Chesapeake Energy has been going through a shake-up of late, most recently at Friday’s shareholder meeting. The low, low price of natural gas is contributing to a cash squeeze. This has made all the more vital the many debates about corporate governance and the company’s investment strategy. To the list of items needing review, I would add the management’s short-term speculations on natural gas and oil prices.
Here’s a slide from a deck distributed in advance of last week’s meeting:
The finance lawyer who blogs at Economics of Contempt has a very nice summary of what is required for JP Morgan to claim that the trades at the CIO unit are allowed under the Volcker Rule because they were “portfolio hedging”. It is a more comprehensive and textual version of our requirement that JP Morgan “show me”.
JP Morgan’s $2 billion loss on credit derivatives traded by its Chief Investment Office (CIO) has moved the debate over implementation of the Volcker Rule to the front page. Many claim that these trades are a clear example of the type of speculative, proprietary trading banned by the Volcker Rule. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon insists otherwise, claiming the trades were intended as a hedge, which is clearly permitted under the Volcker Rule. Public discussion on the matter is confused, in part because many people are unclear about what defines a hedge and what defines a speculation. Who can blame the public when the premier vehicles for speculative trading are known as hedge funds?
Moreover, the current battle over financial reform and the Volcker Rule gives bankers an incentive to escalate the confusion. They want to continue their speculative trading, and that can only be done by labeling it either hedging or market making. Clarity is not their ally. When regulators, legislators and pundits advocate bright line tests for hedging, these bankers ridicule them as simpletons, accusing them of applying a dangerously unsophisticated understanding of financial markets drawn from a bygone era. These simpletons, they complain, fail to grasp the complexity of the modern world that bankers are tasked with mastering in order to serve the needs of society.
So, in order to try to make some progress and gain some insight from the JP Morgan case, let us first step back from the details of the current trades and losses, and from the debate over the Volcker Rule, and instead gain some clarity on the concept of hedging. Then we can double back and analyze the JP Morgan case in light of a sensible notion of hedging.
Two points about hedging…
Delta Airlines’ deal to buy the Trainer Refinery owned by Phillips66 was formally announced yesterday. The 8K filing is available here and includes the press release and slide show. Until yesterday the deal was being talked about as a way to hedge the fluctuating price of jet fuel oil. But the announcement makes clear that the objective is something different entirely: battling the rising jet fuel crack spread in the Northeast U.S. where Delta has critical hubs at LaGuardia and JFK.
This is one of the key charts from Delta’s slideshow highlighting the rising crack spread Delta has paid over the last three years.
The possibility of further closures of East Coast refineries threatened to drive the local spread even higher, Delta claimed. Delta believes that by investing in the refinery, including $100 million in investments to shift even more of its production to jet fuel, it will be able to source its fuel cheaper and able to bargain better for the balance of its needs.
The title of Delta’s presentation reads “Addressing Rising Jet Fuel Risk”, and it does contain talk about how “jet fuel crack spreads cannot be cost-effectively hedged”, among other language evocative of risk management and hedging. But it would be a mistake to try and understand this as a hedge in the traditional sense. Delta isn’t trying to limit volatility: at least not volatility around a mean. It’s trying to put direct pressure on the mean level of the jet fuel spread. That’s a different thing entirely.
This is an attempt to gain a strategic advantage in the airline industry. Will it payoff? Apparently yes, according to Delta’s projections. Even if the Brent-WTI spread reverses and becomes negative and many East Coast refineries reopen for business, that will likely take longer than one year, as much time as Delta believes is needed to payback the investment. Time will tell.
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Update: Liam Denning at the WSJ provides some useful statistics:
The Justice Department considers a market with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index score above 2,500 to be “highly concentrated.” In 2010, the East Coast refining market’s score hit 3,255, against a nationwide one of 680, according to the Federal Trade Commission. If Pennsylvania’s Trainer facility had stayed idle rather than be bought by Delta, the score would likely have surpassed 4,000, according to the American Antitrust Institute.
In a previous post, I criticized a report by the consulting firm IHS on the potential impact of the Volcker Rule on the US energy industry. Kurt Barrow, Vice President of IHS Purvin & Gertz and co-author of that report, has sent me the following reply:
Thank you for your interest in our report. We wanted to take an opportunity to clarify a few points about our work.
The first point in your Blog refers to “bans banks from proprietary trading” but should instead speak to “restrictions on market makers.” We have no issue with bans on bank proprietary trading, and the banks have already exited, or are Continue reading
Natural gas producers in the US are faced with tough choices. Advances in drilling technology have made low cost production from shale resources viable on a large scale, and the industry has been in a race to lay claim to the most valuable properties and to capture a competitive advantage in mastering the technology. But at the very same time, the price of natural gas has collapsed, erasing profits. This has pinched budgets and forced companies to be creative in finding fresh sources of capital. It has also forced companies to re-evaluate development plans and resource acquisitions.
The price of natural gas in the US has been falling almost continuously since mid-2008 when it peaked at over $13/mmBtu. It now lies just above $2/mmBtu.
Despite the falling price, natural gas production in the US has continued to climb. According to data from the EIA, between July 2008 and January 2012 US production increased 17%. Companies have been slow to adjust their expansion plans to the falling price. Finally, in late 2011 and early 2012, companies have begun to adjust their capital expenditures to the current low natural gas price reality. Gregory Myers has reported on this in the Financial Times, citing decisions at Chesapeake Energy and ConocoPhillips. In 2011, Encana Corp finally confronted reality and abandoned its 2008 pledge to double production.
Even as capital budgets are cutback, companies still face a need to raise new cash. The new technologies can also be applied to production of unconventional oil resources, like the tight oil in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale or Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale, as well as to development of liquid rich gas fields. Since the price of oil remains high, it can pay to develop these resources. But many natural gas companies with experience in the new technologies find themselves cash poor due to the low operating profits on their gas properties. Cash poor, and prospect rich.
These companies are selling their traditional gas assets to buy higher value shale deposits. Equity issuance is also at historically high levels. Dealogic estimates that share issuance by the sector represents one-fifth of all the US equity raised this year.
A more interesting development is to get cash from accrued gains with pre-existing hedges as reported by Ajay Makan in the FT. An example would be of a company which had entered in 2009 into short positions in forward/futures natural gas contracts for the next six years, until 2015. Right now, in March 2012, the company has on its books gas contracts with maturities varying from June 2012 to 2015. Since the gas yield curve back in 2009 when the company initiated the positions was significantly higher than the current gas yield curve, the company is sitting on significant unrealized gains. Consider just one of its many futures positions: 1000 contracts sold in 2009 with maturity March 2014. The price in 2009 of a March 2014 contract was around $4. Now the same 2014 futures price is around $3.4. Since each contract is for 10,000 mmBTU, the company can close the position and make a profit of 10,000 mmBTU x ($4-$3.4) = $6,000 per contract, for a total of $6 million.
The companies can close out these contracts in order to cash in on the gains.
A couple of questions are in order:
1. Why would the companies want to do that?
2. If the companies sold the hedges wouldn’t they become unhedged and exposed to greater risks?
The answer to the first question lies in the fact that with low gas prices, companies are not able to generate enough cash from operations to fund investment in land, drilling and exploration of shale gas fields, when the industry faces a lot of competition to own such assets. Faced with an operating cash squeeze, the companies are tapping their reservoir of gains generated by pre-existing hedges.
But, going forward, won’t the companies be much more vulnerable to price gyrations if they liquidate their hedges?
No.
The companies can immediately lock into new forward contracts at the prevailing forward price. The companies are simply realizing past gains on their outstanding contracts in order to plough the money back into their businesses. Unrealized gains are a wasted resource. The companies are free to establish new hedges. Analysts who claim that companies are taking on more risk to avoid cutting back on investment are just wrong. There is not a conflict between cashing in on unrealized gains from past hedges and being hedged going forward.
Earlier today, the consulting firm IHS released a report decrying the horrible consequences that the Volcker Rule would have for the US energy industry and the economy.
It’s a hatchet job.
Why?
Companies are often required to hedge when taking a loan, and especially companies with volatile revenues and little flexibility to quickly adjust their costs to stabilize earnings. Creditors care about being paid back, so they worry that the firm does not fall into a state of low earnings. Hedging reduces the likelihood of that happening, and consequently increases the borrowing capacity of a company.
The problems of Energy Future Holdings (EFH), recently reported in the press, highlight an interesting issue of maturity mismatch between hedging and (excessive) leverage.
What are the problems?
EFH was created in 2007 when a group of private equity investors paid $45 bn to acquire TXU, a Texas power company. The takeover, at the height of the buyout period before the financial crisis, was financed with a debt-to-equity ratio of 4.625X. The deal required EFH to hedge its medium term revenues.
A number of things have happened since then: The development of drilling techniques that tap large deposits of natural gas trapped in shale rock formations in the US and Canada. To make things worse, the deal was signed during a period of high gas prices, prompting many power companies to switch to alternative sources of energy. The additional supply and reduced demand led to a sharp fall in the price of natural gas, currently hovering around $2.30 per BTU. Even if this price makes gas powered turbines attractive, it takes time to convert existing facilities and build new ones.
EFH uses gas price as a proxy for the Texas electricity price. It shorts natural gas derivatives to make money when the price of the commodity falls. The profits from trading gas derivatives offset the decline in revenues from selling electricity at prices indexed to the spot price of natural gas.
The problem is that the hedges covering the anticipated generated output have been declining over the years and will expire in 2014. By then the company will be highly exposed to natural gas prices, and unless these prices recover significantly, the company will not be able to repay the maturing debt.
Currently, 5-year CDSs on EFH debt have an implied rate of 9.5 per cent. Without much hope, creditors have been writing off a significant portion of their loans. This is, in effect, deleveraging. They have also agreed to extend the debt maturities in a gamble that gas prices will rise significantly. This is not consistent with the slight increase in the natural gas futures curve over the next two years.
The example of EFH shows how hedging, or for that matter financial derivatives, can be used to hide more fundamental problems with many leverage deals: That temporary gains in hedges cannot support excessive long-term debt.
Without these temporary hedging profits, investors in EFH are being forced to deleverage. They can do it voluntarily as they seem to be doing, or they can do it through bankruptcy.
As a part of its restructuring of debt, the Greek government has decided to issue GDP-linked securities:
Each participating holder will also receive detachable GDP-linked Securities of the Republic with a notional amount equal to the face amount of the New Bonds of the Republic issued to that participating holder. The GDP-linked Securities will provide for annual payments beginning in 2015 of an amount of up to 1% of their notional amount in the event the Republic’s nominal GDP exceeds a defined threshold and the Republic has positive GDP growth in real terms in excess of specified targets.
The payout on these securities goes up and down with the country’s ability to pay. Yale professor Robert Shiller has been advocating this type of financing for a while, including in the most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review. A small number of countries have tried this before. The recent case of Argentina is notable since its GDP-linked bonds have paid off handsomely.
What about the U.S.? Could GDP-linked bonds be helpful in managing this country’s debt burden? That’s the case the advocates are making. Although the idea isn’t yet mainstream, it has at least made an appearance deep in the slide deck delivered by the Treasury’s Office of Debt Management to the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee last year.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the idea.
 John Parsons MIT |
 Antonio Mello UWisconsin |
Betting the Business 
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