Video – Hugh Hendry Interviewed By Steven Drobny At LSE

Hugh Hendry interviewed by Steven Drobny at the London School of Economics, 2010

Major take-aways from the interview:

• How he got his start: began at an eclectic asset management firm in Edinburgh, which rotated its young associates; began at age 21 in the Japanese stock market the year after it peaked in 1990; the next year rotated to UK large companies; the next year US equities; moved to London in 1998/9 and no one would employ him because he was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none
• 1929/1930 marked a “revulsion with debt” period, which changed very slowly, ultimately eradicated from society in 1973/74; then the opposite cycle occurred, with society massively leveraging; during this upswing, it has paid to be optimistic and the financial economy has become the economy; we appear to be on the verge of a generational shift again, where farmers will reign over hedge fund managers
• Macro opportunities are created by the interactions of economics and the abilities of politicians to try to fudge them
• “The best trade is the one where you don’t fear the consequences of being wrong”
• China
  • China’s economic development strategy is not unique, it’s just large-scale; economy is being directed toward sovereign-profit, not corporate-profit
  • Pursuing sovereign power over economic power results in building your economy on foundations of sand; Japan tried the same thing and it appeared to work until it was revealed to have not worked; Confucius saying, “Wise-man not invest in over-capacity”
  • China is like the sun, you can’t get too close or you’ll melt (can’t short equities in China, HK, or commodity futures or equity derivatives in the West); used the “satellite”, bought CDS on a basket of Japanese industries, as Japan is very reliant on trade with China– steel, for example
• If we’re going to have hyperinflation and the dollar loses its value, you need something profoundly negative to shake the course of economic growth globally, because only if that happens will the central bankers respond with this dramatic decision of hyperinflation
• Slowdown in China, economic restructuring in Europe would be the economic equivalent of a meteor hitting Earth
• Market call: the Yen and the USD could appreciate greatly, because there is so much borrowing in those currencies, if asset values take a hit, you have a shortage of dollars or Yen to pay against the collateral values of that lending; combined with calls on the Nikkei at 40,000, 50,000 (want to be very long equities at that point)
• Good hedge fund managers give great weight to the consequence of their actions and are fearful of them, so they won’t be hurt too much if they’re wrong
• Being plasticine: we spend so much time trying to see the future, we’re deluding ourselves because we have no chance to see the future; better to be careful and flexible, avoid dramatic injury and maintain optionality to respond to whatever the future holds
• Be a centipede, not a mountain climber; have a hundred legs so you can let one or two go if you have to do so
• Strategically, it’s not rational to try to outsmart bright people; bright people are encouraged to be logical in their constructions; my business franchise is trying to get opportunities from the arcane world of paradox, disciplined curiosity, the toolset of the maverick

Video – Hugh Hendry Visits The Milken Institute

Hugh Hendry interviewed in a panel discussion at the 2012 Milken Institute Global Conference

Major take-aways from the interview:

• Global economy is “grossly distorted” by two fixed exchange regimes: the Euro (similar to the gold standard of the 1920s) and the Dollar-Renminbi
• China is attempting to play the role of the “bridge”, just as Germany did in the 1920s, to help the global economy spend its way into recovery
• Two types of leverage: operational and financial; Germany is a country w/ operational leverage; Golden Rule of Operational Leverage, “Never, never countenance having financial leverage”, this explains Germany’s financial prudence and why they’ll reject a transfer union
• Transfer of economic rent in Europe; redistribution of rents within Europe, the trade is short the financial sector, long the export sector
• Heading toward Euro parity w/ the dollar, if not lower; results in profound economic advantage especially for businesses with operational leverage
• “The thing I fear” is confiscation: of client’s assets, my assets; we are 1 year away from true nationalization of French banks
• Theme of US being supplanted as global leader, especially by Chinese, is overwrought
• Why US will not be easily overtaken: when US had its “China moment”, it was on a gold standard…
  • implication, as an entrepreneur, you had one chance– get it right or you’re finished
  • today is a world of mercantilism, money-printing, the  entrepreneur has been devalued because you get a 2nd, 3rd, 4th chance
  • when the US had its emergence on a hard money system, it built foundations which are “rock solid”
  • today, this robust society has restructured debt, restructured the cost of labor, has cleared property at market levels
  • additionally, “God has intervened”, w/ progress in shale oil extraction technology; US paying $2, Europe $10, Asians $14-18
• Dollar is only going to go one way, higher; this is like early 1980/82
• “I haven’t finished Atlas Shrugged, I can’t finish it”: it’s too depressing; it reads like non-fiction, she’s describing the world of today
• The short sale ban was an attack on free thought; people have died in wars for the privilege to stand up and say “The Emperor has no clothes”; banned short selling because truth is unpalatable to political class; the scale and magnitude of the problem is greater than their ability to respond
• We are single digit years away from a most profound market-clearing moment, on the order of 1932 or 1982, where you don’t need smarts, you just need to be long
• Hard-landing scenario in Asia combined w/ recession in Europe would result in “bottoming” process, at which point all you need is courage to go long

Doing The Hugh Hendry

Below is some commentary from Hugh Hendry I found in an FT.com editorial I since can not access as I don’t have a login. But I thought it was interesting when I first read it awhile back and I still think it’s interesting now. I meant to post it earlier. Rectifying my mistake:

For the moment, let us forget the chances of a hard landing in China. Forget the drama of Europe’s circus of politically inspired economic incompetency. Forget that the good news of the US economy’s succession of positive economic surprises is really bad news as fixed income managers have sold copious amounts of too cheap volatility and because it has made equity investors turn bullish, sending stock market volatility back to 2007 levels. This is dangerous. Improved US data may represent a classic short-term cyclical upturn amid a profound global deleveraging cycle.

Such moves have been commonplace for the past three years and have yet to prove a harbinger of any structural upswing. I worry that the pathological course of the last several years will see volatility rise sharply once again. Even so, there exists, in terms of my parochial world of hedge fund investing, a bigger issue.

I fear that my no longer small community has been compromised. Last year was generally very tough for long/short strategies and I commiserate with all concerned. But last year world class funds lost more than 15 per cent in just two months. Today they are celebrated again for making double digit returns in the last quarter even though they still languish below high water marks and their reputation for risk management, at least to those clients who have poured over their copious due diligence statements, has been sorely compromised.

You can probably live with that if you are a pension scheme or a large, sophisticated fund-of-fund because you have a global macro sub-sector that can benefit from short-term shifts in volatility. But the unfortunate thing is that this group exercised its stop losses somewhere between the great stock market rallies of 2009 and 2010. That is to say, they honoured the pact they had with clients. They adhered to the terms of their risk budget: they lost money and they reduced their positions. I fear that owing to this nasty experience the financial world is in danger of harvesting a monoculture of fund returns that could prove less than robust should the global economy suffer another deflationary reversal.

To my mind the situation has parallels with the plight of the banana. Today the world eats predominately just one type of banana, the Cavendish, but it is being wiped out by a blight known as Tropical Race 4, which encourages the plant to kill itself. Scientists refer to it as programmed death cell destruction. In stressful situations bananas fortify themselves by dropping leaves, killing off weaker cells so that stronger ones may live to fight anew. They operate a stop-loss system.

But modern mass production of single type bananas has replaced jungle diversity with commercial monocultural fields that provide more hosts to harbour the blight. The economy keeps producing stressful volatility events. Good managers keep shedding risk and monetising losses and are duly fired, leaving us with a monoculture of brazen managers who will never stop loss because they are convinced central banks will print more money.

Diversification has proven the most robust survival mechanism against failures of judgment by any one society, hedge fund manager or style. But what if we are now a single global hedge fund community afraid to take stop losses and convinced of an inflationary outcome to be all short US Treasuries and long real assets?

This is pertinent as I have always been fascinated by that second rout in US Treasuries in 1984, long after the inflation of the 1970s was met head on by Paul Volcker’s monetary vice and a deep recession. How could 10-year Treasury yields have soared back to 14 per cent and how could so many investment veterans have been convinced that a second even more virulent inflation wave was to hit the global economy?

Psychologists tell us the explanation is embedded deep in the mind. They refer to the “availability heuristic”. Goaded by the proximity to the last dramatic event, investors overreacted to the news that the US economy was pulling out of recession in 1984. They saw high inflation where there was none.

With this in mind, I would contend that it may take several more years before the threat of debt and deflation can be successfully exorcised from investors’ minds, even if the global economy were not set on such a perilous course. Such is the potency and memory of 2008’s crash that anything remotely challenging to the economic consensus could be met by a sudden and severe reappraisal to the downside.

Should such an event send 30-year Treasury yields back to their 2008 low of 2.5 per cent, we believe enlightened investors might better be served by thinking the opposite. Only then might it prove rewarding to short the government bond market and embrace what may turn out to be a much promised once in a lifetime buying opportunity for risk assets.