The Great Turning Point for the U.S. Economy Has Arrived (Howard Marks Explains)

If it's the change I think it is, then what you should have in your portfolio going forward can be very different from what it has been. That there is Howard Marks, co-founder of Oak Tree Capital Management and one of the few super investors that I personally follow, and with good reason. Over the years, he's built a net worth of over $2 billion. But beyond his incredible work at Oak Tree, you probably know him from his investing memos where he explains all the important events that he sees unfolding in the markets.

One event he's been talking about a lot recently is what he calls this big sea change, this big turning point in the U.S. economy that's happening right now. It's a topic I made a video on towards the end of last year, but Marks has recently made another appearance on Bloomberg Television to add some of his updated thoughts to the situation. The Fed discovered something called quantitative easing, or the buying of bonds, and I don't think governments can keep us aloft forever.

So in this video, let's revisit the great U.S. C change and how that's looking to Howard now in 2024. We first just need to set the scene. So we all know what happened over the past decade or so: everyone got very used to interest rates being at almost zero, and easy borrowing was everywhere. Marks actually talks about how he believes this low-rate period went on for so long that people almost forgot what normal interest rate levels felt like. In the period '09 through '13, the Fed took the fed funds rate to zero to fight the global financial crisis, left it there a long time, and didn't have any luck getting it back up into what you might think are normal ranges.

So we had a low interest rate environment which made life very easy for borrowers, asset owners. It was easy to run a business; the economy did well. We had the longest bull market in history, the longest economic recovery in history. We had very low incidents of default and bankruptcy. It was an easy world.

Then, of course, the good times ended. We got hit with the pandemic where the world shut down, the economy shut down, and there was a high level of money printing. The subsequent inflation meant that the Fed needed to raise interest rates. While many people right now are talking about interest rates being really high, Marks is quick to comment that they're actually pretty normal right now. It's just that the last 20 years have conditioned us all to assume that ultra-low interest rates are simply normal, and that's causing a lot of problems right now.

You do have a model roughly in your head where you say in the memo that you don't think that rates are high; they're kind of... they're not high relative to my experience. A big point in Marks' C change memo is that most of the problems we're running into right now are only really problems because we've just all adjusted to this idea that interest rates around 2% to 3% are just completely normal.

We all think that because that's more or less what we've lived with for 20 years. But if you actually zoom out on the Fed funds rate over a long period of time, you can really start to see that 2% is not the average at all. That's a really very, very low stimulative interest rate. You know, between zero and two is an emergency measure, and you know rates were — the Fed funds rate was zero much of the probably the majority of the time in the '09 to '21 period — and that's inappropriate.

It stimulates you; you can't live on a shot of adrenaline every morning for 13 years. It does subsidize borrowers and penalize lenders and savers. And I would like to see a Fed get to a neutral position which is neither stimulative nor restrictive. I describe that as 2% to 4%. So two to four percent is what Marks would like the Fed to settle to. But right now, we're seeing interest rates higher than that at around 5.25% to 5.5%.

And of course, the reason we're seeing that is because the one thing the Federal Reserve is concerned about is the fact that inflation is still not fully under control just yet. You know, we're at 5.25% to 5.5% on the Fed funds right now; that's a measure determined to crimp the economy, to kill off the excess inflation. The target is two; we're above two. Cool off the economy until it moves toward two.

So in summary, we've had this long period where interest rates were extremely low. We've all got very used to that being normal, so much so that now the interest rates are reverting to not even high, just more standard rates. Everyone is being caught out for being overleveraged — too much mortgage business, taking on too much debt — it's all coming to a head now because we pushed things too far when things were easy.

So that's the problem we face. But one thing Marks is more concerned about is how this sea change is affecting the government. We mustn't forget that while we have mortgages and businesses have loans, another major borrower is the government itself, and they don't get any special treatment when they borrow money. They too need to pay it back with interest, and they too feel the pinch when interest rates rise because they have to roll over debts at much higher interest rates.

In fact, the U.S. government might be in the biggest pickle of all of us. Remember how Howard was saying we've seen people get way too comfortable loading up on debts in low interest rate environments over the past 20 years? Well, have a look at what the U.S. government has been doing over that time. In the last 20 years, the U.S. government has been running a consistent deficit every single year. That means that they've had to go further and further into debt each and every year just to plug the hole.

Now look at what's happened to their debt levels since that last year of surplus; the debt pile naturally has grown and grown and grown, and very quickly too, particularly in the last few years as a response to the pandemic. This has really brought the U.S. debt problem to the forefront of everybody's minds. If we reflect on the last, let's say, 10 to 14 years, you would imagine that in a decade-long period of ultra-low interest rates, you would have had this explosion in leverage.

There are several reasons for that, but this period's been quite odd because we then had the pandemic, which led to the strengthening of balance sheets for both corporates and households off the back of a monster fiscal transfer. And a question I think that Lisa and I hear a lot, Howard, is where is the leverage now? Where is the leverage now?

Well, we know that the leverage is in the government. The government has taken on a lot of leverage as part of its rescue mechanism. We had two serious problems: the global financial crisis to kick off that low-rate period you’re talking about and then the pandemic to bookend it. In both cases, the Fed discovered something called quantitative easing, or the buying of bonds, and it really did a great job of saving the economy on both occasions.

But it loaded up its balance sheet with debt. Quantitative easing is the process of the government selling a lot of bonds or going further into debt and those bonds being bought by the central bank, i.e., the Federal Reserve. And as Howard notes, while that certainly helped the economy at the time, it does create a big debt problem for the government. Remember, the government still has to pay back the Federal Reserve when that debt comes due.

Now yes, you can argue that the Federal Reserve kind of works to help the government, so they can always print money out of thin air to buy more and more bonds to alleviate that problem, essentially handing that money over to the government. But, and it's a very big but, they can only do that on a meaningful scale if inflation is under control. That's because the Federal Reserve printing money and buying bonds off the government essentially puts money into the hands of the government for spending.

Well, that is inflationary. But guess what's not under control right now? Inflation. So right now, there's little the Federal Reserve can do to help. So in effect, the government has built up a big debt pile across the easy money period of the last two decades. When the pandemic happened and the Federal Reserve stepped in to support the government, it just spent, spent, spent.

But that actually meant the government went much deeper into debt. But now that big debt pile is looking menacing; menacing for two reasons: one, because the government can't pay it back because they run a deficit, and two, because when the debt periodically comes due, they'll need to roll it over, AKA turn an old loan into a fresh new one. That's much more painful at high interest rates because it means the government needs to spend more money just to hold that debt, which takes even more cash out of their pocket that they were using for other things.

That's the problem the U.S. government finds itself in right now. Is it too simplistic to say if the increase in leverage has been on the sovereign balance sheet, that's where the risk is? How do you frame that? How do you think about that? Well, first of all, I don't invest in sovereigns. And the trouble is that in sovereigns, other things matter. When we look at companies, we ask, will they make money? Will they be able to pay their debt?

Governments don't make money; they're not expected to make money, and they pay their debt by running the printing press. So that's a very different function, and then they have the ability of extending the cycle. At the same time, I think this is what I'm trying to get my head around. If they've absorbed basically the leverage that existed elsewhere, yeah, and they are less exposed to the challenges of companies that you would invest in, are you thinking of a much longer cycle as a consequence?

Well, I don't think — I don't think governments can keep us aloft forever, and that's the fear for many at the moment. Governments can't keep us aloft forever. They did help us out a lot during the pandemic, but that came at a heavy cost of very high inflation, which we now have to deal with through raising interest rates. But that last bit I just said is exactly the reason governments specifically can't keep us aloft anymore.

To keep us aloft, to keep us feeling great in tough times, the U.S. needs to spend money it doesn't have, which means turning to the Federal Reserve to ask if they would be so kind as to buy some fresh new bonds from the government. But right now the Federal Reserve does not want to buy any more bonds from the government because that action is inflationary. Right now, the Federal Reserve is focused on exactly the opposite: stopping inflation.

So they are raising interest rates and not reinvesting in treasury bonds when old treasuries come due. So Howard is bang on the money; the government and the Fed can't keep us aloft forever. So something needs to change, and he joins Ray Dalio in the opinion that it really starts at the source. The U.S. has to fix its deficit; it just has to. If it doesn't, then this problem simply will not go away.

Let's take the U.S. government as an example of somebody that maybe should be bankrupt in some respects because we borrowed so much money. We have $32 trillion of debt; we're running an annual deficit. This year will be roughly $2 trillion. Are you worried about our ability to pay off this debt? And if we can't, will it devalue the dollar?

It's clearly worrisome. There's never been a bankruptcy of the U.S. or a country like it, so we don't know what's going to happen. Right now, the U.S. dollar is what's called the reserve currency of the world, and we get to print them. In the short run, we can print as many as we want, and as long as that's the case, we're not going to go under. It's like if you have an unlimited checking account; you can pay your credit card bills without limitation.

We just don't know where it's going; that's the problem. So it's not a great situation all around. But with that in mind, the last clip I wanted to play for you guys is an explainer on what Mr. Howard Marks believes we, as investors, should be looking at in a time period like this. With all the problems of relatively high interest rates that probably aren't going to drop all that much in the near future, where can investors look for decent returns?

The only thing I'm sure of is that if interest rates are higher, the people who invest in credit instruments, which is what we do, are buying in at higher yields and invariably will have higher returns than they have in the recent past. So today's rates are not high historically, but they're certainly higher than we had from '09 through '21, which means the returns on credit investing, fixed income investing, bond investing, loan investing will be higher than those in that period, which were, you know, really poultry.

That's the classic dynamic. As interest rates get lowered, the deal you get for buying corporate or treasury bonds gets less exciting, whereas businesses have easier conditions to grow in. Unless money floods out of bonds and into stocks. Now, however, Howard is getting excited because, as he says, he invests in credit instruments.

So as interest rates rise and sit higher, loan investing gets juicier. Interest rates are up, which means you get more interest for your lent money. And of course, it becomes harder for stocks to flourish because financing is harder, and thus rapid expansion is harder. So money flows more out of stocks and into bonds.

While we love looking into businesses, Howard Marks would definitely encourage us to maybe have a look at some of those credit investments that he mentioned. Have a look into some bonds. So let me know down in the comments; as interest rates have risen, have you been buying bonds? Definitely let me know. Also, if you're interested in supporting the channel and learning about investing in the process, you can check out the courses on New Money Education, and now is a very exciting time because you can indeed start your journey with us for free.

So more info on that is in the description. But apart from that, hope you guys enjoyed the video. Leave a like on it if you did enjoy it. Subscribe to the channel if you have not done so already. But with that said, guys, I'll see you all in the next video.