Cheap Money - Good for the Economy???

Central bank governors are falling head-over-heels to reduce interest rates, which appears to be their only super weapon to help grow economies. Japan led the way in the 1990s. Their economy has never been in a worse shape after this. I am not an economist, but I hold dearly to this belief: don't expect free lunch! 

To me, there must be a cost attached to any business borrowing. Without a cost, there is simply no pressure for the business borrower to work hard! Easy and cheap money stifles productivity. It feeds real estate and stock market frenzies. Retirees suffer, but ultimately, it does irreparable damages to the economy at large.

Yet, many central bankers are competing to show who is the fairest of them all, meaning, who can dish out the lowest rate! I suspect many are patronizing Ben Bernanke’s tailor.

This crude thought of mine focusses on a micro-aspect of easy and cheap monies in business management.

To deliver a high Return on Equity (RoE) to please shareholders, one only has to make sure that his cost of borrowing is lower than his Return on Total Assets (RTA). The latter is really what a CEO is paid to manage. By gearing up, he can achieve extraordinary RoE.

The formula is simple, really:

RoE = RTA + D/E(RTA - CoD)

If the cost of borrowing is 5% and your RTA is 7%, you will have a spread of 2%. If your Debt to Equity is 5, which means your use $5 of borrowed capital and $1 of own capital to do the business, your RoE will be [7+(5x2)]% or 17%! Your contribution as a manager of the business is only 7% and OPM (other people's money) helps boost the rest of the glowing result for you! But the source of this 5% bank rate is the life-long savings of many old men and women. How much do they get? Probably 2 to 3%! Both the mediocre manager in you and your bank manager literally laugh all the way to where? The bank!!!

In reality, few banks would allow their borrowers to have too high a debt-to-equity ratio. A ratio of 2 or 3 is probably the max you could go for. However, in Japan, a ratio of 15 is not uncommon – there, banks and big businesses tend to lean on each other. Coupled with the fact that competition is intense (and hence margins thin), even though the cost of borrowings are low, the outcome can be fatal. I suspect this is the real reason behind Japan's overall decline.

Many have also been floored by this concept too. In the heyday of high interest rates, (RTA - CoD) turns negative and multiplying this by your D/E, you will have to cry all the way to the bank instead! As an illustration, if your D/E is 2 and your RTA is 5% and your cost of borrowing is 8%, your RoE becomes [5+2x(5-8)] = -1%! How not to cry all the way to the bank!

 
History tends to repeat itself. Economic cycles are for real. It is not for me to cry wolf, but surely you don’t need a PhD in economics to exercise common sense?

INTERNAL RATE OF RETURN – WHAT IS IT?

I gave this talk in February 1994. I thought it is still useful...

Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is a term that is often heard in executive suites and boardrooms. The general perception is that the mathematics involved is too complex or forbidding and the task should best be left to one of those bright-eyed MBAs in the office. One result is that many decision-makers do not quite go beyond the figure to form conclusions, as if IRRs are absolute indicators of financial viability in project investments. What does it really mean?

The concept is actually quite simple. And IRR has many limitations.

Let me try to explain it in the plainest manner.

Say, you have $1,000 and are looking for a good place to grow your money. The easiest and most risk-free way is to put the money in a neighbourhood bank to earn interest. Banks used to pay reasonable interests on deposits, but not now. Many are paying close to zero these days! But for illustration sake, let’s assume a certain Goodie Bank is prepared to pay you an interest rate of 10% per annum. After one year, your balance should show $1,100. Let’s assume this scenario: (a) at the end of the year, you decided to withdraw the $100 interest you had earned to spend and started the new year with a balance of $1,000 in your savings book again, (b) the bank gives you the same interest rate for the next four years, and (c) you also repeat the process of withdrawing $100 at the end of every year for the next four years, and (d) at the end of the fifth year, you close the account and take back your $1,000 together with the interest of $100 that is due to you.

	Beginning Balance ($)	Ending Balance ($)	Withdrawal ($)
Year 1	1,000	1,100	100
Year 2	1,000	1,100	100
Year 3	1,000	1,100	100
Year 4	1,000	1,100	100
Year 5	1,000	1,100	1,100

Assuming that the $100 interest income that you take out every year is not subject to any form of tax, you are effectively getting a return of 10% every year for five years out of the $1,000 you put in; do not forget, though, you are also getting your $1,000 back at the end of the period.

This 10% is an IRR in its simplest form.

Is the 10% return good for you? Foremost in your mind, I suppose, is the question of inflation. True, the $1,000 you get back five years later does not have the same purchasing power as it now has. Even the $100 you take out at the end of every year also seems to be getting “smaller and smaller”. In a real life situation, bank interest rates also fluctuate from time to time. In the 1970s and 1980s, more-than-10%-a-year rates were the order of the day; now you are lucky to get 1 or 2% a year!

We are now enjoying a period of relatively low inflation, if the people compiling the CPIs are to be believed. The rate obviously also does not stay static. In the above example, with adjustment for inflation, the real IRR to your $1,000 investment for five years is much less than 10%.

In the corporate world, IRR is commonly used, sometimes very indiscriminately so, to measure the viability of a project. To be meaningful, it has to be expressed in a manner such as this: The project yields an IRR of 21.3% over an 8-year period – meaning, two elements must be present: a percentage and a time frame. There must also be other qualifications. But let us not get carried away with too many technicalities first.

IRR can be defined as the expected average yearly rate of return you will get for your investment over a given period of time, taking into account that a dollar you receive tomorrow is different in value from the dollar you receive today.

Associated with IRR is the term “discounted cash flow”. Let me try to illustrate with an example.

Let’s say someone comes to you with a seemingly interesting proposal: A project that calls for a total investment of $10 million:

            Fixed Assets                $6 million

            Working Capital         $4 million

Unless you do not believe in bank borrowings, you normally would go to a bank to raise a loan to help finance part of the capital requirement for this project. (Debt actually improves your Return on Equity – provided the cost of your debt is lower than the Return on Total Assets; mathematically expressed, ROE = RTA + D/E [RTA – CoD].) You will also want suppliers to extend credit to your purchases of supplies, raw materials, services etc to reduce your working capital needs. However, if you borrow from banks, you will have to make provisions for the payment of interests and repayment of principal on a regular basis. Mind you, the banks are not a very forgiving lot. If you make a profit, you also have to pay taxes. You have also to set aside a good sum every year to “rejuvenate” your fixed assets. In accounting jargon, you say this is a “depreciation” or “amortization” provision. There is actually no cash flowing in and out of this provision, though.

Whatever cash coming in less whatever cash going out over a fixed period is the NET CASH FLOW for the period which, for planning purposes, is usually one year. Though not exactly correct, net cash flows can also be derived as follows:

            Profit from operations

            Add     : Depreciation
            Less     : Loan repayment
            Equals : Net cash flow
               
If you prefer to leave income taxes out (which is not unreasonable since government can change tax rates and incentives from time to time), the IRR you work out is that of a before-tax one. Next is your investment horizon. It is of course your intention to make your business a going concern. There is really no question of your winding it up after a predetermined period. But let’s be realistic. If you were investing in a snooker parlour, a business where every Tom, Dick and Harry can go into, you would certainly want to make your money fast and be happy to call it quits after just a couple of years. However, if you venture into a steel mill, you are unlikely able to see any profit for the first three years. You would also hope that the state-of-the-art plant you invest in will probably remain efficient for the next ten to fifteen years. Ditto if you go into large scale cultivation of oil palms which take about three years to mature and a couple more years to reach their peak yields. For the steel mill or the palm oil business, your financial people would have to project a 20-30 year cash flow table to plan your capital needs, especially during the gestation period, and be comfortable with the level of cash flows once the project is on stream. From this cash flow, you can calculate the IRR, and see what its NPV is – if you already have a hurdle rate in mind – and estimate the payback period. You would obviously want a high IRR, a robust positive NPV and a payback period that is as short as possible. For very high risk undertakings, such as oil and gas explorations, anything less than 40% over the field life might not be tenable to one; however, most people are happy if see IRRs of 15% after-tax or so.

Let’s go back to the $10 million project. Let’s assume that you plan for a 12-year investment horizon and your accountant suggests that you finance the project with an equity capital, viz., money from your own pocket, of $7 million and raise the rest from a supportive bank. In corporate finance, you say you are going for a 30-70 debt-to-equity ratio. Your accountant lays out the following net cash flow projection for you:

End of Year	Surplus/Deficit) $ million
1	(1.5)
2	0.2
3	1.5
4	1.5
5	1.5
6	1.5
7	2.9
8	2.0
9	2.0
10	2.0
11	2.0
12	2.0

You will want to attach some value to your fixed assets at the end of your investment horizon. Let’s say you reckon they can fetch 20% of their original cost at the end of the day. You must also not forget that you have also had some net working capital in the business by then. We call these the residual or terminal values:

            Fixed Assets, 20% of M$6 million    $1.2 million

            Working Capital                                  $4.0 million
                                                                          __________
                                                                           $5.2 million

Now let me introduce the concept of “discounting”. $1.00 put in a bank today will become $1.10 if the bank pays an interest of 10% per annum. Conversely, $1.00 received a year from now is only worth $1.00/1.10 or about $0.91 today. If you apply this principle to “bring” all the future yearly net cash flows to their “present” value, you will see the following:

Period	Net Cash Flow $ million	“Present” Value $ million
1	(0.5)	-1.5/1.1 =-1.36
2	0.2	0.2/(1.1x1.1) or 0.2/(1.1)2 =0.17
3	1.5	1.5/(1.1x1.1x1.1) or 1.5/(1.1)3 =1.13
4	1.5	Repeat Process
5	1.5	Ditto
6	1.5	Ditto
7	2.0	Ditto
8	2.0	Ditto
9	2.0	Ditto
10	2.0	2.0/(1.1)10 =0.77
11	2.0	2.0/(1.1)11 =0.70
12	2.0	2.0/(1.1)12 =0.64

You will find that the factor used is simply:

 

1/(1.1)ⁿ or (1.1)^-n         where n is the period in question.

The process of bringing these future yearly net cash flows to the present time is called “discounting”. If you sum up the present values of these yearly cash flows for the twelve years, you will get:

                        $7.65 million.

By the same token, the terminal or residual value of $5.2 million has also to be discounted by dividing it with a factor of (1.1)¹², which gives

                        $1.66 million

This figure has also to be included, making the Net Present Value a total of

$9.31 million.

Compared this total with the amount of equity capital you propose to put in, which is $7 million, you see a surplus of

                    
                        $2.31 million

Obviously, the project yields an averagely more than 10% per year.

Now, if you repeat the exercise by using a factor of 1.2, i.e., you discount the future yearly cash flows by 20%, you will find that the sum of these two present values, i.e.,

                        $4.40 million

is not sufficient to cover the $7 million you propose to put in as equity capital. You have a negative NET PRESENT VALUE situation of:

                        $2.60 million

An obvious conclusion from the last exercise is that your investment cannot give you an average yearly rate of return of 20%. If that is your expectation, which may be your “hurdle” rate, then the project is, on a prima facie basis, a NO-GO for you.

The actual average yearly rate of return must therefore be somewhere between 10% and 20%. The rate which gives you a net present value of ZERO, i.e., the summation of all the cash flows – both in and out – “discounted” appropriately, is the internal rate of return of your investment in the project. You can try 12%, 14%, 15.5%, so on and so forth. But the work is simply too laborious. There are ready tables in financial management textbooks to help you with the discounting, but they normally come in whole numbers, nothing fractional ones like 1.5%. For those who are more mathematically inclined, you can use graphs to determine the rate. However, with the advent of Excel, all you need is to type =IRR(Cell A:Cell Z) and out comes the answer! The internal rate of return of this project over 12 years based on a debt-to-equity of 30-70 is

                        13.7%

I have for the sake of clarity illustrated the concept with a simple example. There is really more to it than meets the eye. For instance, your project may take a year or two to complete. You may not have to come up with all capital you need to put up in one go. To be consistent, the installments have also to be discounted according to the period they are put in to conform to this “time-value” concept of money.

The mechanics of working out IRRs is really a figure crunching exercise. Your assumptions must be able to live up to scrutiny; otherwise, it is simply a garbage-in-garbage-out exercise. Projects done devoid of business understanding and entrepreneurial foresights are not worth the paper on which they are written on. However, it has also to be accepted that no one can really foretell what will become of things in the next three to five years, let alone twelve to fifteen years! We can only rely on prevailing knowledge and sentiments to project prices and costs. How many cash flow projections have lived up to their authors’ forecasts? Few really! You may have the capacity, but would you be able to achieve the level of volume objectives you have in mind for the next so many years? Can you predict what your competitors will do? What about the impact of currency fluctuations? Can duties and taxes remain static for the next five to ten years? Your bank may revise its asking rate. Your product can also become obsolete, so on and so forth.

You may also decide to sell your business to a listed company which offers a premium that you cannot rationally refuse. Or you may want to take the business public yourself. Try taking a look at your work years later, if you know what I mean!

It is therefore also quite irrelevant to calculate IRRs to three or four decimal places.

I always caution the blind use of this investment appraisal tool. Remember the rubber glove frenzy in the mid-1980s? So many investors got carried away by a high, yet seemingly realistic, internal rate of return in the wake of a very strong demand for rubber gloves. By all account, cost of product was low; analyst would also tell you this: “You can’t go wrong with this project, IRR is fantastic. I have also done a sensitivity test. Even if I bring down the price by 10% and push the cost up by 10%, we still get an IRR of 60%.” Ditto on people who go into projects based on conventional wisdom or people who embark on businesses or products the business cycle for which are already well past the take-off phase. They will surely go wrong. (If everybody is doing discounted cash flows based on the same set of conventional assumptions, how can the conclusions be different? What many analysts failed to realize is, once the “glut” stage is reached, prices can go down by 50% and cost up by 50%, all within a year or two! No wonder so many always get their fingers burnt.)

In the world we live in today, IRR as a sacrosanct viability indicator is really suspect. But IRRs do have their usefulness.

Where of when?

Comparative analysis is one area where IRR is helpful.

Say you have three investment options in terms of plant configurations. There are all subject to the same external and internal environmental variables. For this illustration, we assume their capital cost is the same - $100,000 – but their net cash flow estimates are different, and the investments have negligible residual value at the end of Year 6:

	Option A M$’000	Option B M$’000	Option C M$’000
Original investment:	100	100	100
Net cash flow:
Year 1	40	25	10
Year 2	38	25	30
Year 3	26	25	30
Year 4	18	25	30
Year 5	16	25	30
Year 6	12	25	20
Total	150	150	150

IRR under the situation can help you to evaluate the three options in a more objective manner. Their IRRs over a six-year period are as follows:

Option A	Option B	Option C
16.9%	13.0%	12.1%

Although the original investments are the same for the three options and cash flows over the six years also all add up to $150,000 in absolute terms, the choice is very clear.

IRR is a useful quantitative method to appraise investments, but it is NOT a be-all-and-end-all one. It should be used in conjunction with a few others.

Modified Internal Rate of Return

Some argue that IRR is flawed. Firstly, it assumes that interim positive cash flows are being continuously reinvested at the same rate of return that the project is generating them. This may not be realistic. A more realistic rate, say the firm’s cost of weighted average cost of capital, should instead be used. Secondly, cash flows in the initial years are usually negative. To correct these two, a version called the Modified Internal Rate of Return is also used. The formula is:

,

For example, if an investment gives the following cash flow projection:

Period	0	1	2	3	4	5
Cash Flow	-4,000	-1,000	3,000	3,500	3,500	4,000

then, the “r” from the following IRR formula, will yield 37.5%

To calculate the MIRR, we have to know our financing cost and to assume our reinvestment rate. Let’s say they are respectively 10% and 12%. The formula above will give us a rate of 27.5%, which is significantly lower than its IRR of 37.5%.

But MIRR, like IRR, is also not a be all, end all formula in investment analyses.