Oaktree - Howard Marks

The latest from Oaktree. It is really a very good letter. I tend to agree with almost all of it and strongly recommend reading all of it. Thanks goes to Pete.

http://www.oaktreecapital.com/memo.aspx

Few Highlights

Finally, I want to provide a word of caution regarding expectations for recovery. I hear predictions that things will come back next year. Earlier this month, for instance, an elevator news display cited a forecast that home prices will rise 4% in 2009, almost offsetting 2008’s decline.

People have become conditioned to expect V-shaped declines and recoveries. We saw quick downs and ups in the markets or the economy in 1987, 1990, 1994, 1998 and 2002. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Those of us who were in this business in the 1970s know different........That means that in order to be part of the investment industry in the ‘70s, you pretty much had to have your job by 1969. And that in turn means you had to be at least 21 by 1969 . . . and sixty or older today. There aren’t many of us still working.

and

First, let’s consider financial institutions and the housing market. In recent years, as everyone knows, the former combined with the latter to create a bubble based on the combination of leverage, innovative structuring and heedless buying. Institutions and housing have been gravely hurt, and they’re likely to bring harm to additional sectors of the economy. For their downward spiral to be arrested, I see four things that have to happen:

· Home prices have to stop going down.
· Home mortgages have to be made available.
· Financial institutions have to stop experiencing incremental write-offs.
· Financial institutions have to be able to raise additional capital with which to rebuild their balance sheets.

The problem I see is that each of these four things is dependent on the occurrence of another – a classic chicken-or-the-egg problem. Write-offs won’t stop until home prices stop going down. Prices won’t stop going down until mortgages become available. Mortgages won’t become available until lenders can raise capital. And capital won’t be freely available until write-offs stop coming. Which will happen first, facilitating the others? What will cause it to happen? When?

These things will happen, of course. Maybe for reasons we can’t foresee. Maybe for no apparent reason. And maybe just because things got so bad they couldn’t get any worse. I go through this only to show why I don’t see an easy or quick solution. But then I’m rarely an unbridled optimist.

There is alot more.