强烈谴责美国联邦储备体系！

   今天FT文章：世界上最大的对冲基金之一，Baupost’s Seth Klarman 管着300多亿美元。他过去一年跑输了大势。因为他是一个价值投资者。他在给投资者的信中，强烈谴责美国联邦储备银行。过去一年的货币政策是：无限制的货币供给、信贷供给、利率超低。并且用中央银行来买企业债券。这严重地破坏了市场的纪律，导致了市场对风险失去感觉；垃圾往天上飞，概念满天飞。而且严重加剧了贫富悬殊。劳动人民继续往下沉，失业和沾不到资产价格膨胀的任何好处，而有钱人和有资产的人占尽了资产价格膨胀的好处，鸡犬升天。

Seth Klarman, founder of the hedge fund Baupost Group, told clients central bank policies and government stimulus measures convinced investors that the risk was “simply gone,” leaving the market unable to meet. its role as a price discovery mechanism.

His fund’s private letter to investors, which was seen by the Financial Times, amounts to a damning criticism of recent market behavior by one of the world’s leading value investors.

Mr. Klarman criticized the Federal Reserve for cutting rates and flooding the financial system with money since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that the central bank’s measures have made it difficult to assess the health of the U.S. economy.

“With so much stimulus on the table, trying to determine if the economy is in a recession is like trying to assess if you had a fever after taking a high dose of aspirin,” he wrote. “But like the frogs in water that slowly heats up to a boil, investors are conditioned not to recognize the danger.”

The biggest problem with these unprecedented and sustained government and central bank interventions is that the risks to capital become masked even as they increase.

U.S. stocks have risen more than 75% since their March lows, while corporate debt spreads – a measure of how much additional interest corporate borrowers have to pay relative to the U.S. government – have returned to pre-Covid levels this month. 

Mr. Klarman – who founded Baupost in Boston nearly four decades ago and raised it to $ 30 billion in assets under management – underperformed the market in 2020.

For several months he has been intensifying his criticisms of the interventions of American central banks. In the last quarterly letter, Mr. Klarman called the Fed the “800 pound gorilla” that has ousted investors who typically provide liquidity in times of distress.

“The biggest problem with these unprecedented and sustained government and central bank interventions is that the risks to capital become masked even as they increase,” he said.

Mr. Klarman also said that the Fed’s policies had exacerbated economic inequalities, referring to a “K” shaped recovery which has seen “the fortunes of those already at the top leap rapidly upwards, while those at the bottom remain on an endless downward slope.”

Taking Tesla as an example, Mr Klarman said shares of the “barely profitable” electric automaker had skyrocketed “seemingly beyond all reason,” briefly making company founder Elon Musk the richest person in the world. Low interest rates have made projected cash flow more valuable, he said, a point many investors have recklessly used to justify valuations of companies that are well above historical norms.

“The further away the end result, the more the current value increases,” he wrote. “When it comes to the value of cash flow, the vast and unlimited future, which has yet to be revealed, has gained ground in a more firmly entrenched present.”

The Fed’s policies and programs “have directly contributed to exceptionally benign market conditions where almost everything is up while downside volatility is truncated,” he added. “The usual role of the market in price discovery has effectively been suspended.”

Mr. Klarman said investors were now in a constant search for yield that took them to riskier corners of the markets, including investment grade corporate debt, private credit or junk bonds.

The Fed’s drastic measures have helped boost economic activity and save struggling businesses, Klarman said. “But they also sparked two dangerous ideas: that budget deficits don’t matter and that no matter how much debt is overdue, we can effortlessly, safely and reliably accumulate more. “