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Evaluating the New Kid
Part of the assessment of a new Federal Reserve Chairman always involves trying to figure out if the new person says particular things because they are wily, and cagey, or because they don’t really have a good idea of what they’re doing.
For example, when Chairman Bernanke said on “60 Minutes” that he was “100 percent” certain that the Fed could stop inflation from happening, some people thought he was being clever and projecting the great confidence that investors presumably needed to hear from the Fed Chairman at that time. I didn’t buy that, and rather thought that anyone associated with real-life financial markets (as opposed to models) would never attach a 100% probability to anything, and certainly not something that had never been tried. Subsequent events showed that the latter was probably closer to the truth, as the Fed went from reassuring the world that it could exit whenever it was warranted, to claiming that no exit – in the sense of needing to reduce its balance sheet – was necessary. That transition in message was largely due to the slowly-developing realization that in the real world, you can’t sell $2 trillion of securities as easily as you can buy them when the Treasury is going the same way.
We are going through a similar process of “market vetting” with Yellen. Her decision to stay the course on the taper – which is surely the right course – could be wise, or it could simply be that she doesn’t make decisions very quickly. It isn’t clear right now which of these is the case.
However, I find her recent talk about inflation to be disturbing. Yes, of course we all know that she is a dove. And, given her historical record on monetary policy topics, I don’t expect her to be as concerned as others (such as Allan Meltzer in today’s Wall Street Journal) are about the prospects for inflation – in other words, I expect her to be late and slow to respond. And that theme got no lack of support today, when Yellen remarked in testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, that “In light of the considerable degree of slack that remains in labor markets and the continuation of inflation below the Committee’s 2 percent objective, a high degree of monetary accommodation remains warranted.” Certainly, that is no surprise, and neither is her assertion (scary though it be) that “In particular, we anticipate that even after employment and inflation are near mandate-consistent levels, economic and financial conditions may, for some time, warrant keeping the target federal funds rate below levels that the Committee views as normal in the longer run.”
I’m not too keen when the Chairman basically promises to keep interest rates below neutral levels even when unemployment and inflation are at normal levels; that’s essentially a promise to raise inflation to a level higher than the Fed’s longer-term goal. Moreover, I am also unsure still whether the Chair is fully informed with respect to the current level and trajectory of inflation itself. It is soothing to hear her acknowledge that “inflation will begin to move up toward 2 percent” (headline inflation will exceed that level eight days from now, and median inflation is already above that standard so this isn’t a difficult projection for an economist) but Dr. Yellen seems to be unaware that the main reason that core PCE and CPI inflation is below 2% today is due to the fact that in April of last year, Medicare slashed prices paid to doctors due to sequester-induced cuts. Bernanke has noted this previously, and it isn’t exactly a state secret…then again, come to think of it state secrets aren’t what they used to be. But talking about persistent inflation below 2%, when there is very little chance of that, makes me wonder whether she’s really attuned to what is happening with prices. CPI and PCE are not the right indicators to be looking at right now – a point also made clearly by the deviation over the last year of PriceStats inflation from CPI inflation (see chart, source PriceStats).
If it were Bernanke talking, we would assume that he knows where the numbers actually are and is just trying to talk the market to his way of thinking. Greenspan was a notorious numbers wonk so there is no doubt that he would know the context of what he’s talking about. But with the new Chair, we don’t really know. It may be that, since she knows she’s keeping rates down for a long time regardless of what happens, she isn’t getting too fine about the details right now. Or it may be that she is alarmed and doesn’t want to let on (I doubt this). It might even be that she doesn’t really know much about inflation, and given her past remarks on the subject of LSAP and policy stimulus – linked to above – that is a possibility we cannot truly refute at this point.
The Fed is already a year or more behind schedule when it comes to removing accommodation in time to prevent an uptick in inflation. I am looking for evidence that they know that inflation will not arrest the moment they decide they are concerned, but I can’t find it. This should worry us all.
Madness or Wisdom?
Trading, and to some extent investing, is all about knowing when markets are moving with the wisdom of the crowds and when they’re moving with the madness of the crowds. In recent years, there has seemed to be much more madness than wisdom (a statement which can probably be generalized beyond the financial markets themselves, come to think of it). Where do we stand now?
I think a recent letter by John Hussman of Hussman Strategic Advisors, entitled “An Open Letter to the FOMC: Recognizing the Valuation Bubble In Equities,” is worth reading. Hussman is far from the only person, nor even the most august or influential investor, questioning the valuation of equities at the moment. Our own valuation models have had the projected 10-year compounded real return of equities below 3% for several years, and below 2% since late April. For a time, that may have been sustainable because of the overall low level of real rates, but since the summertime rates selloff the expected equity premium has been below 1.5% per annum, compounded – and is now below 1% (see Chart, source Enduring Investments).
Hussman shows a number of other ways of looking at the data, all of which suggest that equity prices are unsustainable in the long run. But what really caught my eye was the section “Textbook speculative features”, where he cites none other than Didier Sornette. Sornette wrote a terrific book called Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems, in which he argues that markets at increased risk of failure demonstrate certain regular characteristics. There is now a considerable literature on non-linear dynamics in complex systems, including Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen by Mark Buchanan and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics . But Sornette’s book is one of the better balances between accessibility to the non-mathematician and utility to the financial practitioner. But Hussman is the first investor I’ve seen to publicly apply Sornette’s method to imply a point of singularity to markets in real time. While the time of ‘breakage’ of the markets cannot be assessed with any more, and probably less, confidence than one can predict a precise time that a certain material will break under load – and Hussman, it should be noted, “emphatically” does not lay out an explicit time path for prices – his assessment puts Sornette dates between mid-December and January.
Hussman, like me, is clearly of the belief that we are well beyond the wisdom of crowds, into the madness thereof.
One might reasonably ask “what could cause such a crash to happen?” My pat response is that I don’t know what will trigger such a crash, but the cause would be the extremely high valuations. The trigger and the cause are separate discussions. I can imagine a number of possibilities, including something as innocuous as a bad “catch-up” CPI print or two that produces a resurgence of taper talk or an ill-considered remark from Janet Yellen. But speculating on a specific trigger event is madness in itself. Again, the cause is valuations that imply poor equity returns over the long term; of the many paths that lead to poor long-term returns, some include really bad short-term returns and then moderate or even good returns thereafter.
I find this thought process of Hussman’s interesting because it seems consonant with another notion: that the effectiveness of QE might be approaching zero asymptotically as well. That is, if each increment of QE is producing smaller and smaller improvements in the variables of interest (depending who you are, that might mean equity prices, long-term interest rates, bank lending, unemployment, etc), then at some point the ability of QE to sustain highly speculative valuations goes away and we’re left with the coyote-running-over-the-cliff scenario. Some Fed officials have been expressing opinions about the declining efficacy of QE, and Janet Yellen comes to office on February 2nd. I suspect the market is likely to test her very early.
None of this means that stocks cannot go straight up from here for much longer. There’s absolutely nothing to keep stock prices from doubling or tripling from here, except the rationality of investors. And as Mackay said, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Guessing at the date on which the crowd will toggle back from “madness” to “wisdom” is inherently difficult. What is interesting about the Sornette work, via Hussman, is that it circles a high-risk period on the calendar.
For two days in a row now, I’ve discussed other people’s views. On Wednesday or Thursday, I’ll share my own thoughts – about the possible effects of Obamacare on measured Medical Care inflation.
