Want to know why this is going to be a profitless recovery? And not just in the United States either.

Then look at the IPO (initial public offering) planned by OSX Estaleiros, a start-up ship building company. The March 19 offering aims to raise $5.6 billion. (For more on the profitless global recovery see my post https://jubakpicks.com/2010/01/19/get-your-portfolio-ready-for-the-profitless-global-economic-recovery/ )

For ship building?

This is an industry with global overcapacity. Shipyards in Korea, Japan, China, and Germany have all been forced out of business. How can this company possibly hope to float such a huge offering? Why would investors even think of putting money into such a company?

Because despite the over-capacity in the industry globally OSX Estaleiros is pretty much guaranteed to start with a big book of business thanks to the Brazilian government.

Vale (VALE), the huge Brazilian iron ore exporter, is under intense pressure to place orders for ore-carrying ships with Brazilian shipyards. One tiny problem: No existing Brazilian ship yard is currently capable of building what are the largest bulk carriers in the world.

Investors also clearly expect, with reason, that the government will throw ship building business to domestic ship yards as the country’s state-controlled oil industry develops what promise to be huge new deep water oil fields. The government has already been putting pressure on deep water rig companies to build new rigs in Brazilian yards if they want a piece of the action in developing these fields.

So Brazilian and the global investment banks have lined up to sell the OSX Estaleiros IPO: Credit Suisse (CS), Itau Unibanco (ITUB), Banco Bradesco (BBD), and Morgan Stanley (MS).  And I don’t think there’s any real doubt that the offering won’t raise the projected $5.6 billion. (Which will, by the way, make it the largest IPO in the world Banco Santander raised $8 billion in October in an offering for its Brazilian subsidiary.

But adding more capital to an industry that is already overbuilt because it found it all too easy to raise capital from governments that wanted to create a national shipbuilding industry will just make it even tougher to make money in shipbuilding unless you’ve got government-guaranteed contracts.

With more companies, globally, competing for work, the recovery in shipbuilding will see more ships built but with lower profits. And governments anxious to protect these national industries—and jobs—will keep pumping money into them rather than letting them go bust as quickly as they would without such subsidies.

Change the names and you can say the same thing about cars, solar cells, steel, and lots of other industries that have been targeted for investment by governments around the world.

It’s clear after the recent crisis that the capital markets don’t need any encouragement to misallocate capital. But they’re getting it anyway.

 Full disclosure: I own shares of Banco Itau and Vale in my personal portfolio.