor and her kids.

When I was in college, through some colossal mistake, I was issued a credit card by Citibank, who must have held the theory that my parents would make good on my debt if (when) I overspent. To make a long story short, I learned an expensive lesson: my parents declined the opportunity to bail me out, default was not an option, and it required personal austerity on my part to pay off the credit card.

One of the changes I mentioned yesterday is that we no longer live in a world that is dominated by finance and economics. With most of my blogs over the last month largely dominated by financial and economic issues, that statement may seem strange. That’s because the discussion up to now has been backward-looking—it has dealt with problems that were created in the past and now have to be resolved. Looking forward, finance and economics will not become less important, as we will be dealing with those problems for a long time, but less dominant as a decision framework.

Another way to look at this situation is to consider it not as a decline of finance, but as a resurgence of other factors. One of these factors is the role of government. Since Reagan, the job of the government has largely been to get out of the way. Government is the problem, went the cry, and deregulation was considered an absolute good. Much good was indeed done, but, over time, I’ve increasingly been thinking that perhaps the old regulated world had its advantages as well.

I am a big fan of the Lord of the Rings movies. I would love to embed Cate Blanchett’s witchy Galadriel voice, saying at the start, “The world had changed,” because we are seeing this more and more in the news and in how we look at the world.

I put together a presentation a couple of months ago that talked first about the U.S. economy and then about how it fit into the world and what that meant for our future. As I developed it, I realized that there was actually a consistent narrative that went beyond the U.S. and economics. Simply stated, the primacy of economics and markets as an organizing principle was rapidly eroding and returning to a much more mixed environment of politics, geography (broadly defined), and economics. I will get into this some more tomorrow, including posting a copy of that presentation, but today I want to make a related but different point about how our perception of the world has changed—and how that will affect how we live going forward.