A busy few months……

We’ve begun to work with Richard Pritzlaff and the Biophilia Foundation on an exciting business development in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Richard and his partners have been buying farms (primarily in Maryland) for several years. The farms are reconfigured to reduce nutrient runoff and enhance wildlife habitat and other ecosystem services while maintaining there viability as productive farms (by adding a few new environmental agricultural commodities to the management).

We are now involved in developing a plan and a fund to expand the scope and impact of the venture. Our intentions are to provide new sources of finance/funding to the Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts.

Second, we have received a Rhode Island USDA Conservation Innovation Grant to develop a pilot water use exchange (with related ecosystem service components) in southern Rhode Island. It is an interesting opportunity to develop protocols for water use exchanges that link changes in water use/improvements in water quality to enhancements of other ecosystem services.

Our third project is the New England EcoServices Trust – as yet unfunded (we’ve provided some initial funding and are partnering with the Conservation Law Foundation).

We plan to develop new money flow for conservation by creating a new financial vehicle, the New England EcoServices Trust (NEST). Our ‘green bank’ will make low- or no-interest loans to farmers and forest landowners for conservation practices. It will support sustainable forestry, promote clean water, increase biodiversity through habitat improvements, and be a catalyst for a number of other important conservation practices.

Second, the Trust will support small green business development through loans and micro-investments. Economic development will occur as forest landowners and farmers earn additional income with cottage industries growing and producing traditional as well as specialty items such as witch hazel or bio-energy crops – an array of new local products and services. Farmers will be able to transition to organic farming, add small scale poultry and livestock operations, restart local processing operations, and meet the high demand for specialty products.

Last, and undoubtedly the most complex, is to create an Exchange for ‘green credits’. The Exchange will trade credits for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and water quality – linking conservation practices to a regionally regulated credit marketplace. Landowners implementing conservation practices (e.g., reduction in nutrient runoff from farm operations) would generate credits and receive revenue from credit buyers (e.g., a town unable to reduce runoff to regulated levels). This revenue would help to support the conservation and economic development activities of ‘green bank’ loan recipients, allowing funds to be returned to the bank in a self-replenishing system.

A statement from Justice Souter’s acceptance speech when sworn in to the Supreme Court:

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=detail&hearing=668

Hearing on Addressing Price Volatility in Climate Change Legislation

Ray Dalio, Chief Investment Officer, Bridgewater Associates
By SANDRA WARD  | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR
AN INTERVIEW WITH RAY DALIO: This pro sees a long and painful depression.
NOBODY WAS BETTER PREPARED FOR THE GLOBAL market crash than clients of Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and subscribers to its Daily Observations. Dalio, the chief investment officer and all-around guiding light of the global money-management company he founded more than 30 years ago, began sounding alarms in Barron’s in the spring of 2007 about the dangers of excessive financial leverage. He counts among his clients world governments and central banks, as well as pension funds and endowments.
No wonder. The Westport, Conn.-based firm, whose analyses of world markets focus on credit and currencies, has produced long-term annual returns, net of fees, averaging 15%. In the turmoil of 2008, Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha 1 fund gained 8.7% net of fees and Pure Alpha 2 delivered 9.4%.
Here’s what’s on his mind now.
Barron’s: I can’t think of anyone who was earlier in describing the de-leveraging and deflationary process that has been happening around the world.
Dalio: Let’s call it a “D-process,” which is different than a recession, and the only reason that people really don’t understand this process is because it happens rarely. Everybody should, at this point, try to understand the depression process by reading about the Great Depression or the Latin American debt crisis or the Japanese experience so that it becomes part of their frame of reference. Most people didn’t live through any of those experiences, and what they have gotten used to is the recession dynamic, and so they are quick to presume the recession dynamic. It is very clear to me that we are in a D-process.
Why are you hesitant to emphasize either the words depression or deflation? Why call it a D-process?
Both of those words have connotations associated with them that can confuse the fact that it is a process that people should try to understand.
You can describe a recession as an economic retraction which occurs when the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy normally to fight inflation. The cycle continues until the economy weakens enough to bring down the inflation rate, at which time the Federal Reserve eases monetary policy and produces an expansion. We can make it more complicated, but that is a basic simple description of what recessions are and what we have experienced through the post-World War II period. What you also need is a comparable understanding of what a D-process is and why it is different.
You have made the point that only by understanding the process can you combat the problem. Are you confident that we are doing what’s essential to combat deflation and a depression?
The D-process is a disease of sorts that is going to run its course.
When I first started seeing the D-process and describing it, it was before it actually started to play out this way. But now you can ask yourself, OK, when was the last time bank stocks went down so much? When was the last time the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, or any central bank, exploded like it has? When was the last time interest rates went to zero, essentially, making monetary policy as we know it ineffective? When was the last time we had deflation?
The answers to those questions all point to times other than the U.S. post-World War II experience. This was the dynamic that occurred in Japan in the ’90s, that occurred in Latin America in the ’80s, and that occurred in the Great Depression in the ’30s.
Basically what happens is that after a period of time, economies go through a long-term debt cycle — a dynamic that is self-reinforcing, in which people finance their spending by borrowing and debts rise relative to incomes and, more accurately, debt-service payments rise relative to incomes. At cycle peaks, assets are bought on leverage at high-enough prices that the cash flows they produce aren’t adequate to service the debt. The incomes aren’t adequate to service the debt. Then begins the reversal process, and that becomes self-reinforcing, too. In the simplest sense, the country reaches the point when it needs a debt restructuring. General Motors is a metaphor for the United States.
As goes GM, so goes the nation?
The process of bankruptcy or restructuring is necessary to its viability. One way or another, General Motors has to be restructured so that it is a self-sustaining, economically viable entity that people want to lend to again.
This has happened in Latin America regularly. Emerging countries default, and then restructure. It is an essential process to get them economically healthy.
We will go through a giant debt-restructuring, because we either have to bring debt-service payments down so they are low relative to incomes — the cash flows that are being produced to service them — or we are going to have to raise incomes by printing a lot of money.
It isn’t complicated. It is the same as all bankruptcies, but when it happens pervasively to a country, and the country has a lot of foreign debt denominated in its own currency, it is preferable to print money and devalue.

Isn’t the process of restructuring under way in households and at corporations?
They are cutting costs to service the debt. But they haven’t yet done much restructuring. Last year, 2008, was the year of price declines; 2009 and 2010 will be the years of bankruptcies and restructurings. Loans will be written down and assets will be sold. It will be a very difficult time. It is going to surprise a lot of people because many people figure it is bad but still expect, as in all past post-World War II periods, we will come out of it OK. A lot of difficult questions will be asked of policy makers. The government decision-making mechanism is going to be tested, because different people will have different points of view about what should be done.
What are you suggesting?
An example is the Federal Reserve, which has always been an autonomous institution with the freedom to act as it sees fit. Rep. Barney Frank [a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee] is talking about examining the authority of the Federal Reserve, and that raises the specter of the government and Congress trying to run the Federal Reserve. Everybody will be second-guessing everybody else.
So where do things stand in the process of restructuring?
What the Federal Reserve has done and what the Treasury has done, by and large, is to take an existing debt and say they will own it or lend against it. But they haven’t said they are going to write down the debt and cut debt payments each month. There has been little in the way of debt relief yet. Very, very few actual mortgages have been restructured. Very little corporate debt has been restructured.
The Federal Reserve, in particular, has done a number of successful things. The Federal Reserve went out and bought or lent against a lot of the debt. That has had the effect of reducing the risk of that debt defaulting, so that is good in a sense. And because the risk of default has gone down, it has forced the interest rate on the debt to go down, and that is good, too.
However, the reason it hasn’t actually produced increased credit activity is because the debtors are still too indebted and not able to properly service the debt. Only when those debts are actually written down will we get to the point where we will have credit growth. There is a mortgage debt piece that will need to be restructured. There is a giant financial-sector piece — banks and investment banks and whatever is left of the financial sector — that will need to be restructured. There is a corporate piece that will need to be restructured, and then there is a commercial-real-estate piece that will need to be restructured.
Is a restructuring of the banks a starting point?
If you think that restructuring the banks is going to get lending going again and you don’t restructure the other pieces — the mortgage piece, the corporate piece, the real-estate piece — you are wrong, because they need financially sound entities to lend to, and that won’t happen until there are restructurings.
On the issue of the banks, ultimately we need banks because to produce credit we have to have banks. A lot of the banks aren’t going to have money, and yet we can’t just let them go to nothing; we have got to do something.
But the future of banking is going to be very, very different. The regulators have to decide how banks will operate. That means they will have to nationalize some in some form, but they are going to also have to decide who they protect: the bondholders or the depositors?
Nationalization is the most likely outcome?
There will be substantial nationalization of banks. It is going on now and it will continue. But the same question will be asked even after nationalization: What will happen to the pile of bad stuff?
Let’s say we are going to end up with the good-bank/bad-bank concept. The government is going to put a lot of money in — say $100 billion — and going to get all the garbage at a leverage of, let’s say, 10 to 1. They will have a trillion dollars, but a trillion dollars’ worth of garbage. They still aren’t marking it down. Does this give you comfort?
Then we have the remaining banks, many of which will be broke. The government will have to recapitalize them. The government will try to seek private money to go in with them, but I don’t think they are going to come up with a lot of private money, not nearly the amount needed.

To the extent we are going to have nationalized banks, we will still have the question of how those banks behave. Does Congress say what they should do? Does Congress demand they lend to bad borrowers? There is a reason they aren’t lending. So whose money is it, and who is protecting that money?
The biggest issue is that if you look at the borrowers, you don’t want to lend to them. The basic problem is that the borrowers had too much debt when their incomes were higher and their asset values were higher. Now net worths have gone down.
Let me give you an example. Roughly speaking, most of commercial real estate and a good deal of private equity was bought on leverage of 3-to-1. Most of it is down by more than one-third, so therefore they have negative net worth. Most of them couldn’t service their debt when the cash flows were up, and now the cash flows are a lot lower. If you shouldn’t have lent to them before, how can you possibly lend to them now?
I guess I’m thinking of the examples of people and businesses with solid credit records who can’t get banks to lend to them.
Those examples exist, but they aren’t, by and large, the big picture. There are too many nonviable entities. Big pieces of the economy have to become somehow more viable. This isn’t primarily about a lack of liquidity. There are certainly elements of that, but this is basically a structural issue. The ’30s were very similar to this.
By the way, in the bear market from 1929 to the bottom, stocks declined 89%, with six rallies of returns of more than 20% — and most of them produced renewed optimism. But what happened was that the economy continued to weaken with the debt problem. The Hoover administration had the equivalent of today’s TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] in the Reconstruction Finance Corp. The stimulus program and tax cuts created more spending, and the budget deficit increased.
At the same time, countries around the world encountered a similar kind of thing. England went through then exactly what it is going through now. Just as now, countries couldn’t get dollars because of the slowdown in exports, and there was a dollar shortage, as there is now. Efforts were directed at rekindling lending. But they did not rekindle lending. Eventually there were a lot of bankruptcies, which extinguished debt.
In the U.S., a Democratic administration replaced a Republican one and there was a major devaluation and reflation that marked the bottom of the Depression in March 1933.
Where is the U.S. and the rest of the world going to keep getting money to pay for these stimulus packages?
The Federal Reserve is going to have to print money. The deficits will be greater than the savings. So you will see the Federal Reserve buy long-term Treasury bonds, as it did in the Great Depression. We are in a position where that will eventually create a problem for currencies and drive assets to gold.
Are you a fan of gold?
Yes.
Have you always been?
No. Gold is horrible sometimes and great other times. But like any other asset class, everybody always should have a piece of it in their portfolio.
What about bonds? The conventional wisdom has it that bonds are the most overbought and most dangerous asset class right now.
Everything is timing. You print a lot of money, and then you have currency devaluation. The currency devaluation happens before bonds fall. Not much in the way of inflation is produced, because what you are doing actually is negating deflation. So, the first wave of currency depreciation will be very much like England in 1992, with its currency realignment, or the United States during the Great Depression, when they printed money and devalued the dollar a lot. Gold went up a whole lot and the bond market had a hiccup, and then long-term rates continued to decline because people still needed safety and liquidity. While the dollar is bad, it doesn’t mean necessarily that the bond market is bad.
I can easily imagine at some point I’m going to hate bonds and want to be short bonds, but, for now, a portfolio that is a mixture of Treasury bonds and gold is going to be a very good portfolio, because I imagine gold could go up a whole lot and Treasury bonds won’t go down a whole lot, at first.
Ideally, creditor countries that don’t have dollar-debt problems are the place you want to be, like Japan. The Japanese economy will do horribly, too, but they don’t have the problems that we have — and they have surpluses. They can pull in their assets from abroad, which will support their currency, because they will want to become defensive. Other currencies will decline in relationship to the yen and in relationship to gold.
And China?
Now we have the delicate China question. That is a complicated, touchy question.
The reasons for China to hold dollar-denominated assets no longer exist, for the most part. However, the desire to have a weaker currency is everybody’s desire in terms of stimulus. China recognizes that the exchange-rate peg is not as important as it was before, because the idea was to make its goods competitive in the world. Ultimately, they are going to have to go to a domestic-based economy. But they own too much in the way of dollar-denominated assets to get out, and it isn’t clear exactly where they would go if they did get out. But they don’t have to buy more. They are not going to continue to want to double down.
From the U.S. point of view, we want a devaluation. A devaluation gets your pricing in line. When there is a deflationary environment, you want your currency to go down. When you have a lot of foreign debt denominated in your currency, you want to create relief by having your currency go down. All major currency devaluations have triggered stock-market rallies throughout the world; one of the best ways to trigger a stock-market rally is to devalue your currency.
But there is a basic structural problem with China. Its per capita income is less than 10% of ours. We have to get our prices in line, and we are not going to do it by cutting our incomes to a level of Chinese incomes.
And they are not going to do it by having their per capita incomes coming in line with our per capita incomes. But they have to come closer together. The Chinese currency and assets are too cheap in dollar terms, so a devaluation of the dollar in relation to China’s currency is likely, and will be an important step to our reflation and will make investments in China attractive.
You mentioned, too, that inflation is not as big a worry for you as it is for some. Could you elaborate?
A wave of currency devaluations and strong gold will serve to negate deflationary pressures, bringing inflation to a low, positive number rather than producing unacceptably high inflation — and that will last for as far as I can see out, roughly about two years.
Given this outlook, what is your view on stocks?
Buying equities and taking on those risks in late 2009, or more likely 2010, will be a great move because equities will be much cheaper than now. It is going to be a buying opportunity of the century.
Thanks, Ray.

Three years ago we received a USDA Conservation Innovation Grant, in collaboration with economists at the University of Rhode Island, to develop a community-based ecosystem service market. The market prototype was narrowly focused on providing wildlife habitat (particularly for Bobolinks) on farm fields. By concentrating our energies, we were able to gain substantial insight about how best to market ‘green credits’, how best to contract with farmers for conservation practices that create enhanced ecosystem services, and how best to organize and conduct local and regional markets.

Today we launched a website (parts are still under development) that establishes the Nature Services Exchange. Our goal is to first provide tools for agricultural and rural communities to evaluate and measure their ecosystem services, plan for ecosystem service improvements, and monitor those enhancements over time. As systems and standards for green credit markets evolve, we will adapt those evaluation methods to align with green credit/carbon offset standards – allowing communities to use www.natureservicesexchange.com as a registry and electronic marketplace.

http://www.natureservicesexchange.com/

EcoAsset Markets has also begun developing a green credit exchange and fund for southern New England.

An interesting article hypothesizing about the Forest Service and USDA under an Obama Administration.

http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2008/12/14/news/local/news04.txt

From the Report:

This document provides guidance and additional context for users of the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS), the VCS Program Guidelines, and the VCS Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) project tools. At the beginning of each section, relevant content from the respective VCS document (VCS, the VCS Program Guidelines, and the VCS AFOLU project tools) is presented verbatim in a box after which the relevant guidance is provided. In case of any discrepancies between: a.) this guidance document; and b.) the most up-to-date versions of the VCS, the VCS Program Guidelines, or VCS AFOLU project tools documents, information contained in the documents mentioned under b.) is considered binding. This document should be cited as: “Voluntary Carbon Standard – Guidance for Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use Projects (VCS 2007.1, 2008).” VCS Association. Available at: www.v-c-s.org

The rules contained in the VCS 2007.1, VCS Program Guidelines, and the AFOLU project tools have been developed to enable high-quality AFOLU projects from around the world to generate Voluntary Carbon Units (VCUs) that are credible, robust, permanent and fungible. The result of an intensive eighteen-month development process managed by the VCS AFOLU Advisory Group and overseen by the VCS Steering Committee, these guidelines employ innovative and best-practice thinking in order to create standards that are at once rigorous and workable. After considerable public input, working groups composed of leading experts in each of the four AFOLU project categories authored this guidance and the associated AFOLU text found in the VCS, Program Guidelines and Tools. More than twenty independent reviewers, including preeminent risk experts, investors, NGO representatives and project developers supported these efforts and provided detailed feedback during the evolution of these AFOLU rules and guidance.

For the entire Report:

http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/documents/cms_documents/Guidance%20for%20AFOLU%20Projects.pdf

I’ve always experienced a sense of wonder over the impact of tiny things on our world.

Earthworms can change the chemical nature of the carbon in North American forest litter and soils, potentially affecting the amount of carbon stored in forests, according to Purdue University researchers.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081027152119.htm

My friend John Phipps posted over the weekend about big swings in the financial markets in the past couple of weeks…particularly in the last hour of trading. I’ve noticed the same things…and he also notes the same volatility in commodity markets (around 1 pm). He’s suggests that traders begin ‘to plan on and for’ the wild swings…obviously you can profit on those swings.

His concern is on the psychological effect those commodity price swings have on farmers…and the need for protective measures.

http://projects.flowingdata.com/walmart/?walmart