Imagine
Imagine the collapse of an extended speculative tech bubble, resulting in a broad economic recession. Imagine if the Federal Reserve had persistently slashed short-term interest rates during the downturn, to no avail, leaving rates at just 1% by the time the S&P 500 had lost half of its value and the Nasdaq 100 collapsed by 83%. Imagine that the Fed kept rates suppressed, in the initially well-meaning hope of encouraging lending, growth and employment. Imagine that the depressed level of interest rates made investors feel starved for yield, and drove them to look for safe alternatives to Treasury bills.
Imagine that investors found the higher yields they sought in mortgage securities, which had historically always been safe, and that Fed policy inadvertently created voracious demand for more of that debt. Imagine Wall Street had weak enough requirements on capital and underwriting standards that financial institutions had an incentive to create more “product” by lending to borrowers with lower and lower creditworthiness. Imagine that by the magic of “financial engineering” and lax oversight of credit ratings, Wall Street could pass these mortgages off to investors either directly by bundling, slicing and dicing them into mortgage-backed securities or by piggy-backing on the good faith and credit of the government by transferring them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in return for funds obtained from investors in these “agency” securities.
Imagine that this Fed-induced yield-seeking speculation changed the dynamics of the housing market, and produced a bubble in home prices, coupled with overbuilding and malinvestment. Imagine that the Federal Reserve, focused exclusively on exploiting the very weak links between monetary policy and its “mandates” of employment and price stability, ignored the phrase “long-run” in those mandates, and wholly disregarded the speculative effects of its actions, which any thoughtful central banker should have viewed as a significant risk to the long-run economic health of the nation. Imagine that the then-head of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, answered questions about 1) whether speculative risks existed, 2) whether the Fed had any role in addressing them, and 3) whether there was any doubt that the Fed could halt a resulting economic downturn if it occurred, responding with a dismissive “No, No, and No.”
Imagine that this second speculative bubble collapsed anyway, producing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and that persistent easing by the Fed failed to stop any of it, just as it failed to do so during the preceding collapse. Imagine that the Fed violated the existing provisions of section 13.3 of the Federal Reserve Act (later rewritten by Congress to spell it out like a children’s book) and created off-balance sheet shell companies called “Maiden Lane” to take bad assets off of the ledgers of certain financial institutions, in order to protect the bondholders of those companies and facilitate their acquisition by purchasers. Imagine that the crisis continued, and that what actually ended the crisis was a change in FASB accounting rules in the second week of March 2009, which relieved the need for financial institutions to mark their distressed assets to market value, and instead allowed them “significant judgment” in valuing those assets, instantly removing the specter of widespread financial insolvencies with the stroke of a pen. Imagine that legislation following the crisis was heavy on paper regulation, signed assurances, and living-wills, but was light on capital requirements, and contained provisions that essentially tied the hands of the FDIC and instead gave veto power to the Treasury and the best friend of the banking system, the Federal Reserve Board itself, in deciding whether a “too-big-to-fail” bank would actually go into receivership (where bondholders often lose money, but depositors are protected) if it was to become insolvent.
Imagine that in response to the collapse of a yield-seeking mortgage bubble, a resulting global financial crisis, and a 55% collapse in the S&P 500, the Federal Reserve insisted on pursuing more of what created the bubble in the first place; refusing to admit the weak cause-and-effect relationship between monetary easing and the real economy, pushing interest rates to zero, and expanding the monetary base to the point where $4 trillion of zero-interest hot potatoes constantly had to be held by someone in the financial markets. Imagine that despite pursuing this experimentation for years, the response of the real economy was no different than could have been predicted using prior values of non-monetary variables alone. Imagine that the main effect of this unprecedented intervention was to drive the most reliable measures of stock market valuation (those best correlated across history with actual subsequent 10-12 year market returns) well beyond double their historical norms, and that it prompted massive issuance of low-grade, “covenant lite” debt, in much the same way yield-seeking speculation encouraged the issuance of low-grade mortgage debt in the preceding bubble.
Imagine that the Fed not only refused to take serious account of the distorting impact of yield-seeking speculation on the financial markets, but actually welcomed it, citing it as an example of the “effectiveness” of quantitative easing, in the appallingly misguided belief that “wealth” is inherent in the price you pay for a security, rather than in the long-term stream of cash flows that the security will deliver over time. Imagine that investors adopted the same overconfidence in a Fed “put option” that they held before the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 market collapses. Imagine the Fed failed to take any steps at all to reduce the size of its balance sheet at historically low interest rates, and painted itself into a corner because despite the weak relationship between short-term interest rates and the real economy, any normalization of policy threatened to burst a bubble that was already at a precipice.
Imagine that as a result of a massive combined deficit in the government and household sectors after the housing collapse, corporate profit margins temporarily soared to the highest level in history (an implication of the saving-investment identity under assumptions that typically hold in U.S. data). Imagine that because of this temporary elevation of profit margins, many of the borrowers that issued debt most heavily during this yield-seeking bubble were companies with elevated short-term profitability, but more fragile prospects over the full economic cycle. Imagine that energy and mining companies were among these, but were only the tip of the iceberg, exposed sooner than the rest because of early weakness in commodity prices.
Imagine if central banks took the position that when the relationship between their policy instruments and the real economy proves to be weak, the only option is to push those instruments beyond even the most extremist, historically unprecedented, and wholly experimental limits. Imagine that after years of persistent yield-seeking speculation, valuations were driven so high that the prospective 12-year return on a conventional 60% stocks, 30% bonds, 10% Treasury bills investment portfolio was compressed to just 1.6%. Imagine that corporate, state, and municipal pension funds were still assuming a 7% annual return on their investments, and that as a result of this mismatch, pension funds were becoming both massively underfunded, and vulnerable to severe capital losses over the completion of the market cycle.
Imagine that despite the delusion that low interest rates made stocks “cheap relative to bonds,” years of speculation had already created a situation where stocks were actually likely to underperform even the depressed yield on 10-year Treasury securities in the decade ahead, making the majority of corporate stock repurchases (which are typically financed by debt issuance), negative contributors to shareholder value. Imagine that the latest stick-save by central banks, in response to initial weakness following the 2015 peak of the bubble in global equity markets, had brought the median price/revenue ratio of the S&P 500 to the highest level in history, far exceeding even the 2000 peak (which was more focused on large-capitalization stocks, particularly in technology).
Imagine that all of this could be demonstrated with a century of reliable evidence, but that hardly anyone, particularly in the investment profession, gave it any more attention than the empty lip-service they offered during the tech and housing bubbles. Imagine that central bankers were focused instead on toy models that had weak theoretical and empirical foundations, inadequate transmission mechanisms, and an inability to explain more than a tiny fraction of economic variation over-and-above what could be explained in the absence of their deranged monetary activism. Imagine that they ignored real data in preference for the comfort and bizarre allegiance to a “Phillips Curve” that does not exist (Phillips’ work actually demonstrated a relationship between unemployment and wage inflation – and real wage inflation at that, given that he studied a century of British data when the U.K. was under the gold standard).
Imagine that a divided Congress, incapable of agreeing on fiscal policies to encourage productive investment in the public and private sectors, instead allowed a handful of unelected bankers and college professors to become the untethered de-facto overlords of the financial markets, repeatedly promoting destructive speculative bubbles. Imagine that nobody cared to recognize the role of financial speculation and malinvestment as the primary source of repeated economic dislocations and crises, because they were, nearly to a person, too lazy, uninformed, or dogmatic to actually get their hands dirty by questioning their assumptions or carefully examining the historical data.
Imagine that years of speculative recklessness had driven the S&P 500 to the second most extreme level of equity market overvaluation in postwar U.S. history (the third highest if one includes the 1929 peak), and to the single most extreme point of overvaluation for the median stock. Imagine that market internals and momentum had already deteriorated, and that the market had traced out an extended top-formation, as it had in late-2000 and again in late-2007.
Now imagine what might happen next.
Excerpted from original post: Imagine 20 June 2016 (www.hussmanfunds.com)
Categories: Perspectives