Morgan Stanley Roundtable on Managing Financial Trouble

Against the current backdrop of troubled credit markets and the possibility of growing defaults, a distinguished group of bankruptcy academics and practitioners explore a number of questions raised by the emergence of increasingly active distressed investors: Are these relatively new market forces and mechanisms at least partly responsible for today's historically low default rates? Can they be expected to continue keeping default rates low, even if the economy goes into recession? And perhaps most important, by preventing or delaying defaults, will these new reorganization methods end up increasing recoveries and preserving value? The second half of the discussion focuses on some of the potential problems, or obstacles to the working of these market forces. For example, how will distressed situations play out in cases involving dispersed creditors, such as the holders of CDOs and CLOs? Will there be negative side effects from other financial innovations such as credit derivatives? While acknowledging the challenges of resolving some relatively new kinds of inter‐creditor conflicts, most of the panelists expressed confidence that today's distressed investors, working within the context of a streamlined Chapter 11 process, can be expected to play a major role in preserving values for creditors. At the same time, such investors will help perform the critical economic function of ensuring, in Douglas Baird's words, “that those companies that should survive do survive” and that corporate assets, whether liquidated piecemeal or kept within the firm, end up in their highest‐valued uses with their most efficient users.     

Morgan Stanley Roundtable on Capital Structure and Payout Policy

A group of finance academics and practitioners discusses a number of topical issues in corporate financial management: Is there such a thing as an optimal, or value‐maximizing, capital structure for a given company? What proportion of a firm's current earnings should be distributed to the firm's shareholders? And under what circumstances should such distributions take the form of stock repurchases rather than dividends? The consensus that emerged was that a company's financing and payout policies should be designed to support its business strategy. For growth companies, the emphasis is on preserving financial fl exibility to carry out the business plan, which means heavy reliance on equity financing and limited payouts. But for companies in mature industries with few major investment opportunities, more aggressive use of debt and higher payouts can add value by reducing taxes and controlling the corporate “free cash flow problem.” Both leveraged financing and cash distributions through dividends and stock buybacks represent a commitment by management to shareholders that the firm's excess cash will not be wasted on projects that produce growth at the expense of profitability. As for the choice between dividends and stock repurchases, dividends appear to provide a stronger commitment to pay out excess cash than open market repurchase programs. Stock buybacks, at least of the open market variety, preserve a higher degree of managerial fl exibility for companies that want to be able to capitalize on unpredictable investment opportunities. But, as with the debt‐equity decision, there is an optimal level of financial fl exibility; too little can mean lost investment opportunities but too much can lead to overinvestment.     

摩根士丹利的新老领路人

金融危机爆发,美国政府大举增援,投放巨额资金,摩根士丹利终于渡过难关,躲过一劫。如今摩根士丹利有了新的领路人     

Morgan Stanley Roundtable on Enterprise Risk Management and Corporate Strategy

In a roundtable hosted by Morgan Stanley, a group of corporate risk officers, consultants, and bankers discuss the state of corporate risk management. The discussion focused on a number of questions: What is the primary goal of risk management, and how does it add value for shareholders? What risks do companies “get paid” to bear (for example, should oil companies hedge oil price risk or banks hedge interest rates)? And, given the accounting obstacles that FAS 133 has put in the way of would be hedgers, should companies continue to hedge exposures—and, to the extent their hedges produce “artificial” earnings volatility, how should they communicate the aims and accomplishments of their risk management program to rating agencies and investors?     

试析摩根士丹利的新政

美国的金融机构像我们的行政机构,也是急于出成绩,迫不及待,恨不能立竿见影。     

浅析高盛和摩根士丹利的转型

一、高盛和摩根士丹利的转型 在金融危机加剧的过程中,美联储宣布批准高盛和摩根士丹利提出的转为银行控股公司的请求.这是继今年美国第五大投资银行贝尔斯髓被摩根大通收购、第三大投资银行美林被美国银行收购和第四大投资银行雷曼兄弟申请破产保护之后,美国金融危机中的又一个剧烈变化.     

Morgan Stanley Roundtable on The State of Global Private Equity

In this discussion led by Alan Jones, Morgan Stanley's head of Global Private Equity, the University of Chicago's Steve Kaplan begins by surveying 25 years of academic research on private equity. Starting with Kaplan's own Ph.D. dissertation on leveraged buyouts during the 1980s, finance academics have provided a large and growing body of studies documenting the ability of private equity firms to make “sustainable” (that is, maintained over a three‐ or four‐year period) improvements in the operating performance of their portfolio companies, whether operating abroad or in the U.S. Even more impressive, the findings of Kaplan's new study (with Tim Jenkinson of Oxford and Bob Harris of the University of Virginia) suggest that these improvements have been large enough to enable PE funds raised between 1990 and 2008 to deliver returns to their limited partners that have averaged 300 to 400 basis points higher per year than the returns to the S&P 500. And given the “persistence” of PE fund returns—the tendency of the funds of the same PE firms to show up in the top quartile of performers year after year—that Kaplan has documented in earlier work, the performance of private equity seems notably different from that of mutual funds and hedge funds, where there has been little if any consistency in the returns provided by the top performers. Following Kaplan's overview of the research, four representatives of today's leading private equity firms explore questions like the following:

• ? How do the best PE firms, after paying premiums to acquire their portfolio companies and collecting large management fees, provide such consistently high returns to their limited partners?
• ? How did PE portfolio companies perform during the last recession, when many popular business publications were predicting the death of private equity—and what, if anything, does that tell us about how private equity adds value?
• ? What can PE firms do to avoid, or at least limit the damage from, the overpricing and overleveraging that tend to occur near the end of the boom‐and‐bust cycle that appears to be a permanent feature of private equity?

As Jones notes in his opening comments, the practitioners' answers to such questions “should help investors distinguish between the alpha that the firms represented at this table have generated through active management from the ‘closet beta’ that critics say results when private equity firms simply create what amounts to a levered bet on the public equity markets.”     

永乐被迫联姻国美——来自大摩的操控

2006年我们最应关注哪一个由外资主导的并购案例呢?摩根士丹利(以下全文简称"大摩")在中国投资似乎总有妙手"点石成金",在中国家电连锁行业的老大国美、老二苏宁分别盘踞香港和国内资本市场的情况下,投资老三永乐,并大力促成永乐成功登陆香港资本市场.     

Morgan Stanley Panel Discussion on Seeking Growth in Emerging Markets: Spotlight on China

The treasurer of McDonald's discusses investment opportunities in China with Morgan Stanley's chief economist and its head of investment banking in China. The consensus is that the economic outlook for the country is strong, subject to some concerns about the currency, and that ongoing reforms are expected to bring about greater stability and productivity. Progress in raising Chinese banks to international capital adequacy standards, and imposing transparency and accounting requirements, has been particularly impressive.
McDonald's first went to mainland China in the early 1990s. Thanks to its success in attracting suppliers and local financing and partners, it now has 600 restaurants and an ambitious expansion plan. For other U.S. and overseas companies, China's position as a global manufacturing center, its R&D capabilities, and its potential consumer market will lead to acquisitions of local companies, joint ventures, and other forms of direct investment. China's accession into the World Trade Organization has also opened a number of sectors that were previously restricted to foreign investors, including financial services.     

Morgan Stanley Roundtable on Private Equity and Its Import for Public Companies

The role of private equity in global capital markets appears to be expanding at an extraordinary rate. Morgan Stanley estimates that there are now some 2,700 private equity funds that either have raised, or are in the process of raising, a total of $500 billion. With this abundance of available equity capital, the willingness of private equity firms to participate in “club” deals, and the leverage that can be put on top of the equity, private equity buyers now appear able and willing to pay higher prices for assets than ever before. And thanks in part to this new purchasing power, private equity transactions reportedly account for a quarter of all global M&A activity as well as a third of the high yield and IPO markets. The stock of capital now devoted to private equity reflects the demonstrated ability of at least the most reputable buyout firms to produce consistently high rates of returns for their limited partners. Although a talent for identifying and purchasing undervalued assets may be part of the story, the ability to produce such returns on a consistent basis implies an ability to add value, to improve the performance of the operating companies they invest in and control. And in this round‐table, a small group of academics and practitioners address two main questions: How does private equity add value? And are there lessons for public companies in the success of private companies? According to the panelists, the answer to the first question appears to have changed somewhat over time. The consensus was that most of the value added by the LBO firms of the‘80s was created during the initial structuring of the deals, a process described by Steve Kaplan as “financial and governance engineering,” which includes not only aggressive use of leverage and powerful equity incentives for operating managements, but active oversight by a small, intensely interested board of directors. In the past ten years, however, these standard LBO features have been complemented by increased attention to “operational engineering,” to the point where today's buyout firms feel obligated, like classic venture capitalists, to acquire and tout their own operating expertise. In response to the second of the two questions, Michael Jensen argues that much of the approach and benefits of private equity‐particularly the adjustments of financial policies and stronger managerial incentives‐can be replicated by public companies. And although some of these benefits have already been realized, much more remains to be done. Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, is finding a way to transfer to public companies the board‐level expertise, incentives, and degree of engagement that characterize companies run by private equity investors.     

Investing in the UN Sustainable Development Goals: Opportunities for Companies and Investors

The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of ambitious targets for making the world a better place. For both companies and their investors, the pursuit of SDGs offers a “path to value” while addressing social problems—but a path that presents significant risks as well as opportunities. To prepare themselves for the SDGs, companies and investors will have to take a number of steps: (1) determine the extent of their exposures to those SDGs that are most relevant to their businesses or investment approaches; (2) set specific goals for contributing to the most relevant and material SDGs, which means among other things reflecting such goals in incentives through the use of carefully designed metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs); and (3) establish a system for measuring and reporting on contributions to the SDGs. For investors, it is important to recognize that not all SDGs are equally investable and that reporting on key SDG performance indicators is still too new and uneven to rely on for investment purposes. To overcome this problem, the author's firm has developed a tagging approach that alerts investors to companies' main SDG exposures. As better data becomes available, the metrics and reporting will improve. Although companies are increasingly referring to the SDGs in their investor communications, corporate discussion of targets and KPIs on the SDGs is rare. But reporting of such KPIs is likely to become the norm as investors begin to expect companies to report on their progress on achieving their goals. The author offers a number of hypothetical KPIs for SDGs while providing several examples of pioneering companies.     

Probability distributions and leveraged trading strategies: an application of Gaussian mixture models to the Morgan Stanley Technology Index Tracking Fund

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to assess the merit of estimating probability density functions rather than level or direction forecasts for one-day-ahead forecasts of the Morgan Stanley Technology Index Tracking Fund (MTK). This is implemented using a Gaussian mixture model neural network, benchmarking the results against standard forecasting models, namely a naïve model, a moving average convergence divergence technical model (MACD), an autoregressive moving average model (ARMA), a logistic regression model (LOGIT) and a multi-layer perceptron network (MLP). Secondly, we examine the possibilities of improving the trading performance of those models with confirmation filters and leverage. While the two network models outperform all of the benchmark models, the Gaussian mixture model does best: it is worth noting that it does well on a time series where the training period is showing a strong uptrend while the out-of-sample period is characterized by a downtrend.     

资本市场国际影响力提升效应研究——来自A股纳入明晟(MSCI)新兴市场指数的证据

2018年5月15日,首批纳入明晟(MSCI)新兴市场指数的A股股票名单正式公布。我们发现,被纳入MSCI的股票(标的股票)在公告日前后有显著为正的累计超额收益。相较于主要特征相似的匹配股票,标的股票纳入MSCI后的分析师评级有显著提升。进一步研究表明,在公告日前后融资(融券)交易量显著上升(下降),而换手率没有明显变化,并且净融资交易与公告效应显著正相关。本文的发现表明,A股纳入MSCI这一事件具有明显的信息含量,传递了有关企业前景的正面信息,并促使本地市场聪明投资者进行更活跃的交易,这对促进价格发现、促成价值投资具有一定的推动作用。     

Socially Responsible Investing and Climate Change: Contradictions and Challenges

This article explores the contradiction between the articulated investment policies, screening criteria or ethical charters of socially responsible investment funds and their actions demonstrated by their portfolio selection practice. The paper provides a background to socially responsible investment and Australia's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. A discussion of renewable energy options lays the foundation for our main assertion: that this set of possible alternatives provides some new and more environmentally robust options that will better complement the underlying philosophy of funds in the socially responsible investment sector.     

地方政府投融资平台研究综述

2008年金融危机以来,我国实施经济刺激计划使地方政府投融资平台数量和规模得到了迅猛的发展。地方政府投融资平台对地方经济发展作出了巨大的贡献,同时也累积了巨大的风险。本文对地方政府投融资平台的国内外相关文献作了梳理和评述,以期对未来相关领域的深入研究有所裨益。     

国外指数化投资的发展与研究述评

指数化投资方法在近40年的发展中已成为被动投资领域中重要的投资方法。它是以复制和追踪某一市场指数为目标,根据证券价格指数编制原理与成份股及指数历史价格走势所表现出来的内在规律,按一系列数量化的投资方法,精确构建投资组合而进行的证券投资。本文主要从国外指数化投资的发展历程、指数化投资目标的研究、指数化投资组合的构建方法及组合管理的研究三个方面进行了评述,发现对指数化投资目标的计量方式的研究、主动投资与指数化投资的结合以及指数化投资组合的动态优化是未来的研究发展方向,同时对我国指数化投资的研究和实践也有一定的启示作用。     

Perspectives Articles: Exploring Stakeholder Perspectives on What Is Affordable Health Care

Health care expenditures have accounted for increasing proportions of the U.S. gross domestic product, and the rate of growth of health care expenditures has increased over the past two decades. These two measures of assessing whether the level of health care expenditures is affordable may be appropriate in the aggregate for the United States but are not appropriate to assess whether individual stakeholder groups can afford their particular level of spending on health care. Health care is an economic good that differs from other economic goods, as it involves life and death issues, and invokes a call for a moral authority. This article explores definitions of what is affordable health care from the perspective of different stakeholders and suggests that other measures are needed to assess whether or not health care is affordable for stakeholders as one definition is not appropriate for all stakeholders.