We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP396: China and the Macro Impact w/ Kyle Bass
Episode Date: November 14, 2021Trey Lockerbie brings on a very special guest and that is Mr. Kyle Bass, the Founder, and Principal of Hayman Capital Management. Hayman’s first major success came from effectively shorting the hous...ing market in 2008 and Kyle was profiled in Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short. More recently, Kyle has been heavily focused on China and has been sounding alarm bells from everything from their accounting protocols, military initiatives, and central bank digital currency development. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 04:19 - The early days of Hayman Capital. 23:07 - Why Kyle is protecting his capital by buying farmland. 24:34 - Bitcoin, gold, and central bank digital currencies. 41:23 - Chinese real estate, demographics, accounting concerns. 49:47 - Oil and natural gas and why Kyle thinks we’ll soon be seeing unprecedented prices. And a whole lot more! *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Hayman Capital Management's Website. Kyle Bass' Twitter. Trey Lockerbie's Twitter. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: SimpleMining Hardblock AnchorWatch Human Rights Foundation Unchained Vanta Shopify Onramp HELP US OUT! What do you love about our podcast? Here’s our guide on how you can leave a rating and review for the show. We always enjoy reading your comments and feedback! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're listening to TIP.
On today's episode, we have a very special guest for you, and that is Mr. Kyle Bass, the founder
and principal of Hayman Capital Management.
Hayman's first major success came from effectively shorting the housing market in 2008, and
Kyle was profiled in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short.
More recently, Kyle has been heavily focused on China and has been sounding alarm bells from
everything from their accounting protocols, military initiatives, and central bank digital
currency development. In this episode, we discuss the early days of Haman Capital, why Kyle thinks our
inflation rate is closer to 12%, why Kyle is protecting his capital by buying farmland, Chinese real estate,
demographics, accounting concerns, cold wars, etc. Bitcoin, gold, central bank, digital currencies,
oil, natural gas, and why Kyle thinks we'll be seeing unprecedented prices, and a whole lot more.
I've been a longtime admirer of Kyle's ever since I read The Big Short, and it's always great to meet
folks like Kyle who are incredibly gracious and generous with their knowledge. This one is jam-packed,
so let's get into all of it with the hyper-intelligent Kyle Bass. You are listening to The Investors
Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made
billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to the
Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and man, oh man, today,
We have an extremely special guest, and that is Mr. Kyle Bass.
Kyle, welcome to the show.
Glad to be here, Trey.
I'm so excited to have you on.
I've been following you ever since the Michael Lewis book and reading about the big short
and that early success you had with Hayman Capital.
And I am really curious to start out here and learn a little bit more about how you develop
this passion for investing on these macroeconomic themes and theories.
How did you find that that was your niche or that was going to be sort of your approach to investing?
It was actually more of a logical process.
You know, when I launched the firm in 2006, we were actually very interested in long Asian equities and was looking, if you remember back then, you know, that's when a housing crisis had moved parabolicly in the U.S.
That's where they were getting to be roughly, you know, seven times annual income.
and they'd always hung around four and a half times.
And, you know, so we were looking at the housing market, knowing it was a bubble,
trying to figure out how to basically asymmetrically be short housing.
You know, you didn't want to be necessarily short a home builder because a lot of them
were being acquired, a lot of their mortgage origination businesses were being acquired,
and there was a lot of risk there.
And so in doing the work, trying to figure out how to really cap our downside,
and we got short some mortgage bonds instead of mortgage originators.
And that was kind of a moment that came through due diligence and research and
searching for something to get short.
And then to hedge, you know, being long Asia.
And I think it's when you think back to the crisis, what central banks did and governments
did is they took the bad private assets under the public balance sheets, right?
They started guaranteeing banks.
They started investing in equity.
They started taking on the risk of the bad assets in the market.
So something that started as micro ended up being macro, right?
The sovereigns were taking the bad private assets on the public balance sheets.
And that happened here.
It happened in Europe.
We studied Europe.
We studied Europe's banking system and the size of the, call it 20 biggest banks in Europe.
And so the world moved, in my opinion, or at least in my mind, from micro investing to macro investing.
And now macro really drives sentiment and investing kind of market wide.
I realize there are idiosyncrasies of companies like Google and Facebook and the others,
but the excess liquidity in the markets is what drives things.
If all of a sudden the Fed were to really aggressively tapered today, I don't care what company
you are, what stock you are, you're probably not going to go up for a while.
So it just kind of took me into a place where things were more, I think for me, more logical.
It was just in my own view.
I recently heard Stan Druckton Miller talking about how the common theme with these very successful
investors is that they always seem to have sort of this concentrated position early on, this
high conviction bet, basically.
And as I understand it, your fund, Hama was relatively new.
I think it had around 33 million in assets under management, if I'm not mistaken.
So I'm curious, at what point, how high was your conviction?
Did you go all in on this bet with that fund, the first fund of yours?
or was it a smaller allocation?
You know, I think, look, our big year was 2007.
Primarily, we were short mortgage bonds at par.
And our negative carry was, you know, one and a half, two percent.
So my downside scenario was when you think about all in, you know, my downside scenario
was I lost 2% a year in the position.
My upside scenario is we made 80, 90, 100%.
So that was, it's hard to say that we went all in.
But we had a meaningful position there.
And then when we also launched our mortgage funds,
and our mortgage funds back then at the end of 06 is when we launched.
I designed it so that it had about 10 times implicit leverage,
and our negative carry was about 11% a year, right?
So think about the proposition to investors was,
I'm going to lose about a third of your money over a three-year period,
or we're going to make 10 times your money.
It was a pretty good value proposition.
You could say that was all in, right?
But, you know, we ended up making about 6x,
and it was a great transaction.
That 2008 period, I mean, that's when the Fed really broke the seal, so to speak, of all of this currency printing that they've been doing as of late.
Is anything they're doing today, give you any kind of deja vu from that time in 2008?
No. So that's a good question. I don't believe we're in a bubble today as far as ratios are concerned and leverage in the system's concerned.
We're in a bubble today that I don't think will pop because the Fed, so regardless of how many
mortgages they're buying, I think it's closer to $40 billion right now a month.
But I think it's important to note that we have 40% more cash or broad money in our system
than we had two years ago or 18 months ago when the virus first emanated from Wuhan.
And so that's never happened in the history of the United States before to have 40% more
money in the system. So I'm a monitorist at heart. And so I believe, you know, if you increase the
money supply 40%, you're going to have a 40% depreciation and purchasing power roughly thereabouts.
And so you and I both know inflation is running, call it mid-teens, if not higher. And interest
rates are still at zero. So the insidious, you know, negative real rates of return are hitting our
savings in a major way. And that's what's going on. Right. So when you think about mortgages and
housing availability, who knew that when the virus plagued the world, that the first thing
it would happen is people would just go, you know, when rates went to zero and mortgage rates
collapsed even further that everybody just bought every house they could find. I wouldn't have bet
that actually, but that's what happened. And so now we're in a scenario where the price of everything
has gone up, including residential housing, including commercial real estate. And I don't, while it's
much higher than it once was, I don't believe we're in a bubble because of the amount of liquidity in
the system.
So that kind of raises the question for me around real estate.
How much longer do you think this old run as is before you consider it to be a bubble?
I mean, I will agree that I think, you know, the amount of appreciation of real estate in
the last two years is, it's unprecedented.
It's never, never moved this far as fast.
But I think that for it to be a bubble, it's going to have to get to many multiples of people's
income. You know, we have more job openings today than we have jobless people, which is a really
strange phenomenon as well. So we're seeing, you know, the price levels of wages move. So my answer
to you is, I think assets, including real estate, are going to continue to move much higher
over the next decade because I think the central banks can't raise rates more than 100 basis
points. We're not going to move the front end very much, and it's going to flatten the curve
when they do. So I think if we start aggressively raising rates in 22, I think you're going to see
the curve flatten and maybe even invert almost immediately. And that's a real difficult scenario
for the central banks. You know, I've heard this opinion to some degree before about this
expectation that the Fed can't raise rates upwards of, say, 2%. What is that based on exactly?
I know that the interest on our debt, right, at some point becomes untenable. I mean, is that
the theory and is there a certain number that you're basing that on?
Well, it's not only that, it's the expectations of the participants.
So you look at corporate America, you look at individuals in America, everyone has reset their
expectations to borrowing around these low rates.
And you have to think about the rate moves as a percentage of the base and not as an
absolute.
So if rates drop from 8% to 5%, and then we raise them 5 to 6 or 6 to 7, you're moving 2 off
of 5, right?
are you moving down three off of eight? When you're moving from five to zero and then you try to go
from zero to one, the rate increase is almost infinitesimal, right? Meaning as a percentage of the base.
And so that's what's more functionally relevant than nominal change in rates. And so that's number one.
Number two, everyone is including the sovereign, including the U.S. central government balance sheet,
if we move short rates, almost everything's financed on the front end or the short end.
And so if we raise rates from zero to one and then one to two, all of a sudden interest on our
national debt starts costing us more than 10% of GDP and things start collapse.
I mean, the government can't afford that, right?
So this is not like the period of time in which, you know, Paul Volcker can ride in on a white
horse and raise rates to snuff out inflation.
Think about this.
We won World War II.
We deficit spent going into World War II.
So our national debt in 1946 was about 106% of GDP.
And we won.
We eliminated the product capacity of about two continents.
And we helped rebuild, you know, with the Marshall Plan, Japan and part of continental Europe.
And we ran a trade surplus with every single trading partner in 1946.
So we were able to pay off our debt from 106% of GDP down to the low 30s by the mid-1970s.
So when we had the embargo and oil price spike of 79 and then runaway inflation in 1980
where Volcker showed up, we could afford to briefly raise rates.
So it's important to think about where we were in the late 1970s when you look at our
sovereign balance sheet and corporate balance sheets and where we are today.
Again, Volker cannot ride in today and fix this.
You can't arrest inflation with, by raising short rates, you'll bankrupt the nation, you'll bankrupt
corporate America, you'll bankrupt everything.
So I'm of the opinion that a move from zero to one percent is about all we can do on the short end.
You mentioned inflation earlier, and I've heard you use a term that honestly I hadn't
come across before, which was chain weighted inflation.
Talk to us about the difference between chain weighted and non-chain weighted inflation
metrics and what that means for investors and their discount rates?
It means the government rigs inflation.
So let me give you a perfect example.
So 30 years ago, the average price of an average car in America was about $13,000 a car.
Today that number is just over 40,000.
So it's up over 300% in 30 years.
So when you think about the construct of the consumer price index or the CPI, there is an auto
component to that construct.
I'm just picking one out just because it's easy for us to remember how much cards used
to cost and how much they cost now.
And of that 300 and so percent increase, what percentage of that do you think has made
it into the CPI?
So of a plus 300 number, what do you think has been calculated into the CPI over that timeframe?
A hundred percent.
Yeah, five and a half. So here's what chain weighting means. They say, Tray, we realize that your
bank account just went down by $41,000 because you wrote a check for a new car. But we,
the government, well, we must compare apples to apples. So in your new car, you have a digital speedometer.
In your old car, it was an analog speedometer that was just driven by more mechanical means.
So if you were to replace your digital speedometer with that analog speedometer from 1990,
then your speedometer wouldn't cost $900.
It would only cost $70.
And so they chain weight every part of the car.
You have electric windows.
Well, maybe in 1990 you had the roll-up windows.
So you have to subtract the cost of electric windows.
You have to subtract the cost of your GPS navigator.
You have to subtract the cost of everything to try to compare an.
Apple to an Apple, when in reality, your bank account still went down $40,000 and you wrote the check,
but you have to realize that so many things are tied to the CPI, especially like government
pension payments and there are cost of living adjustments tied to that number.
So when you look at, let's say Germany, for example, they don't chain weight their inflation data.
So Germany just printed a year-over-year numbers of 11.7% inflation.
sounds about right to me.
So it's so fascinating when you peel back the layers of the onion to try to understand
what the incentives are behind the people putting these numbers together.
And then what real life is.
Real life is your bank account.
Real life is what things actually cost you.
Not what they used to cost 30 years ago because you had analog this and roll up that.
It's what can you buy today?
How much does your bank account decline?
So they're kind of playing fantasy football with the numbers, right?
They're not giving you real numbers.
It's really important to think about, they always talk about also CPIX food and energy.
So they're like, wait a minute.
If you don't drive or eat, you know, your bank account would have been okay.
It's just crazy.
So I try to look at things in real terms and how they affect the population and what your
wallet's really feeling when you go fill your car up and what your wallop's feeling when
you take your wife out to dinner and you get the bill and think it's in pesos, but it's
in dollars.
You know, it's insane what's been happening.
I'm trying to understand, how is the Fed getting away with this for lack of a better way to frame it?
I mean, it seems so obvious when you have other resources to look into and compare to.
So how are they getting away with this?
Why is it not more?
I think it is the alternative was to have a much deeper recession in 2008, 2009, to have a calamitous recession in 2020 on the outside of the virus.
With those recessions would come more difficult hardships, maybe more.
physical violence, i.e. societal friction, that would be difficult to get under control.
And so what they choose here is a smoothing. And the smoothing is just printing the money.
And the unintended consequences of the money printing are the rich get richer because they
own the assets and they have leverage on those assets. The middle class, their ability to
trade up, do better and is taken away from them. So the negative real rates of return really hit
the middle class and the poor, they hit the poor the worst. So I think the very people that they're
trying to protect are the people they end up hurting the most. But it's insidious, right? Because
it's hard for you and I to say, well, even though you and I have a retirement savings, we know
it's going to buy less stuff than it would have bought two years ago. But we don't know how much
less. And they're not actually telling us how much less. You and I just kind of have to figure out
what the new cost of living is going to be in the new paradigm. So again, I say it's insidious because
it's not black and white, and it's very difficult for people to measure.
What are your thoughts on something like a Bitcoin and its value it could bring to the market
in this kind of environment, not having Paul Volker around?
Yeah.
You know, I know millennials love private crypto, and I know you're probably a millennial.
But I know that people like to think it's a perfect substitute or a great substitute
for gold and or an inflation protector.
I tend to think that you're going to see kind of authoritarian governments and
Western democracies alike start to really clamp down on Bitcoin. I know China's first kicked
the miners out and then banned private crypto. They did that a year earlier than I expected them to do it.
I think next year, you're going to see intense regulation come from the U.S. Treasury and the IRS.
And so when I think about how to think about discount rates and I think where you're going with
that question is kind of how do I protect myself from this insidious inflation? I think there are
much better inflation hedges. I know Bitcoin's done well. I know that the returns have literally
been off the charts for many, and there are many newly minted billionaires out there in Bitcoin land.
And I think the easy money's been made is what I'm telling you. And I think from here on out,
it's going to be really difficult to make money there. So what I look to are things like real
assets like, like even rural land. Rural land, you can do a lot of interesting things with, you can actually
put a judicious amount of leverage on, I call it 50% leverage and stay way ahead of this kind
of insidious degradation of your savings. And so I actually launched a private equity firm a
couple of months ago to engage in not only an acquisition of rural land, because that's where
I want my money, my family's money, but it's also to engage in mitigating environmental
impacts from big industrial and commercial users of land. So I'm actually a tree hugger at heart.
the environment. I love the outdoors. And that's where I think the best place to go is to mitigate
this. I know that's not where you wanted me to go on Bitcoin, but it's how I feel now. I own a
couple of private positions in big firms that are trading, lending against and developing
Bitcoins and NFTs and all of the digital universe of alphabet soup things that are out there.
So I think that the blockchain, I think that NFTs, those things are all very much here to stay.
Private crypto, I'd put a question mark by over the long run.
And so I'd be careful with that now.
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Would you say rural land?
Are you, is that different from something like farmland?
because I recently heard or saw a headline about Bill Gates, for example, owning like a hundred
million plus dollars of farmland and making the same thing. What I'm talking about is when I think
about the macro movements of the population today in the United States, you have you have high
cost, high tax jurisdictions like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and then you have the entire
west coast of California. Those people are all moving to places like Texas, like Tennessee,
like Florida because they're pro-business, they're low to no tax at the state level. And,
you know, I know rich people can move to Aspen and Utah and everywhere that super-rich people are
moving. But you can't move entire Fortune 500 companies to places like those enclave. So when you
think about where the pro-business environment is, who's going to win over the next decade,
10 to 15 years, it's going to be places like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And with that
non-linear population growth comes big movements in land within, call it two, two and a half
hours of major MSAs, like whatever you do on the weekend where you live there, you probably have
a second home where your parents did or your friends do. And that's what you do. You go to a lake or you go
to a ranch, you go to a farm. I believe you're going to see those prices move faster than,
especially in front of those population demographic moves. I think those are going to move faster than
that inflation will.
Interesting that inflation being where it is, I didn't hear you say something like gold,
right? You went to farmland. So talk to us, what's your position or your opinion on gold
and has it changed at all over the years? Yeah, you know, when private crypto came about,
I mean, what's private crypto's market capitalization today? It's north, there's a north of
two trillion. So, you know, if you think back to 2009, the amount of gold ever mined in the 2009 was
7 trillion. And a lot of that had been, you know, let's just say, stored loss in dowries,
this and that. So when you think about that marketplace and how much money has basically
never made it into that marketplace and gone into things like private crypto. And I think these
people that are selling some private crypto to buy real assets, they're actually not buying
gold. They are going to buy more real estate, more land. And when I think about gold versus
rural land. Again, I have the population demographic in my tailwind, and I also have something that I can
drive to. I can fish there. I'm not a hunter, but if you wanted to hunt, you can hunt there. You can take
your kids, swimming, hiking, outdoors. You can't do that on a piece of gold. And so I think about
the tangible benefits and the both physical and mental benefits of being outside. And I just, I think
that's likely to move a lot faster than gold does. So I'd much rather own that kind of land.
Interesting. You did talk about China's ban on crypto. We're going to talk a lot about China
and different aspects of it. The first point related to crypto here is the idea of China
developing their own digital currency. Yeah, their own digital currency. What is the incentive
for them to do that besides, you know, giving it yet another surveillance tool? How would that
change their position in the world, at least in their minds?
Yeah. I mean, that would radically change China's geopolitical.
call it belligerence. And when you think about how offensive they've been in the last few years,
first of all, in their complete botched review and allowance of scientists into Wuhan to figure out
where patient zero is and where this thing came from, you know, they're not a responsible
global actor. They are completely irresponsible global actor. They have a grand strategy. They're
executing it. We're executing it well. And we are now trying to understand,
in the much larger picture, what it means for them to have a CBD seed of their own, a central
bank digital currency of their own.
And again, it's antithetical to even private crypto.
Private crypto is decentralized.
The idea is, you know, call it not being under the purview of watchful eyes of centralized
governments.
And I understand all of the kind of libertarian ideals of private crypto.
But when you think about central bank digital currency is the opposite, right?
It's run by the government, for the government in a centralized manner.
they know exactly who has it. They know you're spending proclivities. They would know
Trey Lockerby's Social Security number and where you like to spend it, how you spend it, how much
you have. It would enable them, not only are you adopting the Chinese tech stack, you're not
just putting some digital currency in your wallet, you're adopting the entire Chinese digital
tech stack and you're giving them the ability to export their digital authoritarianism to you.
you're allowed, the Chinese government could bribe you directly without being under the watchful eye of
regulators or law enforcement. Imagine if the Chinese government has the ability to bribe, cajole,
coerce anyone anywhere in the world if you're holding onto their money. Like, imagine that world.
That world would be a much worse place to live in. And so I believe the rollout of their CBDC next year
is the biggest risk to the rules-based order in the West that we've faced in the last several decades.
And what would the incentive be for people to opt into a digital currency with China?
Is it just that our U.S. dollar is inflating away?
No.
I think what people maybe don't realize and maybe some do is China can make two moves
on the chessboard on the launch.
They can say anyone that imports and exports, i.e. engages in trade with us, China Inc.,
you have to settle on our currency.
And if you don't like it, that's okay.
find somewhere else to trade.
So they literally could force you into their digital currency.
And then they could say, oh, by the way, anyone that invests in China or has investments
here from now on it all has to settle on CBDC.
And you say, no, I kind of like the dollar.
I like my dollars being invested there.
And they say, sorry, you know, it's illegal.
You have to buy our currency with your dollars.
So what that would do is that would bring in trillions, literally trillions of dollars
into their coffers at the central bank.
And then they would not only have more dollars to exercise their global, you know, belligerence
with economically and militaristically, but then they would also have a stranglehold over you
because if you came out and you were, let's say you transacted a lot with China and let's say
they screwed you on a transaction and they were supposed to pay you a million dollars worth
of their CBDC and they only paid your 800,000 and you said, no, no, no, our deal was a million.
And they would say, sorry, tough.
And then you go and make a public comment on Twitter and say,
they just screwed me out of $200,000.
And then they turn the rest of your central bank digital currency off
because you said something negative about the regime.
Just think about that world.
I don't think people have thought that all the way through.
And I know the National Security Council,
our intelligence agencies, DOD,
we as a country have thought about this deeply.
I don't think the press has written about it much at all.
And I don't think there's been a lot of a proper dialectic here.
And hopefully, hopefully, we will have a meaningful dialectic about this rollout sometime very
soon.
I believe it should be banned, outlawed, and illegal for any U.S. corporation or individual
to hold.
That sounds hyperbolic, but you either have cancer or you don't have cancer, and that is how
I do this.
What do you think happens to oil and how it settles?
You know, they've tried really hard to get people like that.
like MBZ and MBS to settle in R&B.
And that's been a tough, again, road to hoe.
But I think with the outset of a Chinese CBDC that becomes fungible and tradable and transactable
and also is potentially freely tradable in and out of dollars, it gives them so much more
to stand on today.
Let's just, let me give you hypothetical.
If they attack Taiwan today, bombers, fighter jets, and an amphibious assault, we have an
economic nuclear button today. Their entire world depends upon dollar settlement. If we sanction
the Chinese banks, the joint stock banks and the SOE banks, we take China off the Swiss system and their
economy collapses overnight. We have that button today. We don't have to send sailors into the South
China Sea or the Taiwan Strait and risk our brave men and women's lives. What we simply press a button.
if their rollout of their CBDC is successful, that changes the calculus of their entire
geopolitical risk game.
If we lose that button, then imagine how belligerent China can be if they're not relying
on us.
So I think, again, that calculus is something that we all need to be thinking about.
You brought up Taiwan.
I'd like to touch on that because there's that speculation there, and probably with a good reason,
that there's a potential takeover of Taiwan, maybe sometime even after the
the 2022 Olympics. How should investors think about that, position themselves for it? If that's a
concern, you know, at our risk, how do we factor it into our investment approach? You know,
they're not thinking about it. There's a Taiwan ETF that's at an all-time high today.
It's either people don't believe it. They don't believe China will do it. If they listen carefully
to Xi Jinping's October 9th speech, he basically raised the bar on Taiwan.
He said that he's trying to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese race, quote unquote,
and he is intent on achieving the, quote, Chinese dream.
Okay.
Those are two really important phrases because what he is saying is, and he says that peaceful
reunification of Taiwan is a foregone conclusion.
It's inevitable.
In fact, they said it, they reiterated it again with their foreign ministry spokesperson yesterday,
Wang, he said that yesterday. But back to October 9th, so today is November 4th, so call it,
back a little bit less than a month ago, what she said in that speech was, if you don't surrender
peacefully, we're going to take you forcefully. And his success as premier and emperor for life
is contingent upon that reunification. And if he doesn't achieve the Chinese dream or the great
rejuvenation of the Chinese people, then he has failed and he'll no longer run China. That's
literally what he said, October 9th, if you read carefully what he said. So he's raised that,
he's banging the war drums a little harder. I don't know if you've seen just today, Trey,
but for the first time in Chinese media, what I'm seeing all over China is they're talking
about how they're fortifying positions in the region in which they're going to attack Taiwan from.
And there are propaganda videos showing missile silos getting carried down the streets of China that are all cammoed up and trains with tanks on them headed to the region, airplanes, military planes landing there.
And they're pushing these videos all over China for the people of China to prepare for battle.
Okay.
I haven't seen that level of rhetoric in China to date.
But it seems to me like things are speeding up at a quantum speed, right, at an incredible pace.
So whether they wait for the Olympics or not, I can tell you that conversations that President
Biden has had was she surround Taiwan.
And we have a big national security problem with Taiwan, right?
Taiwan semi is very, very, very important to the U.S., to the U.S. military, to our well-being.
and it's literally 100 miles from the Chinese border.
And so the problem is it normally takes about five years to build a wafer fab.
We're about a year and a half into the Taiwan semi-fabs being built in Arizona.
And let's say it takes three or four years instead of five, we still have a duration mismatch
if they move now, right?
And if you're thinking about their calculus, moving sooner rather than later is in their
best interest.
However, they haven't rolled out their CBDC yet.
So again, my calculus and who am I?
I'm some financial guy in Dallas.
But if I were to decide, if I were to bet when something's likely to happen, I would bet
the second half of next year or sooner.
You brought up Taiwan Semiconductor.
And I'm curious about that one especially because if you're someone who's like me and
bullish on semiconductors long term and it's a seemingly great company in the space, it's a $600 billion
market cap, does a Chinese takeover of Taiwan affect that company or at least the prospect of it
does a good business or does it change your outlook on the business at all?
Well, it changes my opinion of Taiwan semi's business overnight.
Yeah, absolutely.
If it's under the centralized control of the Chinese Communist Party, then you have an entire
myriad of new problems to think about.
And immediately, if the Chinese are running Taiwan semi, our government, and they take
it forcefully, they take Taiwan forcefully, our government's likely to ban.
all products from China. So we're going to have to alternatively source. We're going to have to go to a
different supplier. And, you know, we as a country realized what kind of position we were in and that we
had let the frog boil without our knowledge. And it was actually under the Trump administration
in the last two years, the Security Council tasked a former naval intelligence director to
help usher in and get these deals done for Taiwan Semi to build these.
Imagine spending $17 billion on one building tray.
Imagine what that building is going to look like.
And those are being built today, right?
We have Samsung about to break ground in Taylor, Texas.
We have Taiwan Semi building its first and I think it's second way for Fabs in Arizona,
broken ground.
But again, those periods of time and the capital it takes to build those are in
Speaker, speaking of buildings, I'm curious about the real estate in China. You have this theory
around Xi's intent. I've heard you say, especially around Evergrand, I've heard you express that
he's intentionally detonating the real estate market. What do you mean by that?
I think that an unintended consequence of central bank largesse has been asset prices have gotten
out of hand. And in China, when we talk about how housing is priced here,
at call it five to seven times our annual income, four and a half to seven times our annual income.
In China in Tier 1 cities, housing is now like 30 times average annual income. It's at a level
that's so high that when you look at the birth rate, the average Chinese woman, it's 1.2
children per woman. To just sustain a population, that number has to be 2.1. It's 1.2.
So you're having a major population decline starting in China.
And the reason being is the Chinese men can't afford once they get to be an adult age.
They can't afford to have a job and buy a house.
So they're living with their parents in their basement.
And none of the men want to marry a woman because the woman won't marry them
and live in the parents' basement there.
So they're not getting married.
They're not procreating.
They're not having children.
and she realized that this is a structural nightmare for him as a central planner.
So they eliminated the one child policy and said, how about three?
Well, guess what?
It didn't work.
People aren't having three because they can't afford to have three.
And real estate is a third of China's economy.
In the U.S., it's about 18% of our economy.
The real estate prices are so high and so out of reach, and the average Chinese person
owns 2.3 apartments.
That's where they've just been plowing their money in a speculative fervor.
And so now what she's doing is introducing property taxes, which here or two for didn't exist.
So imagine if you didn't have a negative carry, well, you could go speculate in real estate.
Imagine if you had to pay 2% a year, you wouldn't speculate that much in real estate, right?
So in his speech just a few days ago, he talked about further moving property taxes higher in the midst of a real estate crunch.
This is, he is going to bring down real estate prices and they're going to state.
down. That is the common prosperity of the people. That's his goal. And companies, you know,
there are eight developers now in default. Evergrand is, all these bonds are going to get wiped out.
That's the bottom line. And Westerners are going to do a lot poorer than domestic Chinese.
They'll give domestic Chinese a few pennies on the dollar and they'll tell Westerners,
sorry, thanks for playing. So if you've noticed the Chinese high-yield bond market, you know,
had its worst two months ever in the last two months, basically dropped from par to way below 70 in
in the entire high-yield marketplace is probably going a lot lower. So you've got a scenario,
you're going to see real estate come down and stay down because it's driven by Xi Jinping. It's
not just going to bounce back and everything's going back to puppies and rainbows at some point
in time. He realized that he made a major mistake letting the central bank print as much Chinese
money as they did and allow the rampant speculation that he allowed. So this crackdown is not
because Jack Ma is super rich. It's not because the property developers are too flashy with
their jets and cars and things like that. That might have something to do with it, but it's really
core to the central planning of the Chinese Communist Party. Does that have any systemic risk, right?
You know, there was the speculation that Evergrand was the next Lehman there for a minute.
It doesn't sound like you share that opinion, but is there, you know, these bonds getting wiped out,
does it have a rippling effect across the globe? I don't think so. Well, let me rephrase that.
I believe that if you've seen Goldman Sachs' most recent report and expectations for Chinese GDP,
they've taken it to zero.
That's a pretty big statement, right?
But if a third of your economy is going to go pretty significantly negative,
and the other two-thirds of your economy are slightly positive, you could get to a zero number.
God forbid, China only grows at zero, right?
But I think if China does, it has a zero percent growth in GDP for a year or two,
that just means global GDP won't grow anywhere near where anyone's expecting.
So the global slow down a bit. When you think about the systemic nature of what's going on,
you know, we all know Evergrand has about 300 billion of debt, 200 billion, call it internal Chinese
debt and 100 billion external, maybe dollar bonds, you know, those bonds are not levered 10 to
one in foreign financial institutions. Lehman was interconnected to both the U.S. banks and the
European banks with massive derivatives risk. No one signed ISDA agreements with Chinese banks because
Chinese banks demanded to have the jurisdiction be Beijing law. And of course, there's no such thing as
Beijing law. So none of the either domestic West U.S. or European banks have major counterparty risk there.
So the question becomes internal. So are the Chinese banks going to get wiped out? For sure,
they will. Right. I mean, they'll have huge holes in their balance sheets. But with the Chinese government
back depositors, without a doubt. So I think that tree is going to fall in the woods. I don't think many
are going to hear it. I think there'll be some people that are super wealthy over there that
end up losing everything. But I don't think a default crisis will go global here. I think that
they will take real estate down, hold it down. The Chinese property developers are all going to be
massacred and because there will be no bounds and they're all hyper levered to price. And then
the banks are all going to have huge holes in their balance sheets and their banking systems three
and a half times are GDP. They will print enough R&B internally to kind of
save the Chinese people from, you know, jumping off a cliff, but I don't see global contagion
into Western banks.
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All right.
Back to the show.
Got it.
You mentioned Jack Ma a little bit ago, and Alibaba is down around 50% or so from where it was a
year ago.
So your typical value investor might take a look at that and say, hmm, that looks
interesting.
I can gauge that you're probably not investing in too many Chinese stocks.
But I'm curious, does something like Ali Baba,
at its current price level intrigue you at all? Or is there some kind of just Chinese accounting
suspicion that keeps you away?
I mean, have you really peeled back the layers of the onion and look at Alibaba's earnings?
Alibaba's earnings come from markups of their private investment positions.
And they run it through their income statement.
Alibaba is like the biggest house of cards I've ever seen.
You know, I have no idea what their real financials are and neither do you.
Charlie Munger for that matter. You have never submitted themselves to a real Western audit.
And now you have Xi Jinping risk.
Trey, what discount rate do you put on a company that doesn't submit itself to real audits
and has Xi Jinping risk?
I mean, I think if you're a fiduciary, whether you're a fiduciary to your household,
to your kids, or as a real market fiduciary, you should lose your job if you buy Chinese
stocks that are unaudited, which are all of them right now.
That markup aspect is interesting. Talk to us. Give us one example of that accounting issues,
I guess is for lack of a better word, that come up with something like Alibaba and how they're
working with the stock. You look at their markup of Ant Financial in their own income statement,
and it was representing like a third of their earnings for 2020. And when Ant Financial goes away
or gets revalued lower, they don't run it through the income statement. So you know what?
I don't know. And think about how Ant Financial happened. Imagine if you and I,
We're running Alibaba and we're like, hey, let's start this consumer finance platform.
How about you and I and 15 other people, we just, we kind of split it off.
How about we take 50% of the company and we let their shareholders of Alibaba have the other half?
Does that sound like a good deal?
Oh, yeah, that sounds great. They literally stole half the company.
Imagine if that happened here, you'd be behind bars in 10 seconds.
But we just nod our head and say, well, I guess that's the way the Chinese do it.
They just, because they're running the company, they get to keep half of it.
But that's not the way it goes.
And, you know, people just look the other way because they have FOMO, right?
They have Chinese FOMO.
They can't wait to get to the end of that 1.4 billion person rainbow of riches and El Dorado
and somehow leveraging the Chinese people when in the end, the Westerners never make the money.
I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about oil because I've heard the theory of yours.
that I found fascinating around our lack of investment in hydrocarbons and how that might actually
lead to even inflation or higher inflation in food prices and others. What's your current take on
oil and walk us through that theory a little bit? Yeah, it's oil and gas, right? It's seven years
ago, the public markets, when we had kind of the fracking decline, and we became energy
independent six or seven years ago when we were fracking and drilling it at such a high rate
when oil was $120 a barrel, call it 2014.
And then we had an abundance of oil and we're the Saudi Arabia of natural gas and we had
a ton of natural gas.
And so oil prices dropped into the low 30s and natural gas prices went below $2 an M.
And then we started virtue signaling.
We said, you know what?
It's time.
It's time to go to alternative energy.
We have global warming happening and climate change.
And it's all well intentioned.
So don't get me wrong.
I believe that global warming is here and the number suggests it's here, whether it's
secular or cyclical, it'll be left to science over the decades.
So I'm a big believer in saving the environment and doing what we can to be responsible stewards
of both the environment and our lands.
But you have to take a major step towards sustainable power, meaning we blew it when we stopped
engaging in nuclear power plant building. We could have solved this many, many, many years ago.
We could have solved global warming. The same people screaming global warming and climate problems
today are the same protesters that protested nuclear power after Three Mile Island, after
Chernobyl, and then maybe even after Fukushima. Imagine if we just stop flying airplanes after two of them
crashed, right? The technologies are so much better. It's so sustainable. It's the cleanest, most,
It's the best way to empower things.
But what we did is we stopped spending on hydrocarbon seven years ago, right?
Public market analysts said you can't spend outside of your EBITDA anymore to the hydrocarbon industry.
And then you started seeing over the top, you know, virtue signaling from corporate investors and corporate boards.
And you've seen a mass exodus of funding in the capital markets for anything hydrocarbon based.
It takes decades, many decades, to move from one fuel source.
to another. It did for coal. It did for natural gas. And it's going to for alternative power,
but even with alternative power, we need a much better storage matrix. Right now, it's just a great
idea. Wind and solar are amazing, but they're not powering any kind of major percentage of the
grid. And they can't be baseload power. So if we stop, if we mothball the cold plants, we won't
lend to natural gas and we won't lend to oil. And in fact, now private equity is having trouble
raising money in hydrocarbons. So now we have a scenario where demand is inelastic.
We have, do you know how many cars that are in the world driving around cars and trucks?
There are 1.2 billion cars and trucks driving around. How many electric vehicles are on the road
today? I think it's around 30 million. 1.2 billion combustion engines, 30 million. It's amazing.
They're 30 million electric cars. When you think about it in the grand scheme of things,
we still, the world still uses 100 million barrels of oil every single day.
So if we stop spending seven years ago and we're not drilling for more now,
and there's the long rated decline curve of production is about 7%.
So we lose 7% of production every year if we're not drilling.
And in the next 20 years, we'll have one and a half billion cars on the road that are combustion engines
and we'll have 100 million electric vehicles, 100 million, amazing, out of one and a half billion
combustion engines.
So demand for hydrocarbons is inelastic.
It's going to keep growing, and we're not spending the money to find it.
So what I believe is going to happen, if we have a cold winter this winter, you're going to
see numbers you've never seen before.
Because you remember when oil went below zero?
Yep.
In the front end, there was a problem.
There was nowhere to put it.
the exact opposite's about to happen.
On the front end, demand might tick up from 100 million barrels a day to 105 as the world opens,
and there isn't 105 of production.
Oh, and by the way, for seven years, we've under capex production.
We can't just flip a switch.
So you see Biden at OPEC begging them for more production.
At the same time, he's saying no more interstate pipelines, no more drilling federal lands.
I get what he's saying, and the people that are running Biden's energy and climate team
are actually good friends of mine. Believe that or not, but you can't turn something off in
kind of an absolutist fashion overnight and flip a switch and think you can change energy sources
because you believe it's a good idea. It is a good idea. But the incrementalist approach over decades,
it's what it's going to take. And what's going to end up happening is I'm going to predict something.
You're going to see prices you've never seen before for hydrocarbons in the next six months
and maybe six months to two years.
And those prices will unseat the current leadership because you're going to see energy prices
and food prices ripping because of underinvestment and because of excess capital in the system.
So I think that's the grave mistake that the virtue signaling is going to, that's what's going to happen.
You're going to see these things happen.
And by the way, the front end, so at the immediate delivery month of crude,
of natural gas, they can go anywhere. I mean, whatever that marginal cost is, or marginal barrel,
what someone's willing to pay for it, someone's going to pay it. I'm not saying the whole curve
out 30 years is going to move to 150 or 200, but what I'm saying is the front end of crude oil and the
front end of natural gas, you could see numbers you're going to need a slide rule to calculate
if I'm right about this. Do you have a gallon of gas prediction in Dallas? Yeah, I mean,
you could easily see all all-time highs for gallons of gas.
You could see $6 gasoline easily.
Do you think that then creates more demand for the electric vehicle market and maybe
accelerates that adoption a bit more?
Trey, how do we produce the electricity to plug the gosh damn vehicles in?
We burn natural gas.
We burn natural gas.
That's our alternative power source.
So you can't spend enough windmill.
and have enough solar to power the additional electric cars.
You have to put electricity into the grid.
People just haven't thought this all the way through.
China is making a big move into nuclear in the near term.
Do you think that will give us any more confidence of doing the same?
You know, there's places like France that have 70% of their grid as nuclear.
There are some people that have it figured out.
China is currently building more coal-fired power plants.
then the entire coal-fired install base of Europe.
They're building that much this year.
So, yeah, they want to say they're building nuclear, they're building coal,
they're building whatever they can build because their entire system is so broken.
Their grid is massively underserved.
And they're telling their bread and butter manufacturers that they can only manufacture
every other week now because they have rolling brownouts.
So they're having a real problem.
Hydrocarbon demand is in Alaska.
and it's growing at an ever-increasing pace.
And whether China's building nuclear or coal, when you think about Chinese electric cars,
the way you need to think about them is their coal-burning cars,
because the entire Chinese grid is powered by coal.
So when you're feeling good about seeing electric cars on the road,
just remember that coal is what made the electricity that's in the car.
So the entire idea of getting Earth to a better place is really dependent upon only about eight countries.
And China's the number one country.
Whatever they do with their emissions, so goes the world.
And clearly, they're not even engaging in emissions conversations.
They're telling us, oh, they'll be carbon neutral by 2050.
I mean, give me a break.
You know, like you and I could say whatever you want to say about 2050.
It's a joke.
But in the meantime, they are massively increasing their carbon footprint, and they're doing
it with coal.
So when we think about hydrocarbon pricing going forward, I think you're going to see prices
that really shock people.
And I think that's actually going to empower some regime change in a number of countries,
potentially including China.
The worst thing an authoritarian leader can see is skyrocketing food and energy prices
because it hits the billion or so Chinese that are already dirt poor.
So that's my prediction, much higher hydrocarbon prices.
So circling back to what we spoke about a little bit earlier around inflation, and if we're
predicting that it's 12 percent and without tapering, it seems like,
it's not going to be very transitory, right? So for the retail investor who can probably only expect,
you know, on average, historically, 7, 8 percent from the S&P, which in my opinion has become
sort of the default savings account for the retail investor, is that the best they can do?
You know, if they can't afford rural land or whatever, if their dollar cost averaging into their
IRAs, 401Ks, is that the best they've got? You know, I guess our conversation today has been on
the fact that we're entering a stagnationary period, right? We're going to see, we're going to
see nominal numbers continue to move higher. We're going to see real rates of return negative because
the difference between, you know, nominal and reals inflation. And stocks typically keep up with about
80%, 80 to 85% of that move. So you'll feel kind of good about it, but you'll still be losing
purchasing power, I think, over time. So again, I started this private equity firm called
conservation equity management to do exactly what I would do, which I'm doing, to try to stay ahead
of that insidious negative real rates of return. So, you know, if people want to talk about it,
they should call me. So summing up, you know, given the fact that the Fed can't taper,
what is the end game, in your opinion, to write the ship and keep U.S. dominance, especially
the U.S. dollar? Yeah, I think they will taper. So I'm not saying they can't.
What I'm saying is when they do, and if they start raising short rates, you're going to see a curve flattening and it'll be recessionary.
So it'll snuff out economic growth in the United States.
For us to maintain our global hegemonic position, we should outlaw the Chinese central bank digital currency.
We should make it illegal.
We should enforce the rules-based order within our own borders.
We should try to become less partisan and have the centrist run things and not the progressives and the radicals.
either side. The problem is, I'm not hopeful about that. I think we're more divisive than we've
ever been. And that's largely due to the gap between the haves and haves-nots widening.
And I think that continues to widen. So I think you and I, when we think about protecting
what we've worked so hard to save, you've got to be thinking in ways that people that are alive
today, most people that are alive today didn't really live through, invest through the late
70s and early 80s. When you think about the core of the investment corpus today in America,
and that was a period in time in which the government could do something about it. Here, I think
they're going to be walking a tightrope of raising short rates, flattening the curve, you know,
trying to figure out how to stimulate again. They'll have to come back and inject some more
capital in the markets and again, grow the central bank balance sheets. Look, you've seen.
seen Japan do it, seen Europe do it. We're just behind the, if you think about it on a timeline,
we're third in time, but you know, everybody's doing it, whether you're the UK, whether you're
the Bank of England, the PBOC, the BOJ, the Fed, everyone's doing it. And they'll keep doing it. So I think
it's important to just think about how to defend yourselves from that.
Kyle Bass, this has been an incredible honor to have you on a show. I really enjoyed it. I learned
a ton. And I would like to, before I let you go hand off or give you the opportunity to hand off
to our listeners, any other resources you want to share.
Oh, I don't have any other resources, but I appreciate it, Trey.
Thanks for your time.
I hope you can do it again soon.
Yeah, it's a pleasure meeting you.
All right, I hope you guys really enjoyed that one because I sure did.
So if you're loving the show, please don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app
and definitely leave us a review we love to hear from you.
You can always find me on Twitter at Trey Lockerby.
And if you haven't already done so, what are you waiting for?
Go to the investorspodcast.com.
Google TIP finance. You don't want to miss all the amazing resources we have for you there.
And with that, we'll see again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to
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