Discounting is the term Wall Street uses for the idea that investors factor into today’s prices, to a greater or lesser degree, their beliefs about the future (I wrote a detailed post about the process in October 2012).
Two of the major macroeconomic factors the market is wrestling with now are the timing and extent of the Fed’s future moves to raise interest rates from their current emergency lows, and the possibility that Greece will default on its debts and exit the euro.
My experience is that almost nothing is ever 100% discounted in advance. There’s always some price movement when the event actually happens. Having said that, the coming rise in interest rates in the US has been so anticipated–and talked about by the Fed–for such a long time that there may even be a positive market reaction to the first rise. This would be on the idea that Wall Street would give a sigh of relief when there’s no more anticipatory tension to deal with. More likely, there’ll be a mild negative movement, for a short period, but that’s all.
The Greek financial crisis has also been in the news for a long time. But we don’t have the same extensive history of behavior during past economic cycles to draw on, the way we do with the Fed. We do have Argentina as a case study in what happens to the defaulting country (personally, I expect the consequences of default for Greece would be pretty terrible for its citizens). But the focus of investors’ concern is what damage might be done to the EU by Greece’s leaving. In addition, lots of non-economic factors are involved in this situation. There’s Greece’s central role in Europe’s beliefs about its own exceptionalism. There’s the Greek portrayal of the EU’s requirement that Greece implement structural economic reform as a condition for debt relief as 21st-century Nazism. There’s the status quo in Greece that has benefited from the country’s profligate borrowing. There’s fear of the unknown that must be urging politicians to paper over Greece’s problems.
In addition, my sense is that the markets’ overriding emotion so far is denial–hope that the whole situation will go away. Current thinking seems to be that the parties will arrange for some sort of default, along with capital controls to restrict the flow of euros out of Greece, that will allow Greece to stay in the EU. Still, I find it very hard to calculate odds or even to anticipate what the worst that can happen might be, or the best. This makes me think that very little of the possible negatives of “Grexit” are factored into today’s prices.
More tomorrow.