To Our Shareholders
Usually we begin our Letter to Shareholders with a recap of last year’s earnings, but this year all business including Leucadia’s plays second fiddle to the sad state of our body politic or more simply put the mess in Washington. It is true that unemployment is down and the economy is showing signs of a pickup, but the recovery is fragile and we think quite prone to relapse back into recession. The recovery seems more beholden to money printing by the Federal Reserve than to a growing strength in the underlying economy. It is ironic that the financial shenanigans that begat the financial crisis in the first place are being treated and ostensibly cured by financial shenanigans of our own government. Our national debt has gone up two and a half times in twelve years and government expenditures are now consuming 25% of GDP, up from a more normal 20%. All of the above is not sustainable and when interest rates get back to normal we’ll be the headline, not Greece. Without fixing our fiscal infrastructure high inflation seems inevitable. One of us loves GLD the other farmland.
In the face of this compounding wall of debt further tax cuts seem as absurd as the dream of cutting in one year annual government spending by $500 billion. And any plan that doesn’t attack entitlements is not a plan. One of us leans to the right and the other to the left, but we are sure we could agree on an imperfect compromise solution to our fiscal mess. Like children on the playground, no one gets their way all the time....MUCH MORE
Democrats and Republicans in Washington remind us of the days of the Cold War when Mutual Assured Destruction3 resulted in a stalemate between Russia and the U.S. In this new cold war between Democrats and Republicans we are the hostages to the stalemate. Last year we recommended the Simpson-Bowles Commission report as a start on a path to getting our economy back in balance. We do so again. And now to the numbers.
As you can see from the following chart, Leucadia’s stock price and book value have recovered from the trough of the Great Recession, but the stock price has a way to go to get back to the frothiness before the deluge....
...Jefferies Group, Inc.
Jefferies (NYSE: JEF) is a full-service investment bank and institutional securities firm.
Jefferies offers its customers capital markets executions, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring
and other advisory services. They have 30 offices in 11 countries.
As of December 31, 2011, Leucadia owns 58,006,024 Jefferies common shares, approximately 29% of all shares outstanding, for a total investment of $980.1 million. At year end, Leucadia carried Jefferies on its books at fair value of $797.6 million. The undersigned are both members of its board of directors.
In early November, our investment in Jefferies almost disappeared! In the aftermath of the MF Global bankruptcy, Jefferies was falsely accused of having a similarly illiquid and risky balance sheet. This coincided with a panic in the European Sovereign Debt markets and opportunistic and we believe coordinated short sellers pounded the stock. Rich Handler, Brian Friedman and management responded swiftly with what we expected, honesty and transparency.
The Bears were bloodied and beaten back. We are proud of our ownership and association with Jefferies and believe their response was their finest hour. Jefferies enjoys a great deal of good will in its middle market and we are grateful to its clients and customers who stood by them.
We look forward to management continuing to serve clients and create value for shareholders....
HT: Real Time Economics
