signs of excess
The US is now awash in money being pumped into it by the federal government, both through Federal Reserve buying bonds and offering overnight money to banks basically for free and Congress sending out trillions of dollars in stimulus money. Why? …to combat the enormous and unnecessary damage done to the economy by the pandemic (not by the virus itself but by Trump’s bizarre implosion under pressure–calling the pandemic a hoax, urging citizens to ignore medical advice, fomenting race conflict to cover up his failure).
For the stock market, most of this is in the near-term rear view mirror. There are clear signs that there’s no shortage of cash in circulation. Barstool Sports’ shift from sports betting to day trading stocks is one. The increasing popularity of Robinhood–and the response of traditional discounters in offering trading in fractional shares is another. The weird resurrection of the stocks of bankrupt companies like Hertz (I can’t think of an instance where common shareholders have ever come out of a Chapter 11 proceeding with anything at all).
it’s all about the money (supply)
Yes, these are serious warning. But healing at least some of the damage Trump has done during his time in office takes priority for now, as I see it. And until there’s a change in government policy to “take away the punch bowl,” stocks will likely continue to hold up relatively well. This was certainly the case during the gigantic bull market in Japan during the 1980s as well as in the runup in the US stock market during the Y2K/Internet bubble of 1999.
my biggest question marks today
–is the market rotation toward domestic economy-centric stocks that began in late March over? My guess is not yet.
The winning strategy for Wall Street since the positive effect of the 2017 corporate income tax cut began to wear off in early 2018 has been to hold the US-traded stocks that have the least to do with the domestic economy. From late March to late April, these laggards, as measured by the Russell 2000, began to keep pace with the broader market. For the past 6 weeks or so, thanks (I think) to Washington stimulus, they have been outperforming. A counter-trend rally, which is what I think this is, typically lasts about two months. I regard the start as the end of April, not the end of March. So even though price movement can be read as the R2000 rally being over, my guess is that it still has some weeks to run.
–will Trump be reelected? Former Wall Street economist, Stephen Roach, now teaching at Yale, is the first public figure to be talking about my Mexico-1980s analogy as a possible future for the US. He does so in a Bloomberg article that reads in part:
“Look no further than the Trump administration. Protectionist trade policies, withdrawal from the architectural pillars of globalization such as the Paris Agreement on Climate, Trans-Pacific Partnership, World Health Organization and traditional Atlantic alliances, gross mismanagement of Covid-19 response, together with wrenching social turmoil not seen since the late 1960s, are all painfully visible manifestations of America’s sharply diminished global leadership.”
He thinks a fall in the dollar of about a third is possible.
Although Roach doesn’t put it this way, a very big question to be answered in November is whether the US doubles down on the Trump anti-growth, anti-science, white supremacist agenda or tries to start to repair the damage done to date.
A final point: Mexico in the 1980s was a horrible place economically, where the currency lost 90+% of its value. But because the government did not permit citizens to move assets abroad the stock market there was the best-performing in the world over that period.
more tomorrow