I have watched the endless TV hype about Facebook’s (FB) IPO with great interest but from a safe distance. FB is SO not the kind of stock we’d ever invest in – not that anyone should feel dissuaded because over the years we safely avoided Apple and Google amongst others too. So nobody should interpret anything profound – it’s just that if we don’t understand how they make money we just move on to other things.

Although I’m not a stockholder, I use Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family. I’m not on every day, and many people have more “friends” than me. In fact for a while my total was barely in double digits until my children’s friends began to take pity on me and helped me get to a few dozen. The college-age crowd that are the engine for FB often number friends in the several hundred. I am clearly not that popular, but I can claim that my FB friends really are friends.

About a year ago FB e-mailed me to enquire whether I’d like to advertise my business, SL Advisors, on FB. I was surprised. I honestly didn’t know FB carried ads. I’d never spent much time considering their business model or how they managed to exist. So much of the internet is free, and FB was just there whenever I needed it without even the occasional NPR-like pledge drive.

Unable to recall a single ad I’d ever seen on FB, I concluded that my own advertising budget could be more usefully deployed elsewhere. And in fact even now I can’t remember anything advertised on FB. I do know that GM have stopped advertising there due to poor results, and I also know that Ford are very happy with their FB ads. This probably speaks to the average age of their customers, but in both cases I read about these developments elsewhere and don’t know what GM or Ford have actually advertised on FB.

Meanwhile, FB continues to be a fun way to stay connected with friends and family scattered around the U.S., UK and Canada. The price is right, and if advertisers deem it a useful way to spend their budgets they truly don’t even distract me. In spite of what economic theory holds, sometimes there really is a free lunch.

Aubrey McClendon has by most accounts assembled a team of very able engineers and geologists as Chesapeake (CHK) has acquired the natural gas assets they own. We’d never invest with CHK because McClendon ‘s risk appetite is too big, but it’s stll interesting to watch what they do because thematically we are in agreement. The element of his compensation package that allowed McClendon to take a personal stake in each well drilled, financed with personal debt, was obviously wrong. Even though some came out and defended the approach as aligning his interests with stakeholders, the obvious flaw in this argument is that his ownership of stock is supposed to do just that. Maybe we’d all like to just own a piece of CHK’s wells without any of the other parts of their enterprise, but such a choice is not publicly available. So naturally the Board had to put a stop to it as it became clear even they were unaware of the manner in which McClendon was financing his side deals.

So now Reuters reports that McClendon was also running a hedge fund, cementing his reputation as a visionary with a complete absence of judgment. It’ll be interesting to see how his supporters defend this revelation as being in the interests of CHK stockholders. At some point this may become an attractive investment. We’re probably heading into territory where the CEO’s departure would push the stock up, however unlikely that is.

ISS caught my attention today in their criticism of the compensation structure set up for JC Penney (JCP) senor management. ISS describes the peer group JCP used as “aspirational” in that it includes far larger companies such as Nike (NKE) and Target (TGT). ISS would prefer a set of similarly sized companies and their own peer group for JCP apparently includes four auto-parts companies. JCP defends their method as reflecting the market in which they must compete for talent, noting that recent senior hires had come from TGT and other companies in their peer group. ISS recommends shareholders vote against the compensation structure. It’s unlikely to fail because Pershing Square who owns 26% and were instrumental in bringing Ron Johnson on board will obviously vote yes, as will Voronado another large holder. For our part, we’ll vote Yes as well. JCP is a turn around story, and that requires a different compensation model. We are invested in JCP precisely because of the senior team.

To pick a different example, Citigroup’s owners recently rejected the proposed executive compensation structure. Since Vikram Pandit took over as CEO in December 2007 the stock has lost 90% of its value. No doubt he inherited a tough hand, but don’t forget that among the billions in losses was the complete write off of the hedge fund of funds business Old Lane that Pandit had only months earlier sold to Citigroup for $800 million. You’d think he’d have had the good grace to resign right then.

Disclosure: Author is Long JCP

Chesapeake (CHK)  has long been the flag bearer for the natural gas industry. Aubrey McClendon has been front and center in making the case for shale drilling and the abundant natural gas reserves it is revealing. To many this is a game changer for U.S. energy consumption.

Aubrey McClendon has also shown a tendency to get over his skis in terms of his own risk profile, most notably in 2008 when personal loans he had taken out to buy CHK stock almost bankrupted him. In 2008 he was the highest paid CEO, earning $112MM which was intended to offset somewhat the $1.9BN he lost on leveraged holdings of CHK stock as it sank from $74 to $16.52 where he sold most of it to meet a margin call. For this reason, while we are bullish on certain natural gas E&P names, we long ago concluded that Mr. McClendon risk appetite wasn’t the same as ours.

There’s little doubt he’s a big believer in natural gas. But Aubrey’s not content with owning 3.25 million shares of stock; he also has an unusual deal that allows him to personally invest in individual wells that the company drills. It now turns out that he has taken out $1BN in personal loans top pay for these stakes. This is described by their general counsel as “aligning his interests with those of other investors” according to an article in the FT. Well, I guess so, but why not use that cash to buy more shares in CHK? By cherry picking amongst the assets CHK owns, he creates at least the potential for a conflict of interest and certainly the appearance of one.

It reflects on Mr. McClendon’s tendency to push risk to its limits. The fact that the company didn’t reveal the loans necessary to finance his purchases until reported by Reuters doesn’t help, and is contributing to today’s 5% drop in the stick price. But there are plenty of other companies to choose from that are run by less accident-prone managements. If CHK stock doubles because of positive developments in natural gas, other names in the sector will do well too. But CHK investors bear additional risks specific to the company for which they’re not obviously rewarded. Why provide capital to CHK by investing in their stock when their CEO shows such questionable judgment?

Investors are living in a time of unprecedented openness by the Federal Reserve. Many readers are old enough to recall the days when “Fed-watchers” would seek to divine the central bank’s intentions on monetary policy through its open market operations. If managing reserves, and therefore indirectly the cost of short term financing through the Federal Funds rate, required that the NY Fed conduct a “System RP” and they instead provided somewhat less overnight funding through a “Customer RP”, bond traders would immediately interpret an intention by the Fed to raise interest rates and react accordingly. It was subject to all kinds of communication problems – sometimes the Fed wasn’t trying to say anything, but Wall Street analysts had got their reserve requirement Math wrong and thought they heard a warning of higher rates. Then the Fed might oversupply short term credit the next day, in order to correct the mis-communication. Somehow this obscure back and forth of action by the Fed followed by reaction from the markets was state of the art central bank communication back in the 80s and 90s. It all now seems so quaint and pointless at the same time. The Fed under Alan Greenspan, following custom, deemed plain English unsuited to its purpose. And Greenspan himself took evident pride at his ability to provide long Congressional testimony using tortured erudition that shrouded monetary policy in a fog and left senators befuddled.

Ben Bernanke has continued a new tradition begun in the latter Greenspan years of communicating quite plainly. Opinions are easily formed on this Fed, because their intentions are so clear. There’s no more hiding behind obfuscation. The conduct of monetary policy takes place right out in the open. FOMC minutes are released in a timely fashion; Bernanke holds “town halls” to discuss monetary policy, goes on “60 Minutes” and the Fed now actually tells you, with a fair degree of precision, where they think interest rates will be.

In January, the FOMC released short term interest rate forecasts from all 17 FOMC members. From the published data, it’s possible to construct the Fed’s own yield curve. A long term interest rate is simply the sum of all the short term interest rates from which it’s constructed. Libor rates are visible and can be hedged out to ten years through eurodollar futures. In aggregate they form the ten year swap rate. The ten year swap rate is closely tethered to the ten year treasury yield, which is largely set by the Fed’s Operation Twist and its predecessors, QE 1 and 2.

The chart overlays market forecasts of short term interest rates, derived from recent eurodollar futures prices less the typical 0.3% spread to the Fed Funds rate (the blue bars), and compares it with the FOMC’s own interest rate forecast (the red line). It assumes the FOMC expects to return to its equilibrium 4% interest rate in five years.

The Fed expects to raise short term rates by the end of 2014. They expect them to go up by 0.5% between the end of 2013 and 2014. Quite recently, the market forecast for Libor rates was that they’d increase by 0.3% during this time. Futures markets didn’t expect as sharp an increase as the Fed. Of course, the Fed is only making a forecast, and it’s based on GDP growth, inflation, unemployment and many other variables. Their forecast for these might be too optimistic. But when you ponder for a moment the actions of those bond investors who would accept market interest rates as the basis for their purchases, it’s quite bold to insist that buying bonds at yields below the Fed’s expected break-even is a sound move. They are telling you, if you’ll just listen, that short term rates between now and 2022 will average more than the current yield on a bond maturing at that time. The Fed’s forecast may be wrong, but their forecast is obviously a bit more important than yours or mine.

The long end of the yield curve is similarly fascinating. The FOMC’s long run equilibrium rate is 4%. This is where they believe short term rates will return when the Great Recession of 2008 is a distant memory and the economy is chugging along at whatever rate it can just short of causing inflationary pressures on wages and other inputs. The FOMC doesn’t say exactly when things will be back to “normal”. Of course, we’d all like to know. The chart above assumes five years. But the futures market has a different opinion on when that will be, and the answer is March 2022. This is how far out in to the future it’s necessary to go in order to reach a eurodollar futures contract that yields 4%. Everything prior to that date yields less, because investors in aggregate believe the economy won’t quite be back to normal. Or at least,
that’s what investors are saying by their decisions to invest, or not, at prevailing yields.

If Bernanke testified before Congress that we still have another ten years to go before the “extraordinarily accommodative” monetary policy was no longer needed, there would be outcry. He would probably be fired, or even impeached. Further fiscal stimulus not even imaginable would no doubt be contemplated. Big things would happen.

Except that he wouldn’t say that. Although he hasn’t put a date on normalcy’s return, everything about his actions and those of his colleagues on the FOMC strongly suggests they are not nearly that pessimistic. Futures markets are pricing in ten years because the Fed has put them there through their buying of treasuries. 61% of net U.S. Federal government debt issuance was bought by the Fed last year. The Fed is maintaining bond yields at levels far lower, perhaps 1-2% lower, than the likely break-even on short term rates over the same period.

This should be plain to anybody paying attention to the Fed’s communications. It doesn’t necessarily mean ten year treasuries at 2.2% and related corporate bonds at modestly higher yields are guaranteed to lose money. It may take us more than ten years to reinvigorate the economy, to fully repair all the damage excess debt has wrought over the years. But it is obvious that the Fed thinks today’s bond yields are a poor investment. That is a clearer expression of its opinion from the central bank than many of us are used to, and shows how far we’ve come since the old days of Fed watchers.

We continue to think equities are attractively priced, although obviously not as cheap as they were in the Fall. The Equity Risk Premium, the difference between the earnings yield on the S&P 500 and the yield on ten year treasuries, has narrowed modestly from where it was in September, mostly because the strong rally in stocks has driven multiples higher and earnings yields lower while treasury yields have drifted higher. However, this relationship is still historically wide.

But on interest rates, we believe in siding with the elephant in the room. If last year’s buyer of 61% of treasuries thinks yields are too low, that sounds like a view worth respecting. Investors can own a combination of equities and cash divided according to their risk appetite and outlook. But long term bonds, both government and investment grade corporate, are clearly at yields intended to lose you money. The world’s biggest buyer is telling you so.