Archive
Shots Fired
This isn’t the first time that stocks have corrected, even if it is the first time that they have corrected by as much as 4% in a long while. I point out that rather obvious fact because I want to be cautious not to suggest that equities are guaranteed to continue lower for a while. Yes, I have noted often that the market is overvalued and in December put the 10-year expected real return for stocks at only 1.54%. Earlier in that month, I pointed out and remarked on Hussman’s observation that the methods of Didier Sornette suggested a market “singularity” between mid-December and January. And, earlier this month, I followed up earlier statements in which I said I would be negative on stocks when momentum turned and added that I would sell new lows below the lows of the week of January 17th.
But none of that is a forecast of an imminent decline of appreciable magnitude, and I want to be clear of that. The high levels of valuation make any decline potentially dangerous since the levels that will attract serious value investors are so far away. But that is not tantamount to forecasting a waterfall decline, which I have not done and will not do. How does one forecast animal spirits? And that is exactly what a waterfall decline is all about. Yes, there may be precipitating events, but these are rarely known in prospect. Sure, stocks fell sharply after Bear Stearns in the summer of 2007 liquidated two mortgage-backed funds, but stocks reached new highs in October 2007. What happened in mid-October 2007 to trigger the top? Here is a crisis timeline assembled by the St. Louis Fed. There is basically nothing in October 2007. Similarly, as Bob Shiller has documented, at the time of the 1987 crash there was no talk whatsoever about portfolio insurance. The explanation came later. How about March 2000, the high on the Nasdaq (although the S&P 500 didn’t top until September)?
What two of these episodes – 2000 and 2007 – have in common is that valuations were stretched, but I think it’s important to note that there was no obvious precipitating factor at the time. It wasn’t until well into the stock market debacle in 2007-08 that it became obvious (even to Bernanke!) that the subprime crisis wasn’t just a subprime crisis.[1]
Here is my message, then: when you hear shots fired, it isn’t the best idea to wait around to figure out why people are shooting before you put your head down. Because as the saying goes: if the enemy is in range, so are you.
And, although it may not end up being a full-fledged firefight, shots are being fired, mere days before Janet Yellen takes the helm of the Fed officially (which may be ominous since Fed Chairmen are traditionally tested by markets early in their tenure). Last night, Turkey was forced to crank up money rates by about 450bps, depending which rate you look at. When Argentina was having currency issues, it wasn’t surprising – when you have runaway inflation, even if you declare inflation to be something else, the currency generally gets hit eventually. And Russia’s central bank was established only in 1990. But Turkey, about 65% larger in GDP terms than Argentina, is relatively modern economically and has a central bank that was established in the 1930s and has been learning lessons basically in parallel with our Fed since the early 1980s. Heck, it’s almost a member of the EU. So when that central bank starts cranking up rates to defend the currency, I take note. It may well mean nothing, but since global economics has been somewhat dull for the last year or so (and that’s a good thing), it stands out as something different.
What was not different today was the Fed’s statement, compared to its prior statement. The FOMC decided to continue the taper, down to “only” $65bln in purchases monthly now. This was never really in question. It would have been incredibly shocking if the Fed had paused tapering because of a mild ripple in global equity markets. The only real surprise was actually on the hawkish side, as Minnesota Fed President Kocherlakota did not dissent in favor of maintaining unchanged (or increased) stimulus – something he has been agitating for recently. Don’t get too used to the Fed being on the hawkish side of expectations, however. As noted above, Dr. Yellen takes the helm starting next week.
The Treasury held its first auction of floating rate notes (FRNs) today, and the auction was highly successful. And why should they not be? They are T-bill credits that reset to the T-bill rate quarterly, plus 4.5bps. In the next few days I will post an article explaining, however, why floating rate notes don’t provide “inflation protection;” there has been a lot of misinformation about that point, and while I explained why this isn’t true in a post from May 2012 when the concept of the FRN program was first mooted, it is worth reiterating in more detail.
So we now have a new class of securities. Why? What constituency was not being sufficiently served by the existing roster of 1-month, 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year TBills, and 2 year notes?
I will ask another “why” question. Why is the President proposing the “myRA” program, which is essentially a way to push savings bonds (the basics of the program is that if you sign up and meet certain income requirements, the government will give you the splendid opportunity to put your money in an account that returns a low, guaranteed rate of interest). This is absolutely nothing new. You can already set up an account with http://www.TreasuryDirect.gov and have your employer make a payroll direct deposit to that account. And there’s no income maximum, and no requirement to ever roll it into an IRA. Yes, it’s true – with Treasury Direct, you will have to pay federal taxes on the interest, but the target audience for the myRA program is not likely to be paying much in the way of taxes so that’s pretty small beer.[2]
The answer to the “why” in both cases is that the Treasury, noticing that one regular trillion-dollar buyer of its debt is leaving the trough, is looking rather urgently for new buyers. FRNs, and a new way to push Treasuries on middle-class America.
Interest rates have declined since year-end, partly because equities have been weak, partly because some growth indicators have been weak recently, and partly because the carry on long Treasury securities is positively terrific. But the Treasury is advertising fairly loudly that they are concerned about whether they’ll be able to raise enough money, at “reasonable” rates, through conventional auctions. Both of these “innovations” cause interest payments to be pegged at the very short end of the curve, where the Fed has pledged to control interest rates for now, but I think interest rates will rise eventually.
Probably not, however, while the bullets fly.
[1] In a note to Natixis clients on December 4th, 2007, entitled “Tragedy of the Commons,” I commented that “M2 has grown only at a 4.4% annual rate over the last 13 weeks, and that’s egregiously too little considering the credit mess (not just subprime, as I am sure my readers are aware, but Alt-A and Prime mortgages, auto loans and credit cards too),” but the idea that the crisis was broader than subprime wasn’t the general consensus at the time by any means. Incidentally, in that same article I said “We have not entered a recession with core inflation this low in many decades, and this recession looks to be a doozy. I believe that by late 2008 we will be confronting the possibility of deflation once again. And, as in the last episode, the Fed will face a stark choice: if short rates don’t get to zero before inflation gets to zero, the Fed loses as they will never be able to get short rates negative,” which I mention since some people think I have always been bullish on inflation.
[2] I wonder how the money is treated for purposes of the debt ceiling. If the Treasury is no longer able to issue debt, then surely it won’t be able to do what amounts to issuing debt in the “myRA” program? So if they hit the debt ceiling, does interest on the account go to zero?
Guide to My Recent Re-Posts
I hope that folks are enjoying the “best-of” re-blogs I’ve been posting over the past week. Here is a summary of what has been posted and the basic topic in each case:
“I Am Become Debt, Destroyer Of Worlds” – the connection between the federal deficit, the trade deficit, and the Fed’s balance sheet.
Groucho And Holiday Inn Express – long-run real returns to equities
Why CPI Is Not Bogus – combination of two previous posts, illustrating how we know that CPI is approximately correct and explaining why inflation tends to feel higher than it is reported.
Tales of Tails – the implications of the Kelly Criterion for “the optimal bet size” in the context of investment decisions.
Perfect Drugs From Perfect Pharmacists – a discussion of Janet Yellen’s (weak) defense of Large-Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP).
U.S. Wages and Egyptian President Employment – why the Phillips curve does not imply that high unemployment should lead to disinflation, or vice-versa.
My Two Cents On Nonsense – a reminder of the bogus-ness of the “bank stress tests.”
Side Bet With Ben? – a really important post illustrating the critical – and beyond rational argument – relationship between transactional money and the price level.
Keynes, Marx, and Bernanke – a short post on the interrelationship between real wages and the real cost of capital.
Some Useful Charts And Thoughts About Personal Investing – well…this is pretty much what it says it is!
I hope you enjoy some of these “classic” posts. As always, feel free to post any comments you like and to follow me @inflation_guy on Twitter. Happy New Year!
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.
Moving Goalposts
The equity melt-up continues, with the S&P 500 now up more than 25% year-to-date in a period of stagnant growth and an environment of declining market liquidity. The catalysts for the latest leg up were the comments and testimony by Fed Chairman-nominee Janet Yellen, whose confirmation hearings began today.
Her comments should alleviate any fear that Yellen will be anything other than the most dovish Fed Chairman in decades. Ordinarily, potential central bankers take advantage of confirmation hearings to burnish their monetarist and hawkish credentials, in much the same way that Presidential candidates always seem to try and campaign as moderates. It makes sense to do so, since the credibility of a central bank has long been considered to be related to its dedication to the philosophy that low and stable prices promote the best long-term growth/inflation tradeoff. Sadly, that no longer appears to be the case, and Janet Yellen should easily be confirmed despite some very scary remarks in both the scripted and the unscripted part of her hearing.
In her prepared remarks, Yellen commented that “A strong recovery will ultimately enable the Fed to reduce its monetary accommodation and reliance on unconventional policy tools such as asset purchases.” Given half a chance to repeat the tried-and-true mantra (which Greenspan used repeatedly) about the Fed balancing its growth and inflation responsibilities by focusing on inflation since growth in the long run is maximized then inflation is low and stable…Yellen focused on growth as not only the primary but virtually the only objective of the FOMC. As with Bernanke, the standard which has been set will be maintained: we now use extraordinary monetary tools until we not only get a recovery, but a strong recovery. My, have the goalposts moved quite a lot since Volcker!
That means that QE may indeed last forever, since QE may be one of the reasons that the recovery is not strong (notice that no country which has employed QE so far…or ever, as far as I know…has enjoyed a strong recovery). In a very direct sense, then, Yellen has declared that the beatings will continue until morale improves. And I always thought that was just a saying!
I would call that borderline insanity, but I am no longer sure it is borderline.
Among other points, Yellen noted that the Fed is intent on avoiding deflation. In this, they are likely to be successful just as I am likely to be successful in keeping alligators from roosting on my rooftop. So far, there is no sign of it happening, hooray! I must be doing something right!
Yellen also remarked that the Fed might still consider cutting the interest it pays on banks’ excess reserves, or IOER. The effect of this would be to release, all at once, some large but unknown quantity of sterile reserves into the transactional money supply. If there was any question that she is more dovish than Bernanke, there it is. It was never clear why the Fed was pursuing such a policy – flood the market with liquidity, and then pay the banks to not lend the money – unless the point was merely to reliquify the banks. It is as if the Fed shipped sealed crates of money to banks and then paid them rent for keeping the boxes in their safes, closed. If you’re going to do QE, this is at least a less-damaging way to do it although it raises the question of what you do when you need the boxes back. Yellen, on the other hand, is open to the idea of telling the banks that the Fed won’t pay them any longer to keep those boxes unopened, and instead will ship them crowbars. This only makes sense if you really do believe that money causes growth, but has nothing to do with inflation.
The future Fed Chairman also declared that the Fed has tools to avert emergence of asset bubble. Of course, no one really doubts that they have the tools; the question is whether they know how and when to use the tools. And, to bring this to current events, the question is no longer whether they can avert the emergence of an asset bubble, but whether they can deflate the one they have already re-inflated in stocks, and an emerging one in property! Oh, wait, she’s at the Federal Reserve…which means she won’t realize these are bubbles until after the bubble pops, and then will say that no one could have known.
Now, it may be that the U.S. is merely nominating Dr. Yellen in self-defense, to keep the dollar from becoming too strong or something. Last week’s surprise rate cut from the ECB, and the interesting interview by Peter Praet of the ECB in which he opens the door for asset purchases (which interview is ably summarized and dissected by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard here), keeps the heat on the Fed to remain the most accommodative of the major central banks.
At least the ECB had a reasonable argument that there was room for them to paint the least attractive house on the block. Europe is the only one of the four major economies (I exclude China since quality data is “iffy” at best) where central-tendency measures of inflation are declining (see chart, source Enduring Investments).
And that is, of course, not unrelated to the fact that the ECB is the only one of the four major central banks to be presiding over low and declining money supply gowth (see chart, source Enduring Investments).
Still, the Bundesbank holdovers must be apoplectic at these developments. I wonder if it’s too late to nominate one of them to be our next Fed Chairman?
There is of course little desire in the establishment to do so. The equity market continues to spiral higher, making the parties louder and longer. It is fun while it lasts, and changing to a bartender with a more-generous pour might extend the good times slightly longer.
It is no fun being the designated driver, but the good news is that I will be the one without the pounding headache tomorrow.
[Hmmm…erratum and thanks to JC for catching it. The S&P is “only” up 25.6% YTD (my Bloomberg terminal decided that it wants to default to the return in Canadian dollars). So originally the first paragraph had “32%” rather than 25%. Corrected!]
Just Waiting for the Shaking to Stop
Obama started backing off the “absolute default” tactic by today saying “This week, if we don’t start making some real progress both in the House and the Senate, and if Republicans aren’t willing to set aside some of their partisan concerns in order to do what is right for the country [ed. note: our guys are always the patriots and the other guys are always the partisans, right?], then we stand a good chance of defaulting.” So, it’s no longer a sure thing, and the hurdle he has laid out is “good progress” rather than a hard stop.
As I have said before, there should be no default even if there is no agreement reached in our day. There simply is no reason to default unless the Administration decides it is politically opportune to do so. Last week, White House spokesman Jay Carney said “prioritization is default,” meaning that the government would somehow be defaulting by choosing to pay debtholders before others, but that’s simply wrong. Servicing the bonds is most assuredly not a default no matter what else you do. Carney might mean “prioritization is a bad political situation for us,” and he might mean “not paying some vendors would be, if we were a private company, grounds for being forced into bankruptcy,” but the US Govt isn’t a private company and there is no way to force it into default if it services its debt. And it is interesting that the President is now walking back his threats that a default was inevitable if no agreement is in place by the time the debt ceiling is reached.
I am not so sanguine that the current developing deal in the Senate is going to end the impasse. Although Senate Republicans seem willing to give the Administration all that it wants, and probably to apologize as well, the House Republicans already tried their version of a complete surrender and it was roundly rejected by the Administration (and why shouldn’t it be rejected? With the government shut down and the constant threat of default in the air, stocks are +1.7% this month. Toy with us some more, please!). By the time this crisis is over, the Republicans will probably be offering to repeal the 22nd Amendment and let Obama serve another term!
If, in fact, the standoff is resolved, it remains to be seen how quickly all of the economic data releases get back on line once the government is back at work. In any case, some of the data from this month will be suspect because the regular collection procedures will not be followed. For example, even if CPI is released on Thursday (or delayed and released before the end of the month), it will not be based on a full month’s regular survey of prices since for the last week or two no one has been collecting prices. This will be corrected in the next release (since what the price collectors are surveying is the level of prices, not the change in prices), but it may lead to near-term confusion due to the indeterminate effects. Other releases suffer from similar problems of greater or lesser order, but considering how important CPI is right now this is a prime concern.
It is a prime concern right now firstly because the artificial inflation trough induced by the original sequester has passed and inflation will be rising going forward, and secondly (and more importantly) because we will soon have a new Federal Reserve Chairman in Janet Yellen who will have to confront the issue very quickly and either burnish or reject her dovish credentials. So far, it seems clear to most of us that Yellen is a committed dove although a story that circulated in late September tried to argue that since she had been an advocate of a formal inflation target it means she is actually a hawk.
Favoring an annual inflation target has almost no implications for interpreting whether a monetary policy maker is a hawk or a dove. In fact, of the various targeting regimes proposed the non-correcting annual target is the most dovish proposal. That’s because there is no penalty for missing the target. With this sort of target, if you have 2% inflation followed by 20% inflation followed by 2% inflation, you’re back on target and the central bank need do nothing further. But, of course, prices are much higher than if you’d experienced 2%, 2%, and 2%. Other proposals, such as the long-term price-level proposal, force the central bank to steer to a particular compounded inflation level, which means that a big miss to the upside must be “paid back” by a subsequent miss to the downside. Now that is a much more hawkish proposal, because it defends long-term inflation levels rather than declaring a toothless goal. (You can read more about inflation targeting in my article here from 2010). Yellen is among those who thinks it’s important to convince everyone there is a goal, because “grounded inflation expectations” (even if they’re not rationally grounded but rather grounded because you tricked consumers into thinking you really have a target) help to restrain inflation. And on this point there is really not much evidence.
But it also misses the point in the extant environment. If Yellen desires to limit inflation, merely stating that she wants inflation to stay around 2% isn’t a policy action, or even a policy preference. It’s merely an expression of her preference for possible states of the universe. My children do approximately the same thing, with the same effect, when they say “I wish we could have a horse/travel to the Caribbean/build an indoor pool.” Yeah, and I wish I had a Jaguar, too.
Wishing doesn’t make it so. If Bernanke/Yellen want to limit inflation to 2%, merely talking about it is insufficient. What Yellen needs to do is to take action now. (Actually, they needed to take action two years ago, but it’s like James Carville famously said: “the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is right now.”) To the extent that Yellen is not urging action to reduce the Fed’s balance sheet and restrain future money growth it means that either she doesn’t really care about 2% inflation, at least in the near-term, or she doesn’t understand what causes inflation. I suppose I hope it is the latter cause, since that would be consistent with Bernanke’s position: he probably cares about limiting inflation but doesn’t understand that letting the balance sheet grow without bound is among the worst things he can do to limit inflation in the medium-term.
