If All Investments Were Private

This piece is another one of my experiments, please bear with me.

“Measure Twice, Cut Once” — A very intelligent woman (I suspect) whose name never got recorded the first time it was uttered

“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” — Warren Buffett

Photo Credit: Falcon® Photography|| In this story, TSB stands for “The Storage Bank”

Imagine for a moment:

The public secondary markets didn’t exist

Investment pooling vehicles were all private, and no one published NAV estimates

Stocks and bonds existed, but they were only formally offered through the companies themselves, and all private secondary trading was subject to a right of first refusal on the part of the issuing corporation. This includes short-term debts like commercial paper.

Banks and life insurance companies still offer products to retail savers/investors, but nonforfeiture laws didn’t exist, and CD penalty clauses were very ugly. In other words, because of no public secondary markets, the price of liquidity was very high, with a strong incentive to hold financial instruments to their maturity date.

Accounting rules are only partially standardized.

Deposit insurance still exists.

So does limited liability.

In this thankfully fictitious world, what would investing be like?

The main factor would be that liquidity would be dear. Because the “out” doors for liquidity are thin or closed for a long time, money would go into any investment only after great study. The 4 Cs of credit would be present with a vengeance — character, capacity, capital and conditions — and character would be chief among them as J. P. Morgan famously said.

This would be true even if one were investing in the stock of a firm, rather than the debt. Investing in such a world, even with limited liability, is tantamount to an economic marriage back in a time where divorce was mostly for cause, and not easy to get.