Tema: PPCC-Pisitófilos Creditófagos-Otoño 2022

[wanderer]

De todos modos, precisamente en hostelería (sobre todo si hablamos de hoteles), tienen una opción muy simple para hacer que pagando poco merezca la pena tomar el trabajo, y es incluir el alojamiento como salario en especie (de hecho, creo que en resorts eso está muy normalizado). A lo mejor dejan de ganar algo por eso, pero al menos se garantizarían cubrir los puestos. ¿Porqué no es tan común si es tan obvio...?

[Derby]

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/10/how-corporations-get-away-with-murder-to-inflate-prices-on-rent-food-and-electricity.html
Entrevista a Hal Singer, profesor universitario especialista en fijación de precios.

How Corporations “Get Away With Murder” to Inflate Prices on Rent, Food, and Electricity

(...) It can’t be said too often: a significant amount of our current inflation is due to companies increasing prices because they can, not because they are seeing corresponding increases in costs. And that’s before getting to the fact that corporate profit share is at a record high level of GDP, nearly twice the level of the early 2000s, which was then deemed unsustainably elevated by none other than Warren Buffett. In other words, some companies are using this inflation as yet another opportunity for grifting, instead of going on a modest profit diet to increase worker pay.

Lynn Parramore: As inflation worries continue, we hear a lot of people blaming the problem on wage increases for workers. You disagree. Why?

Hal Singer: I think that in the present or new economy, wages don’t really enter the calculus of pricing by the firm. You may have heard the expressions “superfirms” [very large and successful companies] or “Network Economy” [an emerging hyperconnected, digitized, interactive economic system]. The idea is that in today’s economic reality, if you’re in a high fixed-cost industry where it costs you a ton to get started and then you take over the industry, the pricing problem basically devolves into one of maximizing revenues. In that situation, costs like the wages of your staff are really secondary considerations.

LP: Can you give an example?

HS: Sure. Think of an airline setting prices on an across-the-country flight. Are they taking into consideration the salaries of the flight stewards when setting that rate? Most likely not. What about a pharmaceutical company? Does it look at the wages of its chemists when pricing the products? Again, probably not. There’s been a severing of the relationship between wages and prices in so many sectors of the economy, particularly those in which inflation is running rampant. I could go on with many examples. I’m in a hotel in New York City right now. You think they’re charging rates based on the wages of the cleaning crews that come in? Not likely. They’re revenue maximizers. They’re just looking at the demand curve. The only thing that enters the calculus is what economists call demand-side elasticity considerations. In other words, how much you can get away with on the demand side in setting prices. The costs are no longer entering the equation.

One thing that has happened in the current economy is that worker power has been completely demolished. That has been recognized by tons of economists, including those at the Federal Reserve (Fed). That lack of power has broken down the historical relationship between unemployment and inflation. Economists call it the flattening of the Phillips curve [a theory that inflation and unemployment have a stable and inverse relationship]. What it means is that it’s going to be very difficult, if not extremely painful, to arrest inflation by targeting all of our energies at the labor market. If the relationship between wages and prices has been severed by a combination of network effects, superstar firms, monopsony power [when a single firm has all the power to buy labor in a market], then employing this policy is like pushing a rope. We’ll never get to the finish line. Look, inflation is still rampant despite these rate hikes and employees are suffering as firms pull back from hiring or lay off workers. The question is, have we really done anything to arrest inflation? The answer is no. (...)

LP: When businesses raise prices now, they claim to be simply passing on rising costs to consumers. But your work shows there’s more going on, and you’ve placed blame on corporate profit-seeking for inflation. What’s the evidence?

HS: If firms were simply passing along higher costs, then we wouldn’t expect to see their profits go up. Yet profits are at a historical high right now. That’s telling you that they’re not passing along cost increases. I’m not sure that they have any cost increases. The prices are rising much more quickly that the costs. So that kind of rejects the idea in the abstract.

To be concrete, I think that electricity is a market that people should focus on. And rental markets and food. These are the largest contributors to inflation. It’s very hard to believe, when you look at the profits of the electricity firms, which are skyrocketing right now, that they’re dealing with increased costs. Really, it suggests that their costs are not going up, or to the extent that they’re going up at all, the price hikes are far outpacing those costs.

Look at rental properties. If an institutional investor bought a bunch of rental properties in a neighborhood in say, Miami or Atlanta, how have their costs been going up? What costs are they facing at the margin, exactly? Are we talking about the clean-up crew? The security guards? The prices are clearly being set on the demand side. There’s no cost to explain why rents are exploding.

LP: Why aren’t companies afraid of driving away consumers away with predatory pricing? In your work, you’ve mentioned the profit-seeking price hikes in the meat-processing industry, putting a steak dinner out of reach for many. Why isn’t the meat processor worried about driving away business?

HS: It’s hard for consumers to move away, particularly when you’re talking about food. You could change your diet, but it’s pretty hard after you’ve developed certain preferences for meat over your lifetime. It’s hard to switch on a dime. There’s a central tenet in pricing theory that the more concentrated an industry, all things being equal, the easier it is to coordinate on prices. This coordination can be happening explicitly, like you pick up the phone and you tell your competitor, hey, let’s go and do this. Or you can do it tacitly. If there are just a few of you there, you can feel your way through to higher prices.

There’s a story I love telling. I was in a courtroom in December 2021. A price-fixing case. Under oath, one of the executives said that his cartel, which concerned capacitors [energy storage components], functioned most efficiently during times of inflation! I nearly fell out of my chair. What he was basically saying was that a small dose of inflation can serve as a focal point. A way for a bunch of different firms in a concentrated industry to focus their attention on a new target to kind of move in unison, to coordinate their pricing. It occurred to me right at that moment that we’re in big trouble, given how concentrated all markets in the U.S. economy have become over the last 15 to 20 years.

The other thing that a small bout of inflation does is that it softens the beachheads, to use a war analogy about how they would drop bombs on the beaches to allow the troops to march in. Today, when a consumer goes into a restaurant, say a steakhouse, and she sees a $50 price, she’s already been conditioned to expect that the price was going to be higher. She’s more likely to go along, to just tolerate the price hikes. She doesn’t see it as evil, just something that everyone’s doing. This is another reason we don’t see people just defecting and imposing price discipline. It’s going to be very hard for consumers to defeat this by protesting en masse.

What I’m calling for is a different approach entirely to how we arrest price increases that are coming largely from a very specific segment of the economy. The analogy I give is that if there’s a fire in your guest bedroom, you don’t go and bulldoze the whole house. You don’t start spraying water in the den. You go to the source of the fire and put the fire out there. It’s hard for me just watching this unfold because we know exactly where the price hikes are coming and we think we know who is implementing them and why. And yet we’re going to try to correct it through some general prescription that involves throwing sand in the gears of the economy writ large and aimed particularly at the labor market.(...)

[Derby]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/housing-existing-home-sales-drop-140004730.html

Housing: Existing home sales drop for 8th straight month in September

Sales of previously owned homes fell for the eighth straight month in September as mortgage rates marched higher, further eroding affordability in the housing market.

Contract closings retracted 1.5% from the month before to an annualized pace of 4.71 million, data from the National Association of Realtors showed Thursday. That was higher than the median estimate of 4.65 million from Bloomberg's survey. Sales fell by 23.8% from a year ago on an unadjusted basis.

The waning demand is showing up in prices, with the median price falling month over month for the third time in a row.

“The housing sector continues to undergo an adjustment due to the continuous rise in interest rates, which eclipsed 6% for 30-year fixed mortgages in September and are now approaching 7%,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement. “Expensive regions of the country are especially feeling the pinch and seeing larger declines in sales.”(...)

[Derby]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-20/transcript-nouriel-roubini-predicts-a-crisis-worse-than-the-1970s

Transcript: Nouriel Roubini Predicts a Crisis 'Worse' Than the 1970s

The Fed won’t pivot, it will “wimp out” says Dr. Doom.

(...)So it's going to be worse than the seventies. So this is not just the short term phenomenon. People say the global supply bottle necks may end after November when Xi Jinping is going to care about growth. I think there are many other forces, there is protectionism and deglobalization. Friend-shoring, reshoring of manufacturing from China to high-cost Europe and US, aging of population, restriction of migration, decoupling between US and China. Geopolitical risk and depression that's going to fragment, decouple, balkanize and deglobalize the global economy, the impact of global climate change, the impact of cyber warfare, the impact of recurrent pandemics, the backlash against income and wealth inequalities leading to policies pro-labor workers and so on. And of course de-dollarization of the dollar when eventually people are going to get out of dollar assets because of the financial sanctions and so on.

Those are 11 forces that are medium term that have nothing to do with Covid and Russia/Ukraine. They're going to be reducing growth, increase cost of production and I think central banks will have to blink. Like the first example is what happened in the UK. If you're going to have an economic crash, you're going to have a financial crash. As you increase interest rates, you're going to wimp out. Guaranteed. The Fed did it in 2019, the BOE has done it now, the ECB is going to have to do it, the Fed is going to do it. It's going to happen for sure and therefore we're going to have an unhinging of inflation expectations. I don't believe central banks when they say we're going to fight inflation at any cost, even if there is a recession, even if there's a hard landing, first of all it's not going to be a short and shallow recession, it's going to be ugly and then you'll have financial stresses and a financial and a debt crisis.

At that point they're going to wimp out. And wimp out actually worse than the seventies. Because in the seventies we had two stagflationary shocks and with inflation recession, but debt ratios were a 100% of GDP for private and public sector advanced economies. After the GFC where had the debt crisis, mortgage, housing, bank debt, but we had deflation because it was a negative aggregate demand shock and a credit crunch. So we could ease monetary fiscal policies like we wanted. Today we have levels of debt to GDP of 350% of GDP globally, 420% in advanced economies, private and public. And we have this massive negative supply shocks. So we are not going to have only inflation, we're not going to have only stagflation. We'll have a stagflationary debt crisis, the worst of the seventies and the worst of the post-GFC period.

[Derby]

https://www.businessinsider.com/great-labor-shortage-looming-population-decline-disaster-global-economy-2022-10

The Great People Shortage is coming — and it's going to cause global economic chaos

(...) To get out of a labor shortage, economies will need a productivity boost on par with the industrialization miracle that led the world out of relative widespread poverty 250 years ago. If fewer working people are going to finance an ever-expanding welfare state, more investment in innovation and progress is needed. This is especially true for the service sector, where a majority of the labor force works in developed countries, and where productivity has been stagnating for almost 20 years now. There is plenty of room for improvement. Business models based on low-skilled labor at minimal wages are not characteristic of a high-tech country. They are a sign of regression. Therefore, it's necessary to create incentives through raising minimum wages to automate simple work wherever possible.

Change also means letting go of creaky processes, outdated business models, and obsolete industries. That means investing in cutting-edge companies: Among the world's top-10 companies when it comes to market capitalization, eight are tech companies whose success is based on products and business models that have adapted to quickly changing markets and even created markets we never knew existed. That also means making a more dynamic labor market that motivates people to find the right job. The Great Resignation has shown that we can allow workers to more dynamically switch to jobs with higher salaries that better fit their skills. And finally, that means reforming our education system. As long as one-fifth of 15-year-old students cannot read at a basic level, we won't be able to combat the challenges of population decline. The next era of work will require skills other than diligence and obedience — which is what schools primarily teach today. Creativity, resilience, and the ability to solve complex problems will be imperative skills to keep our economy running.

And a new economy will not emerge without the help of immigrants from around the world. As the population declines, countries will shift from trying to keep immigrants out to fighting over the dwindling supply of in-demand workers. To continue to attract people in the future, countries will need to start shifting their immigration strategies now. For instance, a lack of language support excludes many children of immigrants from the labor market, and high real-estate prices lead to increasing segregation, especially in large cities. Countries like Canada have tried to overcome these problems by proactively welcoming refugees and supporting new residents. This rejection of unequal treatment and discrimination will pay off in the long run as the world's most important resource, human beings, becomes scarce.

If history has taught us anything, it's that progress is always accompanied by change and the courage to try something new. To combat the coming population bust, the world will need nothing less than a revolution of our minds. We need innovation and new ideas: robots and artificial intelligence that do our work for us and let everyone get the chance for good education and training. Along the way, we will have to find solutions to make this continued progress climate neutral by investing in sustainable-energy production and low-emission technologies. By doing so, we will make a better world for our children.

[Derby]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/opinion/liz-truss-kwasi-kwarteng-uk.html

Liz Truss Believed in Markets, but the Markets Did Not Believe in Her

(...)The mini-budget that ended Mr. Kwarteng’s tenure as chancellor of the Exchequer and crashed the pound can be seen as a utopian gesture, an act of voluntarism designed to jolt the British people out of their post-pandemic torpor through its very boldness. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed to have believed that by patching together all of the most radical policies of Thatcherism (while conveniently dropping the need for spending cuts), they would be incanting a kind of magic spell, an “Open sesame” for “global Britain.” This was their Reagan moment, their moment when, as their favorite metaphors put it, a primordial repressed force would be “unchained,” “unleashed” or “unshackled.”

But as a leap of faith, it broke the diver’s neck.

The outcome resulted in a divergence between the incentives of existing capitalism and the fairy tale of liberal utopia. Just as Brexiteers had discovered after the departure of the country from the European Union that the City of London actually didn’t want to be freed of the regulations that they were promising, the money markets were not waiting for an act of faith in Laffer Curve fundamentalism after all. This was “Reaganism without the dollar.” Without the confidence afforded to the global reserve currency, the pound went into free fall.

Since the 1970s, the world of think tanks had embraced a framing of the world in terms of discrete spaces that could become what they called laboratories for new policies. The mini-budget subjected the entire economy to experimental treatment. This was put in explicit terms in a celebratory post by a Tory journalist and think tanker claiming that Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng had been “incubated” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in their early years and “Britain is now their laboratory.”

The framing captures the situation well. The scientists at the bench discovered that the money markets would not only punish left-wing experiments in changing the balance between states and markets, but they were also sensitive to experiments that pushed too far to the right. A cowed Ms. Truss apologized, and Mr. Kwarteng’s successor has reversed almost all of the planned cuts and limited the term for energy supports.

Whether Thatcherism itself is dead is too soon to judge. Political religions have long afterlives.

[pollo]

De todos modos, precisamente en hostelería (sobre todo si hablamos de hoteles), tienen una opción muy simple para hacer que pagando poco merezca la pena tomar el trabajo, y es incluir el alojamiento como salario en especie (de hecho, creo que en resorts eso está muy normalizado). A lo mejor dejan de ganar algo por eso, pero al menos se garantizarían cubrir los puestos. ¿Porqué no es tan común si es tan obvio...?

Hombre, entiendo que para un hotel es trivial, pero para el Restaurante Paco, difícil lo tiene. Supongo que al final acabará habiendo convenios o asociaciones si la cosa no mejora (que yo creo que acabará petando antes).

[pollo]

https://www.businessinsider.com/great-labor-shortage-looming-population-decline-disaster-global-economy-2022-10

The Great People Shortage is coming — and it's going to cause global economic chaos

(...) To get out of a labor shortage, economies will need a productivity boost on par with the industrialization miracle that led the world out of relative widespread poverty 250 years ago. If fewer working people are going to finance an ever-expanding welfare state, more investment in innovation and progress is needed. This is especially true for the service sector, where a majority of the labor force works in developed countries, and where productivity has been stagnating for almost 20 years now. There is plenty of room for improvement. Business models based on low-skilled labor at minimal wages are not characteristic of a high-tech country. They are a sign of regression. Therefore, it's necessary to create incentives through raising minimum wages to automate simple work wherever possible.

Change also means letting go of creaky processes, outdated business models, and obsolete industries. That means investing in cutting-edge companies: Among the world's top-10 companies when it comes to market capitalization, eight are tech companies whose success is based on products and business models that have adapted to quickly changing markets and even created markets we never knew existed. That also means making a more dynamic labor market that motivates people to find the right job. The Great Resignation has shown that we can allow workers to more dynamically switch to jobs with higher salaries that better fit their skills. And finally, that means reforming our education system. As long as one-fifth of 15-year-old students cannot read at a basic level, we won't be able to combat the challenges of population decline. The next era of work will require skills other than diligence and obedience — which is what schools primarily teach today. Creativity, resilience, and the ability to solve complex problems will be imperative skills to keep our economy running.

And a new economy will not emerge without the help of immigrants from around the world. As the population declines, countries will shift from trying to keep immigrants out to fighting over the dwindling supply of in-demand workers. To continue to attract people in the future, countries will need to start shifting their immigration strategies now. For instance, a lack of language support excludes many children of immigrants from the labor market, and high real-estate prices lead to increasing segregation, especially in large cities. Countries like Canada have tried to overcome these problems by proactively welcoming refugees and supporting new residents. This rejection of unequal treatment and discrimination will pay off in the long run as the world's most important resource, human beings, becomes scarce.

If history has taught us anything, it's that progress is always accompanied by change and the courage to try something new. To combat the coming population bust, the world will need nothing less than a revolution of our minds. We need innovation and new ideas: robots and artificial intelligence that do our work for us and let everyone get the chance for good education and training. Along the way, we will have to find solutions to make this continued progress climate neutral by investing in sustainable-energy production and low-emission technologies. By doing so, we will make a better world for our children.

Yo sinceramente, creo que las cosas no van por donde dice el artículo. El problema es el modelo y el contrato social, que es lo que va a tener que cambiar. El equilibrio va a ir menos a favor del mercado y las empresas y más a favor de la sociedad y el Estado (la gente poco a poco va a valer más, especialmente la que aporte). Pero bueno, nada que no se haya hecho ya en otras épocas en economías capitalistas cuando apretó la necesidad.

Lo que ocurre es que el mundo anglo le tiene urticaria a ciertas cosas y están anclados en una forma muy específica de funcionar, que sólo se sostenía a base de desequilibrios sistémicos que ya no dan más de sí, véase la situación de EE.UU. y el brete en el que está ahora a base de políticas suicidas (putear sistemáticamente a tu población haciendo negocios obscenos con las necesidades fundamentales de las que depende a largo plazo la sociedad de tu país).

Las innovaciones y mejoras en la productividad que reclaman ya existen desde hace mucho tiempo, lastradas por diversos factores que ya se han hablado aquí muchas veces que han llevado a asignar recursos más que excesivos a las actividades más contraproducentes para la sociedad. El que siga esperando al genio de la lámpara en forma de automatización mágica, viajes espaciales e IAs infalibles se va a llevar un chasco.

Personalmente me creeré este discurso cuando webs como Amazon (que no dejan de ser los líderes a los que copian muchas otras) orienten sus ingentes cantidades de recursos cerebrales en diseñar algo que me facilite la vida y me dejen en paz en lugar de algo con lo que venderme hasta el alma de mi abuela en un frasco mientras me recomiendan otras cincuenta cosas, porque es ahí cuando sabré que quienes están a cargo arriba son gente competente con visión y no vendehumos profesionales bienpagaos. Todavía recuerdo un pasado en el que las empresas no inspiraban automáticamente desconfianza absoluta mientras me ponen publicidad buenrollista y mensajes con emotes sonrientes.
El ejemplo más paradigmático serían las telecos, especialmente las de origen anglo, con las prácticas más despreciables en todos los aspectos.

Quien sea inteligente sabrá recuperar esa forma de actuar.

[Benzino Napaloni]

De todos modos, precisamente en hostelería (sobre todo si hablamos de hoteles), tienen una opción muy simple para hacer que pagando poco merezca la pena tomar el trabajo, y es incluir el alojamiento como salario en especie (de hecho, creo que en resorts eso está muy normalizado). A lo mejor dejan de ganar algo por eso, pero al menos se garantizarían cubrir los puestos. ¿Porqué no es tan común si es tan obvio...?

Hombre, entiendo que para un hotel es trivial, pero para el Restaurante Paco, difícil lo tiene. Supongo que al final acabará habiendo convenios o asociaciones si la cosa no mejora (que yo creo que acabará petando antes).

No es solo la Tasca de Pepe. En general hay mucha atomización del tejido empresarial español. Otro ejemplo son los transportistas. Como no se asocian ni saben comprar el combustible a futuros, cosa que sí hacen los grandes y las aerolíneas, cada vez que hay una crisis de precios del combustible salen a manifestarse "porque no nos sale a cuenta".

Sólo viendo los márgenes ridículos con los que opera buena parte de la hostelería se ve claro por qué no pueden subir un céntimo sus gastos.

De todos modos sigo pensando que "no mentar a la bicha" es un factor igual de importante. Si se casca en público que el precio del ladrillo es un obstáculo para la economía real y que las empresas contraten, es el fin. De momento ya estamos en la etapa de calma tensa y silencio incómodo. Se aparenta normalidad mientras por lo bajini se reza para que "esto se pase rápido". Pero pesa demasiado el recuerdo de la crisis.

Tic-tac tic-tac...

[Saturio]

En otro orden de cosas...

Hoy el primer batacazo de estar ronda de resultados.

Tesla -6,41 para totalizar un -30,92 en el último mes..

En un primer vistazo podría ser incomprensible porque sus ingresos (ventas) han crecido un 41,61% interanual (un pelín menos que su "guiance"). El problema es que en terminos trimestrales la cosa no pinta tan bien. Los ingresos de este tercer trimestre han sido inferiores al del segundo y al del primero del año.

Netflix pasó el examen y fue recompensada ayer con una subida bestial pero hoy ya se ha dejado un -1,55. El mes les sale en verde con un +13,21

[Derby]

[Derby]

https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1583147726123909121

The 10 year yield is approaching the year 2008 highs in vertical fashion. Back then debt to GDP was half of what it was now and everything fell apart.
Incidentally the Fed then told the public it forecasted no recession same as they do now.
$TNX

[Rocoso]

Home Sales, Listings Plunge Over 20% in September—Most on Record Aside From Pandemic Start

https://investors.redfin.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/816/home-sales-listings-plunge-over-20-in-septembermost-on

[sudden and sharp]

Aquí explican lo de la deuda UK... más en línea de pp.cc. que de El Arquitecto... todo hay que decirlo:

Si los fondos de pensiones empiezan a necesitar dinero en efectivo de inmediato para cubrir sus posiciones de pérdida en sus contratos de swap, entonces tienen que vender cualquier activo líquido que tengan en sus libros para conseguir dinero en efectivo o quebrarse. Se ven obligados a vender sus tenencias de bonos del Estado, lo que en el mercado más amplio aumenta la oferta y hace bajar el precio y hace subir los rendimientos. Y esto es lo que ha sucedido, y aún sucede en Reino Unido. El hundimiento de los bonos del Tesoro británico no ha tenido nada que ver con la posición fiscal del gobierno. A medida que los inversores del mercado de bonos tratan de venderlos, los fondos de pensiones se enfrentan a nuevas peticiones de margen porque sus activos pierden valor y el ratio de financiación se deteriora. Los fondos de pensiones llaman entonces a sus gestores de LDI -algunos de los grandes bancos de inversión, como Blackrock, etc.- para que vendan sus activos, incluidas las tenencias de bonos del Estado, de modo que puedan cumplir sus obligaciones en virtud de los contratos de LDI. La secuencia se refuerza a sí misma: venta forzosa, caída de los precios, más peticiones de margen, más ventas forzosas, los tipos de interés siguen subiendo. Y así sucesivamente.

La financiarización de las pensiones, detrás del hundimiento de la libra
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/analisis/juan-laborda-financiarizacion-pensiones-detras-hundimiento-libra
Uno de los problemas relacionados es que los fondos de pensiones se gestionan según el principio de la codicia en lugar de garantizar exclusivamente el cumplimiento de las obligaciones.

[puede ser]

https://www.eleconomista.es/mercados-cotizaciones/noticias/11999976/10/22/Primeras-secuelas-del-minibudget-de-Truss-un-agujero-de-20000-millones-en-una-gestora-tras-el-caos-en-los-bonos.html

Primeras secuelas del 'mini-budget' de Truss: un agujero de 20.000 millones en una gestora tras el desplome de los bonos
Schroeders ha registrado el impacto en sus fondos de pensiones
El desplome de los bonos ha dañado sus activos bajo gestión

El día en que la primera ministra británica, Liz Truss, asume que su situación es insostenible y dimite, se conoce la primera víctima de su 'mini-budget'. Aunque ya fuera de Downing Street, su paso por el gobierno ha dejado escollos en el mercado. Es el caso de una gestora con sede en la City que se ha anotado un agujero de 20.200 millones de libras en sus activos, según una actualización contable a cierre de trimestre publicada este jueves por la firma.

Schroeders ha dado a conocer su informe de actividad entre junio y septiembre, donde se refleja que su división de Solutions ha pasado de gestionar 225.700 millones de libras a reducir esa cifra hasta los 205.500 millones. Es decir, esos 20.200 millones de diferencia. El 'hueco' se produce en el negocio de la gestora que integra los fondos de pensiones, que se vieron en serio peligro tras el desplome de los bonos británicos.

Las firmas como Schroeders utilizan la estrategia Liability Driven Investment (LDI, por sus siglas en inglés) en las carteras de sus pensionistas, lo que les permite cubrir los riesgos con derivados, utilizando activos de bonos como garantía. Tras el desplome de la deuda pública británica, ese esquema se vio sometido a gran presión, como ahora muestran las cifras.

En el caso de la gestora británica, la caída en sus activos gestionados está actualizada a fecha 30 de septiembre y las turbulencias en los bonos empezaron solo una semana antes, cuando el ya exministro de Hacienda, Kwasi Kwuarteng, anunció las rebajas fiscales que desencadenaron tal reacción en el mercado. Eso indica que el impacto en el conjunto de los tres meses puede contemplar otras razones, pero también que el 'golpe' a los fondos de pensiones ha sido contundente en tan breve espacio de tiempo. A su vez, eso explica la posterior intervención del Banco de Inglaterra (BoE).

El banco central tenía que poner un cortafuegos a las ventas masivas de bonos, ya que, a medida que caían los precios de los títulos, se sucedían los margin call (llamadas de margen) para renovar garantías. Y, para poder cumplir con las mismas, fue necesario vender otros activos, lo que ponía en riesgo un efecto en cadena.

Ahora, con el informe de actividad de la firma se han podido cuantificar en libras las consecuencias de la estrategia de Truss y Kuarteng. Si se miran los activos totales bajo gestión de Schroeders, se observa que la caída procede, principalmente, de Solutions.

En el segmento institucional, la cantidad en libras gestionadas se mantiene en los 143.800 millones; en fondos de inversión pasa de los 102.600 millones a los 97.600 millones (una diferencia de 5.000 millones) y en el negocio de alternativos mejora de los 69.400 a los 71.700 millones. Por eso, el grueso del impacto está en la división de soluciones.

Otras de las compañías que basan sus fondos de pensiones en la estrategia LDI son Blackrock, con exposición a Reino Unido o Insight Investment, entre otras. A medida que transcurra el tiempo, no solo se conocerá el impacto para Schroeders, sino que a esos más de 20.000 millones de libras en activo, se sumarán los de otras gestoras.