Andy Kessler

WSJ: What's Next for the Banks

If you want to know what's going to happen to the big banks and investment banks, you've got to go back to early 2003, when the seeds of destruction were planted.

It had been a year or so since a couple of trillion dollars of investor wealth had been wiped out. The Dow was 8000 and dropping, and the stocks of big institutions from Citi to Merrill Lynch to Morgan Stanley were at multiyear lows. Bank lending was down, but no one was really worried. The old "borrow short, lend long and pocket the difference" game had been around for millennia, and banks had weathered worse than this mild economic slowdown.

What was not at all clear was how investment banks were going to make money going forward. Wall Street had piles of capital and no place to go. Stock trading and large parts of bond trading had gone electronic. Decimalization of the stock market wiped out markups. IPOs were down, mergers were down and, gasp, bonuses were way down.

Stocks were out and investors wanted yield -- safe, predictable returns -- but there wasn't much profit in that. Some, especially hedge funds and international investors, insisted on even higher yields than plain old government bonds.

So Wall Street, as it always does, gave investors what they wanted -- excess yield in the form of derivatives, asset-backed, mortgage-backed, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), basically funky amalgamations of lots of other pieces of paper. Done right, no one but you knew how to value these exotic instruments, so you could mark them up way more than a penny and generate huge fees, profits and bonuses. Win-win.

I Still Hate Dividends, Professor Siegel

Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel is much revered. His students sing his praise, his books are best sellers, the press adores him. I’ve heard him speak and he is very engaging, even convincing. He is also totally wrong. About dividends. About ETFs based on dividends. Enough to lose you money.

A few years back I wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page about dividends. Specifically, that I hate dividends. You can read it here. Stocks trade on their prospects for earnings. Dividends are just a bribe to get you interested in slow growing companies who can’t be bothered to reinvest their earnings in something useful. In the past, when companies paid out 100% of their earnings to shareholders, well then dividends mattered. Today, no one pays 100%, so dividends have limited say in the value of a company. In fact, they sucker you in with attractive “yields” right before they consider cutting the dividend. Citigroup anyone?

as persuasive as arguments may sound, the hard evidence proves otherwise.

Sadly, to academics such as Professor Siegel, this is heresy. He was nice enough to write a letter to the editor about my piece saying that I was completely wrong. He is entitled to his opinion, of course, as I am entitled to hold a grudge. He even took a swipe at me in his March 2005 book, The Future for Investors: Why the Tried and the True Triumph Over the Bold and the New, (although he called me Arthur Kessler, nice fact checking, Professor Seagull). And I quote,

“As persuasive as Kessler’s arguments may sound, the hard evidence proves otherwise…Average returns on older firms surpassed the returns on the newer firms…Technology stocks, which pay the lowest dividends have scarcely been market beaters.”

Like, say, Apple. Don’t bother with the book, it is backwards looking twaddle.