Where to Invest Abroad When the Dollar Falls

Jim Jubak MSN Money April 22, 2011

4/21/2011 4:00 PM ET

By Jim Jubak

Credit rating agencies are more worried than ever about America's fiscal health. Now it's time for you to act as your own credit rating agency. Here are 4 categories to help you invest abroad.

Related topics: China, Brazil, investing strategy, debt, Jim Jubak

Why should Standard & Poor's have all the fun? On April 19, the credit rating firm shook global financial markets by putting U.S. government debt on negative credit watch. If the United States doesn't get its budget act together, S&P warned, it would take away the country's AAA credit rating.

But why stop there? What about Japan? Does a country with a gross public debt of 229% of GDP deserve an AA- rating? The United Kingdom an AAA? Brazil? Colombia? Germany? How do they stack up?

Countries have credit ratings, too

It's time to become your own credit rating company and fill in the gaps left by recent headlines.

You should make up your own list of good credits and bad credits so you can figure out how to allocate your portfolio. Downgrades and upgrades are going to come faster than an avalanche moves downhill. And you'd like to be on the right side of those moves.

Jim Jubak

Seem too hard? Well, it would be a daunting task if your ratings had to include the detail that Standard & Poor's, Moody's or Fitch Ratings do. But for your portfolio purposes, you don't really care about the differences between AA+ (Belgium, according to S&P) and AA (Spain). Actually, you don't care much about this kind of static rating at all. What you want to know is the direction in which a county's debt rating is heading. For that, I want to introduce you to my own version of a bucket list -- which is more than good enough as a place to start.

It's certainly enough so that you figure out what currencies you'd like to be holding in your stock portfolio 10 years from now. (Think the U.S. dollar is going to hold its value over that period?)

My system requires just four big buckets. Let's start from the top.

Bucket No. 1: The hardest club in the world to get into. This bucket is reserved for the countries with the best-run fiscal policies in the world. And it's not very crowded. To get in, all a country has to do is match the way Norway or Chile runs its budget and economy.

A tough, hypervigilant central bank that manages a national currency to match the changing demands of just one economy is a must. Chile's central bank, for example, has raised interest rates 10 times in 11 months, to 4.5%. The most recent increase of 0.5 percentage points in April came just weeks after a similar 0.5 percentage point increase in March. Inflation isn't going to get out of control in Chile's economy if the central bank can help it -- and inflation was just 3.5% in March, mind you.

But a central bank as tough as Chile's isn't enough. You also have to have a political consensus that the country needs to live within its means -- both now and over the long run. Both Chile and Norway believe in putting money away during boom times for the inevitable busts that are part of the cycle.

Chile, despite its efforts to diversify, is a commodity economy dependent on copper. In past decades, the country has spent at the top of a cycle like the boom would last forever, only to be left with nothing in the bank when copper prices inevitably sank. In an effort to end that boom-and-bust trap, the country set up two independent panels of experts who decide when the country can run a deficit. According to the panels' rules, the government can run a deficit only when output falls short of the economy's potential in a recession or when the price of copper falls below its 10-year equilibrium price.

This system actually works. In the boom of 2003-2008, the government wanted to increase spending because, it argued, the increase in the price of copper was permanent. The panels said no, and, as a consequence, Chile went into the global financial crisis with government liquid assets three times greater than the market value of government debt. The country has been able to tap its Economic Stabilization Fund, put away in sunny days, to finance $8 billion in extra spending, which helped limit the contraction of its economy in 2009 to 1.5%.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund works in the same way, but over a longer time period. The fund is designed to take some of the money from the boom years of Norway's offshore oil production and invest it for the time when production inevitably begins to fall. This way, the country doesn't get accustomed to living on what is a temporary cash flow, thus dodging the dangers such an approach would pose for asset bubbles and wasteful spending. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is the second largest in the world -- $548 billion as of the end of 2010.

As I said, membership in this first bucket is rather limited. I'd also include Singapore and . . . well, I can't think of anyone else. (Norway, by the way, has one of the world's seven AAA credit ratings. And I'd argue that Chile, at A+, the highest rating in Latin America, is underrated.)

Bucket No. 2: Countries with manageable fiscal problems. Countries in this group do a good, but not perfect, job of managing their budgets and long-term fiscal policy. In this bucket you'll find three more of S&P's AAA countries: Germany, Canada and Australia.

They're not perfect. Australia and Canada, for example, have commodity-based economies and haven't yet developed anything nearly as effective as the countercyclical measures of Norway and Chile. Germany has a regional banking problem -- the Landesbanks -- that it refuses to face up to. A good number of these banks are overexposed to the debt of Portugal and Greece, and their capital base is, in many cases, built on stuff that looks like equity capital but isn't.

Continued: The credit quality waiting roomSingle page12Next >RELATED ARTICLESJubak on video: Putting the 'S' in BRICsStocks cheap or overpriced? 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Gas price up, food price up, what did you expect with the paper money printing press running overtime the last few years. Pay to burn corn, corn made this nation, now burn the major food crop. Everyone in Washington knows how to spend other peoples money. None know how not to spend money. Now point the finger at speculators, they don't have any control over the paper money printing press. Speculation tends to reduce jumps and dips in prices, make the wrong bet and it's your money gone, not other peoples money, that can make you burn the midnight oil.

People in Washington are going to spend your money where they can put some in their pocket. Get off this green kick, if it's worth doing, some person will do it.

Good Luck, we are going to need it.

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