One more blast from the past this week.
This is from summer 2008. It’s really just a rundown of what was going on in the UK at the time – profit warnings from Taylor Wimpey and M&S were just two prominent signs that all was not well with the UK economy.
It’s a useful reminder that things were already awful before Lehman Brothers blew up. The great financial crisis didn’t begin with Lehman Brothers – Lehman just took it to a whole new level.
I could have picked any number of Money Mornings from that summer that illustrate a similar point. Indeed, when this Money Morning was written, the UK was already in recession, although it wasn’t yet official. It had started in April 2008, and it would continue until June 2009.
But what I find most interesting about this one is that, as the closing quote from private equity boss John Moulton shows, even the most bearish commentators couldn’t have foreseen just how bad things would get in the end…
How bad will the recession get?
(Money Morning, 3 July 2008)
We’ve been saying you should avoid investing in housebuilders for quite a while now.
It looks like the City has come around to our point of view with a vengeance.
Taylor Wimpey hasn’t been able to convince investors to give it the £500m it needs to shore up its balance sheet. The country’s biggest house builder by volume may face “collapse when covenants are tested in February”, said Dresdner Kleinwort analyst Alastair Stewart.
It was just one grim story among many from yesterday that all pointed to one thing – Britain is facing one hell of a slump.
Taylor Wimpey shocked the market yesterday by warning that it hadn’t yet been able to raise money from investors. Its shares ended down nearly 42% as it said it could breach its covenants by February if cash isn’t forthcoming. The company is shutting down a third of its regional offices and cutting 900 jobs. It won’t be paying a first-half dividend.
But it’s also set to write down its land bank by £550m (that’s 11%), and it’s carrying £1.7bn in net debt. As the company delicately put it, if it can’t sort out the terms of its banking facilities: “in certain negative market scenarios we might breach one or more banking covenants at the first testing date in 2009”.
It’s hard to believe that the market will be positive enough to save Taylor Wimpey by then. Reservation levels are down 45% in the 26 weeks to 26 June, compared to the same time last year; completions down by a third. No one is buying houses anymore. The group is also exposed to the US and Spain – it’s hard to imagine a worse group of countries to be building in at the moment.
That doesn’t mean the company won’t be able to find a solution, given time. The banks won’t be keen to shut down housebuilders, given their own hefty exposure to the sector. But these problems are by no means exclusive to Taylor Wimpey, although it is one of the most vulnerable.
Construction industry data from the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply showed that activity in the sector is at its lowest level since the series began in 1997. Meanwhile, costs are soaring, and unemployment is creeping up.
As Anthony Hilton said in the Evening Standard, even if housebuilders do manage to raise new money, all this will buy them is time. “But it may not be enough. They still have a huge litany of problems to work through.” The mortgage market will take a long time to defrost, and the levels of lunacy seen in recent years won’t return any time in the foreseeable future. And builders haven’t helped themselves – during the boom they’ve been building almost nothing but flats in inner-city areas, much of which “only sold because it was fuelling the buy-to-let market. They are going to take a long time to shift”.
Housebuilders aren’t the only ones in trouble, of course. We were also treated to a trading update, which was actually a profit warning, from none other than Marks & Spencer. Overall sales in the UK were down 5.3%. Clothing and general merchandise fell 6.2%, while there was a 4.5% fall in like-for-like food sales.
Why the slump has hit M&S hardest
Sir Stuart Rose claimed he’d never seen “such a sharp and continuous slowdown” in his entire retail career. And he’s right to say that M&S won’t be the only one suffering. However, it should come as no surprise that it’s the first high-profile retailer to issue a major warning. After all, as Damian Reece in The Telegraph pointed out, M&S is “the ultimate good-time grocer”.
If your average middle-class shopper is looking to make some easy cuts in the household budget, then swapping the weekly trip to M&S for a jaunt to Tesco, or even Aldi, is a relatively painless way to make some big savings. A bag of potatoes is a bag of potatoes, whether you carry it home in an M&S carrier bag (now 5p a pop) or an Asda one.
While all this trading down may well be uncomfortable for consumers, it shouldn’t be that much of a shock. The British economy has been built on debt, mainly fuelled by the housing market. The housing market has collapsed – it’s not too much of a jump to assume that the British economy will follow.
Yet we’re only now seeing the first mainstream forecasts of recession. And that’s from the traditionally bearish Capital Economics, who have now said that there is “a strong chance” the economy will enter “a technical recession” – that’s two quarters of falling GDP. But to be fair to economists, they tend to get hung up on these little technical definitions, which probably explains their reluctance to use the ‘R’ word.
As the research group’s Jonathan Lloynes goes on to say: “Whether or not the economy actually enters recession, the consequences of the downturn will be severe. Aside from the drop in house prices, unemployment could rise by almost a million by the end of 2010.”
It seems that Gordon Brown didn’t really eliminate boom and bust after all. Who would have thought it? Even the Iron Chancellor couldn’t change the laws of economic physics. What goes up, must come down. It’s just a shame that, having stacked up a debt mountain of more than £1.4 trillion, we’ve got so far to fall.
As Jon Moulton of private equity group Alchemy puts it: “It’s not the end of the world – it’s part of the cycle – but it will be pretty tough this time… there’s three years more to come – two if you’re lucky, four if you’re not.