Equinox Partners, L.P. - Q4 2006 Letter
Dear Partners and Friends,
Excess
Fortunately for Equinox Partners, we live in an era of financial excess. This investment perspective has provided opportunities to sophisticated, patient partners such as ours, for some time. From the natural resources (low) and technology business (high) valuation extremes of the late 1990’s to today’s historic levels of financial leverage, and its first cousin, investor complacency, Equinox has sought substantial profits from the reversal of excess.
The recent earthquake in American housing finance is well on its way to causing a tsunami of credit problems in America’s a heavily leveraged economy. In addition to our short exposure to US mortgage originators and consumer stocks, Equinox also expects to profit from the ultimate casualty of these problems—the US dollar.
Confidence
For years, markets have blithely shrugged off the economy’s ever growing imbalances. You’ve posted an almost eight percent current account deficit and received a corresponding warning from the IMF? Not to worry markets say. Your economy is dependent on massive foreign capital inflows, rapidly rising debt, inflated real-estate prices and a currency propped up by central bank intervention? Your country’s economic strength is the greatest story never told markets say. --That the preceding paragraph could refer to either America circa 2006 or Thailand circa 1996 concerns us greatly.
Confidence, in and of itself, is oft cited as a virtue by market commentators. But, in the long-run, unwarranted confidence in a financial system lacking solid fundamentals is apt to cause more harm than good. Pre-crisis Thailand certainly did not want for confidence. The problem lay with underlying financial reality. Even after massive capital outflows had unmoored the Baht, it took several months for the markets to fully close the gap between reality and perception that had opened up in preceding years. In fact, when the Thai Baht broke on July 2, 1997 many observers reassured investors that the problems would be “contained,” not foreseeing that once the heavily leveraged Thai economy began to slow the resulting financial distress would feed on itself rather quickly.
When the tech bubble burst seven years ago, we thought a serious reexamination of the US economy’s shortcomings was inevitable. The unthinking confidence of the late 1990’s could not survive an eighty percent decline in tech stocks, could it? As to whether reason or pessimism would replace the hype, we were uncertain. But, we were positive that markets would start asking the hard but important questions again, e.g. how safe is the US dollar given America’s large and persistent twin deficits? Needless to say, our analysis was wrong. Greenspan worked his magic and sparked a debt fuelled housing bull market to pick up the economic slack created by the tech bust, and the US economy skated through a potential crisis without suffering so much as an official recession.
Today, once again, a bubble that has been fueling the US economy is deflating and, once again, overconfident investors are struggling to reconcile a barrage of unwelcome facts with their optimistic worldviews. For those market participants guided by nothing more than recent history, the current problems in the American mortgage market must seem like just another one of those periodic gut-checks that separate the weak from the truly deserving. After a “contained” correction, markets must continue on their upward trajectory. That is, after all, what always happens, right? Taking a slightly longer view of history, we are decidedly less sanguine.
With rating agency complicity, many of the ultimate owners of sub-prime mortgages have yet to mark their holdings to market and have thereby dampened the reverberations of the current down-turn. Should, however, the mortgage crisis worsen, as we believe is likely, the downgrades will come, and rising mortgage default rates will do serious damage to America’s highly geared financial system. Furthermore, given the size of the debt involved and the centrality of the mortgage boom to the US economy’s recent recovery, a mortgage crisis is highly unlikely to be “contained.” In fact the exact opposite is likely, that a mortgage crisis will raise fundamental questions about America’s long-term economic health. Should these questions dampen foreign appetite for US dollar denominated assets then the Fed’s hands will be tied, and financial reality will once again be more important than confidence. Equinox Partners, with its short position in US financials and long positions in hard assets and Asia is well positioned for the expiry of the Bernanke put and the likely decline of the US dollar.
Sincerely,
Sean Fieler
William W. Strong









