Making Easy Money

Yesterday's announcement that Google's Eric Schmidt will be handing the CEO reins back to co-founder Larry Page came as a shock, but with the company's aura of invincibility fading, and its core business showing signs of age, the time was right for a change. There was "an example every hour," of how triumvirate decision-making by Schmidt, Page, and co-founder Segrey Brin was hurting the company, Schmidt said. If Google wants to assure investors and consumers that rumors of its looming insignificance have been greatly exaggerated, there are a few key things that Larry has to do.

No. 1: Fix Search

Google's cash cow is its online-search advertising business, but the search results are starting to look awfully spammy. Between content farms that flood the Internet with meaningless search bait and black hat optimizers that use sleazy tricks to get top results, there are entire industries devoted to gaming Google's algorithms.

People who depend on Google for their livelihood have started to notice, and consumers are showing signs of getting antsy: There is a reason Microsoft's Bing quickly picked up 12 percent of the search market, and it's not because of its Gossip Girl product placements, or even vastly superior search results. Google has also drawn some ill will with an aggressive, some say illegal, tendency to push its own services to the top of the page.

It looks like Larry gets the seriousness of the problem. Friday, on day one of his regime, Google acknowledged the issue in a blog post, even as it downplayed its severity. "Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse," said principal engineer Matt Cutts. "The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better."

It will take more than a wonky breakdown, but it's a start.

No. 2: Find Growth

The aforementioned cash cow is still so lucrative that it's easy to forget that Google has never really succeeded in any other business. Despite the ubiquity of Gmail and YouTube, they are not yet successful stand-alone businesses. YouTube only recently made it into the black after incurring hundreds of million of dollars in losses over the years.

It's not like Google isn't aware of the problem. Witness the frenzied diversification into anything that looks hot: cars that drives themselves, social networks, and yesterday's long-expected news of a Groupon clone. But trying everything hasn't produced much of anything.

Larry needs to ditch the side projects and focus on the most promising ones: the Android mobile-phone operating system, and the mobile ad network AdMob, which even makes money from iPhones as it serves up 2 billion ads a day.

No. 3: Stop the Brain Drain

Here's an enigma for Larry to unravel: Why does a company with five-star chefs, high-tech nap pods, and free massages have to throw millions of dollars in cash money at employees to get them to stay?

Part of the problem is Google's convoluted management structure, which Page is clearly trying to fix. If a team has been working on an amazing project for a year, only to hear that it overlaps with someone else's pet project, who wouldn't want to jump ship? But it also has to do with Google's size and a potentially fatal inability to face up to an unpleasant reality. From what we hear, there's reluctance from some of the old guard to accept that Google is a massive corporation now.

There is a major intangible at play as well, something that may not be easy for someone who is more Chief Engineer than Chief Executive to grapple with. If the ambitious go-getters that make it through Google's onerous interview process sense that the cool, sexy projects are happening at Facebook, Apple, or some stealth VC project with no name, then no amount of money is going to keep them on side, no matter how big a money truck Google backs up to their cubicle.

Which leads to....

No. 4: Consider a Personality Transplant

Tech bloggers were smitten with Eric Schmidt, but for all the wrong reasons. Sure, he grew Google into a $200 billion behemoth, but he also had a weakness for creepy Big Brother jokes delivered so dryly that no one could be sure he was joking. Contrast that with the controlling and charismatic Steve Jobs, surely one of the best salesmen in modern history, with a reality distortion field that may have made enemies but also bestowed an ineffable cool on his entire company.

Larry, by all accounts, makes Eric Schmidt look like Steve Jobs.

Ken Auletta explains:

He is a very private man, who often in meetings looks down at his hand-held Android device, who is not a comfortable public speaker, who hates to have a regimented schedule, who thinks it is an inefficient use of his time to invest too much of it in meetings with journalists or analysts or governments. As C.E.O., the private man will have to become more public.

Google's engineer-driven approach to new products has been a long-standing problem. (Google Wave, anybody?) Unlike Apple, it seems to build for engineers and developers, not consumers. That's great when you're making an open source mobile platform like Android, which is hot on the iPhone's tail due to its openness and potential ubiquity across multiple carriers and devices. It's not so great when you made everyone on Gmail opt into Google Buzz ’ or for creating fanboys and girls who want to use your products, even if they have to anyway.

Either way, Larry, you're going to need some charm to lend Google the same cool factor it had last time you were in charge. Maybe start by looking up from your Android phone every once in a while.

Submitted by Taylor Cottam of Economy Politics

Another Call For The Fed To Raise Rates, So Big Banks Can Start Lending And Hiring Again

As we explained in our previous article Seeking an interest rate solution,
real interest rates are negative and nominal short term interest rates
are near zero. That is not healthy. What is a healthy interest rate? My
view is that short term rates should be above 1% to make them positive
and closer to 2%.  It has caused consumer credit to contract. 



Of course, banks would argue that a healthy spread is the key to a
healthy banking sector.  Raising the rate would likely flatten the yield
curve.  What gives? 



How banks really make money



Banks are not in the business of making loans per se.  They are in the
business of making more off their assets than their liabilities.  In
normal times, underwriting consumer and business loans are the best
avenue for them to pursue that goal. 



Banks, and many hedge funds, really make money off the yield curve. They
have assets with a higher duration than their liabilities. Although
banks fund their assets with a mix of checking, demand deposits and some
longer dated term deposits (CDs), they have the ability to swap out
longer term deposits (CDs) to make their liabilities duration almost
zero. Their assets, which are typically loans to consumers and
businesses, have a longer duration.  Since the yield curve almost always
slopes upward, they make money off the yield curve spread plus the
credit spread. 



In 2008, I did some modeling for a large financial institution that had
duration of liabilities of roughly 3.5 years, based upon mostly term
deposits. They were able to bring the duration on their entire
liabilities portfolio down to a duration of less than 0.25 (3 months) by
transacting a simple fixed for floating amortizing swap based upon
their CD maturity schedule. Every quarter, with the 3 month rate sunk
below 25 bps, we would receive a large cash settlement from our
investment bank counterparty. I didn't stick for the full term of the
swap, but on a 1.5 BB principal, our estimate of earnings from the swap
alone stood at $100MM over three years. Based upon where short term
rates have stayed, they could have made 1.5 times that.



With our cost of capital below 25 bps, we did the thing that any
rational person would do.  We stopped lending to people and
businesses and lent to the US government instead.  We bought Treasuries.
In this case, the 5-year yields were above 2% bringing our expected
risk free spread above 2 points.



In 2008 and 2009, when it became obvious that Bernanke would likely
leave short-term rates low for an extended period of time, yield curve
risk became an afterthought. Those actions have been largely vindicated.
If we held the Treasuries for at least three years, the term of the
swap, we would just sit back and make money off the spread without
having to originate a single loan.



You get to be a bank, without having to do any work to originate loans.
Who needs a large origination group, when you can make a ton of money
and fire half of your employees?



Pushed or Pulled into Treasuries



During the recession there was often talk of a flight to quality.
Investors would flee risky assets and go into something safe. However,
investors are not always being pushed, they are often pulled. During the
recession, we began seeing a very steep yield curve. The spread
investors are as much lured by the allure of easy money with a steep
yield curve as they are by the fear of risky assets.

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