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Do Data Matter Again?
In normal times, by which I mean before actions of the Federal Reserve became the only data point that mattered, the monthly ISM report was important because it was the first broad-based look at the most-recent month’s data.
Now that the Fed’s taper has begun – right about the time that the uncertainty of the impact of Obamacare implementation was at its peak, curiously enough – the ISM data seems to have taken on importance once again. I must say that I did not see that coming, but since guessing at the Fed’s actions every six weeks and ignoring all intervening data was so all-fired boring, I suppose I am glad for it. Looking at economic data and trying to figure out what is happening in the economy is more like analysis and less like being on The People’s Court trying to rule on a he-said, she-said case where the hes and shes are Federal Reserve officials. And that is welcome.
That being said, the January ISM report isn’t one I would necessarily place at the head of the class of importance, mainly because it is January. Still, it was an interesting one with the Manufacturing PMI dropping 5.2 points, matching the steepest decline since October 2008. The New Orders subindex plunged to 51.2 versus 64.4 last month, and Employment and Production indices also declined significantly. It’s clearly bad news, but I would be careful ascribing too much value to any January number – especially one based on a survey.
Also standing out in the report was the increase in the (non-seasonally adjusted) “Prices Paid” subcomponent, to 60.5. the jump was initially somewhat surprising to me because as the chart below – which I tweeted shortly after the number – seems to show, we have had a jump in Prices Paid that is not being driven by a concomitant jump in gasoline prices – and Prices Paid is predominantly driven by gasoline prices.
However, as I noted in that tweet, the Prices Paid index is measuring the rate of change of prices (the question posed to purchasing managers is whether prices are increasing faster, slower, or about the same as the month before), so just eyeballing it may not be enough. The chart below plots the 3-month change in gasoline prices versus the ISM Prices Paid subindex. What you can see is that the first chart is slightly deceiving. The change in gasoline prices has accelerated – back to zero after having been declining since February of 2013. And “unchanged” gasoline prices is roughly consistent with about 60 on the Prices Paid indicator. So, this isn’t as much of a surprise as it looked like, initially.
Still, whether it was the data or because of continued concern about emerging markets (though the S&P fell nearly as far in percentage terms as did the EEM today, leaving open the question of which is following which), stocks didn’t enter February with much cheer. But never fear, I am sure there is “cash on the sidelines” that will come charging to the rescue soon.
The past week has given a great illustration of one important difference between the price behavior of equities and commodities. That is that stocks are negatively skewed and positively kurtotic, while commodities are positively skewed and negatively kurtotic. That is to say, in layman’s terms, that stocks tend to crash downward, while commodities more frequently crash upwards. This happens because what tends to drive severe movements in commodities is shortages, where the short-term supply curve becomes basically vertical so that any increase in demand pushes up prices sharply. Exhibit one is Natural Gas (see chart, source Bloomberg), where inventories were above normal as recently as October and now are the lowest in a decade.
Exhibit two is Coffee (see chart, source Bloomberg), where drought in Brazil has lifted coffee prices 8-9% today and 35% from the five-year lows set in November. There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, I understand, but there may be less this year.
In my view, stocks remain very expensive even after this quick 5.75% loss (-2.3% today). Obviously, less so! Commodities have outperformed stocks by basically remaining unchanged, but remain very cheap. Bonds have rallied, as money has shifted from stocks to bonds. This is fine, except that 10-year notes at 2.57% with median inflation at 2.1% and rising is not a position to own, only to rent. The question is, when investors decide that it’s time to take their profits in bonds, do they go to cash, back to equities, or to commodities? If you are one of the people mulling this very question, I have another chart to show you. It is the simple ratio of the S&P to the DJ-UBS (source: Bloomberg).
I think that makes where I stand fairly clear. If both stocks and commodities represent ownership in real property, and both have roughly the same long-term historical returns (according to Gorton & Rouwenhorst), then the ratio of current prices should be a coarse (and I stress coarse) relative-value indicator, right?
But let’s shift from the long-view lens back to the short view, now that a retreating Fed makes this more worthwhile. I am not sanguine about the outlook for stocks, obviously (and here’s one for the technicians: for the first time in years, exchange volume in January was higher than last year’s January volume). However, bulls may get a brief reprieve later this week when the Employment Report is released. Yes, it’s another January data point that ought to be ignored or at least averaged with December’s figure. And that’s the point here. Last month’s Employment Report showed only a 74k rise in Nonfarm Payrolls. That weakness was likely due to the fact that the seasonal adjustments (which dwarf the net number of jobs, in December and January) assumed more year-end and holiday hiring than actually occurred. But the flip side of that is that if fewer were hired in December, it probably means fewer were fired in January. Thus, I expect that the 185k consensus guess for new jobs is likely to be too low and we will have a bullish surprise on Friday. That might help the bulls get a foothold…but it is a long three trading days away.
Time is Running Out
All the expectations for resurgent growth are running into a time problem. While the Federal Reserve continues to pump the system, hoping for that burst of energy coming out of the slump, there is really little reason to expect anything more than we have already gotten. I’ve written recently about that in the context of payroll growth and the rate of improvement in the unemployment rate. But there is also, as I say, a time problem.
The current expansion, believe it or not, is getting long in the tooth. While there have been longer expansions – the one from 1991 to 2001, fueled by a continuous decline in interest rates, a budget that was near balance or in surplus, and an asset bubble engendered by the promise of the Internet and some remarkable Wall Street pitchmen – the average postwar expansion has only been 68 months, peak to peak, or 58 months, trough to peak. According to the NBER, on which we rely to jog our memories since this was so long ago, the prior business cycle peak occurred in December 2007 and the prior trough in June 2009. So, using those average business cycle lengths, the expected date of the subsequent peak would be between August 2013 and May 2014. This latter date is especially interesting because it is approximately the current consensus on when the QE taper is expected to begin (again).
I think it’s not unreasonable to suggest that getting more than an “average” expansion in the current circumstance would be a pleasant surprise indeed. With the size of government deficits, the uncertainty engendered by the morass in Congress and the rapid proliferation of regulatory overhead (both ACA-related and other), real interest rates much closer to the likely bottom than to the likely top, and continued threat of volatility in the international political economy… it is remarkable to me that we’ve even been able to squeeze out one of “average” duration.
And all it took was a few trillions!
It is well past time when it was appropriate for the Federal Reserve to stop trying to push the economy faster. Blowing into the sail simply doesn’t work very well to make the boat go faster. It will only lead to hyperventilation.
So now we are in a situation in which the expansion is likely to begin to wind down, and very likely to do so at least partly provoked by the Fed’s tightening of policy (for lessening QE is, as we have seen from the interest rate response, clearly a tightening of policy). It may become very tempting for the Yellen Fed to continue QE as weakness manifests, but the problem is going to be that inflation is going to be heading higher, not lower, into the slowdown as the housing price inflation continues to percolate into rental prices and a weakening dollar helps other prices to firm as well.
We really are in a very dangerous situation equity market-wise, as a result of this timing issue. Over the next year inflation is going to rise, growth is (probably) going to slow, and equity earnings ex-finance are looking decidedly punk as a recent article by Sheraz Mian from Zacks Investment Research pointed out. Which is not to say, of course, that the stock market can’t or won’t continue to ramp higher…just that it is increasingly subject to sudden-breakage risk as the shelf it sits on gets higher and higher.
Food Fight at the Fed!
Now, now, children! Stop fighting! This is unbecoming!
It is apparent now that the disagreements in the FOMC – while nothing new – are becoming more significant and the hurly-burly is spilling into the public eye. It is somewhat amazing to me that the Fed is allowing this argument to be conducted in public (traditionally, all remarks by Fed officials are first vetted by the Chairman’s office). Today Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher actually questioned the Fed’s credibility! This article is worth reading, and not just for the part where Fisher says that Yellen is “dead wrong on policy.” It’s also fascinating that Fisher attributed the decision to delay the taper to “a perceived ‘tenderness’” in the housing recovery.
Below is a chart (source: Enduring Investments) of the ratio of median existing home sale prices to median household income. If this is “tenderness” in a recovery, it only shows a lack of knowledge of history: this is the second highest ratio of home prices to income we have since this particular data begins…and the first highest ratio sunk the global economy for a half-decade and counting.
On the other side of the fence were the New York Fed’s Bill Dudley and the Atlanta Fed’s Dennis Lockhart, who lamented that (Dudley) there has been no pickup in the economy’s “forward momentum” and asked (Lockhart) “Is America losing its economic mojo?” These questions, and the result of these questions during the recent FOMC meeting, illustrate two points. First, that the bar for removing never-before-seen levels of monetary accommodation has been raised so high that doves believe it is appropriate to keep the foot on the accelerator until growth is drastically above-average. As I illustrated back at the beginning of August, it is unreasonable to expect more than about 200,000 new jobs per month to be created by the economy. Repairing all of the damage is simply going to take time. We would all love to see 5% growth, but is the Fed’s job really to make sure that happens, or to try and manage the downside (or, as I personally believe, to merely manage the price level)?
The second point that the Fisher/Dudley/Lockhart comments illustrate is that the doves at the Fed are clearly in control. The hawks were completely unable even to get a marginal tapering, although the Fed had clearly indicated previously that such a taper was likely to happen.
It is a Dudley/Bernanke/Yellen Fed (and they have allies too!), and anyone who thinks that the Fed is abruptly going to find religion once CPI peeks above 2% is fighting against all historical indications. One need only consider the fact that the post-FOMC meeting statement pointed out a “tightening of financial conditions observed in recent months,” a clear reference to the rapid rise in interest rates that accompanied the initial talk about tapering. But if the Fed begged off on the taper partly because of the tightening of financial conditions, that is the rise in interest rates that was caused by an expectation that the taper would stop, then the argument circular, isn’t it? It’s impossible for them to stop, since any indication that they were going to stop is obviously going to cause interest rates to rise, which would be a tightening of financial conditions, which would keep them from stopping… Does anyone seriously think that a core inflation print of 2.1% would change that?
To the extent that cutting from 20 cups of coffee per day to 19 cups of coffee per day could be called a “bold step,” wouldn’t the best time to take such a “bold step” with monetary policy be when the equity markets are at their highs and real estate markets back above their long-term value anchors?
And yet, the initial enthusiasm for the stock market for the continuation of QE seems to have faded rapidly. The entire post-FOMC rally that caused such joy around the offices of CNBC last Wednesday has been erased. Interestingly, the initial spike in commodities prices has also been erased, which is more curious since commodities prices don’t depend on growth as much as they do on inflation. And 10-year inflation expectations are back around 2.25%, basically the highest level they have seen since the Q2 swoon (see chart, source Bloomberg). So, as usual, I am flummoxed by the behavior of commodities.
I know that there is a great deal of confidence in some quarters that the Federal Reserve can keep its foot on the gas until such time as inflation actually rises to a level that concerns them. I cannot imagine the reason for such confidence when the drivers of the car are such committed doves. There are multiple problems undermining my confidence in such a possibility. There is the “Wesbury hypothesis” that the Fed will adjust its definition of what worries them about inflation – a hypothesis which, after this month’s FOMC meeting, should be even more compelling. There is the fact that there is no evidence I am aware of that the Fed was able to easily restrain inflation after it came unglued in any prior episode (and no one knows where and when and how it will come unglued). And finally, it isn’t clear to me how the Fed would go about restraining inflation anyway, given the overabundance of excess reserves and the fact that those reserves insulate any inflation process against the tender ministrations of the central bank.
One thing seems to be sure. The food fight at the Fed is not likely to end soon, and together with the dysfunction on Capitol Hill is raises the very real question of whether anything economically helpful is going to be accomplished in Washington DC this year.
