- At the top of bubbles, participants ignore
glaringly obvious risks. In October 2007, Meredith
Whitney pointed out the almost glaringly obvious
fact that Citigroup was paying out more in dividends
than it was earning in profits (i.e. it was being run
like the US government, but without a friendly Federal
Reserve to bail it out by printing money.) She said
that Citigroup would need either to raise capital, sell
assets or slash its dividend -- possibly all three.
That's what happens when you spend more than you earn,
yet other Wall Street analysts were dismissive of "the
easiest call [she] ever made" (as she called it.)
- Critics are ostracized. Remember how
Warren Buffett was ridiculed because he did not "get"
the Internet? This allows the "in" crowd to ignore
warnings from those not caught up in the mania. During
the housing bubble, if you told someone you were a
renter, not a homeowner, you were greeted with looks of
puzzlement and/or pity. If you went on to explain that
you thought the rental yield on homes was much too low
to justify valuations, people would start to look around
for the men in white suits to take you away. (I know
this from personal experience.)
- Participants enjoy financial success far
beyond what their skills or efforts should reasonably
justify. That financial success imbues bubble
participants with an aura of infallibility. We tend to
think "He made a lot of money in real estate/internet
stocks/tulip bulbs, so he must be a smart person, and I
should be doing what he is doing." Think of all the
people who grew rich (and full of themselves) flipping
houses during the mid-2000's. And then think of the
even greater number of people who emulated them, only to
get into the housing market in 2007, right before it
started heading down.
- "This time it's different." The
internal logic of the bubble creates its own reality.
People don't question when a single tulip bulb costs as
much as a middle-class home, or when a strawberry
picker earning $15,000 a year can get a loan to buy
a $750,000 home.
Alan Greenspan was
wrong. It's not impossible to spot bubbles before
they burst. What's hard is going against the
consensus, when everyone around you is ignoring the risk
that should be obvious, causing you to question your own
reasoning; when they are making money hand over fist for
seemingly no effort, telling you they've found a "new truth"
and ridiculing you if you don't agree, that's when you've
spotted a bubble.
Energy
I introduced this article by saying bubbles are a social
phenomenon. As a social phenomenon, they don't have to
be financial: The same dynamics of group behavior can also
lead to bubbles that don't necessarily manifest themselves
in asset prices, but they're still real, and they still bear
the very real risks of financial bubbles.
I believe we're in just such a bubble now. To me, it's
glaringly obvious. Like Meredith Whitney said about
her Citigroup call, it's the easiest call I ever made:
We can't keep using traditional energy sources and expect
the economy to grow forever.
In other words, our society and economy are built on an
energy bubble. Oil powers our transportation system,
and coal, natural gas, and nuclear power our electrical
infrastructure. All of the signs outlined above are
there.
Ignoring risks.
How many nuclear disasters like the ongoing one in Japan,
and the earlier ones at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island will
it take us to realize that nuclear generated electricity is
picking up quarters in front of a steam roller? Yes,
the risks of nuclear failures are absurdly low, but the
consequences of such failures are absurdly high, and the
pools of spent fuel that we still have not agreed on a
permanent home for are tempting
targets for any ambitious terrorist.
Why do the people who are trying to convince
us that shale gas extraction is safe spend so much time
talking about the economic benefits? Isn't that a lot
like someone trying to sell you a tranche of a highly rated
MBS in 2007 saying "sure, it's safe, the yield is 100 bps
higher than any other security with a triple-A rating from
S&P?" Shale gas fracking has only been going on
commercially for five years. Perhaps it is safe,
when done properly, but why, exactly, do we expect it to
always be done properly? Before putting our faith in
environmental regulators to ensure that shale gas extraction
is done properly, we should consider the plight of the
financial regulators overseeing mortgage backed securities
in the last financial crisis.
And then there is Climate Change. We know that burning
fossil fuels emits CO2. We know that CO2
levels are rising rapidly. We know that we're
burning a lot of fossil fuels. We have known since the
19th century that CO2
traps heat in the atmosphere. We know that so much
Arctic sea ice is melting that countries
are squabbling over newly accessible Arctic oil and
natural gas reserves. Yet the number of Americans
worried about Climate Change is falling, and not
a single Republican on the House Energy Committee will say
that Climate Change is real.
Critics are Ostracized
I don't believe that each of the 31 Republicans on the House
Energy committee necessarily thinks that Climate Change
isn't happening. They are not stupid, they simply are
all politicians, and if being ostracized and forced out of
the "in" group is dangerous in any profession, it's
dangerous in politics. Politicians know which way the
wind blows, and this level of consensus in the face of basic
science is one of the surest signs of the bubble mentality.
Participants enjoy financial success beyond what
their skills and effort merit.
The US consumes
about 22 percent of world oil production, so we're
certainly participants in the bubble. We have the
highest living standards in history, higher than any other
country. Yet are we smarter than our grandparents, or
our immigrant ancestors who came from all over the world?
Do we work harder than an Asian laborer in a factory doing
12 hour shifts seven days a week in order to send a little
money back to his family? If you resent the
implications of those questions, you now have a visceral
understanding of how hard it is to escape the bubble
mentality when you are already caught up in it. When
you're making money or enjoying cheap energy today, it's
very hard to look at the long term costs of your actions.
This is the same reason that the United States has so much
trouble getting our deficit under control. We all want
the US to live within its means, but support vanishes when
it comes to cutting
Social Security, Medicare, or Defense Spending.
"This time it's different."
Whether you believe the oil and other fossil fuels in the
ground got there over millions of years of heat and pressure
on organic matter, or were put there by God during creation,
there is only so much of it in the ground to extract.
We started extracting the easiest, most accessible reserves,
and now the only easy oil that's left is in the unstable
Middle East. In the rest of the world, we're left with
drilling in increasingly difficult and risky situations,
such as deep water (as the Deepwater
Horizon oil spill and the consequences
for BP's stock price demonstrated, .) The rising
price also reflects the lack of oil prospects that are cheap
and easy to extract. Yet the discussion about what to
do about rising oil prices revolves around "how can we drill
for more oil?" not "how can we use less oil?" Richard
Nixon promised
in 1977 that "gasoline will never exceed $1.00 a gallon"
and the United States has been striving for Energy
Independence ever since. It has not worked: in 2005 we
imported twice as much oil as we produced.
The progress towards energy independence we've made since
2005 is almost entirely due to reduced consumption (see
chart.) Despite over three decades of effort to
increase domestic oil production, production has declined.
Nevertheless, if you listen to the popular debate, the
implication is still that the secret to energy independence
is trying harder. Trying harder is not going to more
than double our oil output when we've been trying harder for
over three decades and we're now producing less than we did
in 1970.
What to Do About It
During the 2007 Housing Bubble, the smart investors were
buying credit default swaps (CDS) on mortgage backed
securities. During the Internet bubble, they were
scooping up REITs yielding 15% or more.
I'm a stock guy, and I didn't (to my regret) buy any CDS's
in the last bubble, but I was one of those buying REITs in
1999 and 2000. This time around, I'm buying Green
Stocks: Renewable Energy, Energy Efficiency, Efficient and
Alternative Transport companies that will be selling the
services that help us shift away from traditional energy
sources like oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear. But
like most bubbles, it's a lot easier to see the Energy
Bubble happening than it is to predict when it will burst.
Hence, it's important to buy the stocks of companies that
can survive (or even thrive) in the current environment, yet
still benefit from the end of the current Energy paradigm.
Just buying green stocks is not going to allow our Energy
Bubble to deflate safely, but it should cushion the fall for
those of us who do, and we'll also have the comfort of
knowing that the companies we invest in are doing just a
little to build the beginnings of a post-bubble energy
infrastructure.
This article was first published on Forbes.com Green
Stocks blog.
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current opinions of the author and such opinions are subject
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