Will markets collapse?
We’re a day late this week, steering clear of election bipolarity marked by the vicissitudes of demography and the barest palimpsest of republicanism, a diaphanous echo of Madison and Jefferson and Hamilton, names people now think of as inner city high schools.
Back to markets. We’ve seen a curious change. A year ago, the top refrain from clients was: “What is our Rational Price?” For those not in the know, we calculate where active investors compete against market chaos to buy shares.
That’s not the top metric now. It’s this: “What’s your take on macro factors?” Management appears to have traded its focus on caring for trees for fearing the forest – so to speak. If so, the clever IRO will equip herself with good data.
We’ve been writing since early October about the gap between stocks and the US dollar. The dollar denominates the value of your shares. As the currency fluctuates in value, so do your shares, because they are inversely proportional.
In past decades since leaving the gold standard in 1971, those fluctuations have generally proven secondary to the intrinsic value of your businesses. But that changed in 2008. Currency variance replaced fundamentals as principal price-setter as unprecedented effort was undertaken by governments and central banks globally to refloat currencies.
Imagine currencies as the Costa Concordia, the doomed luxury liner that foundered fatally off the Tuscan coast. Suppose global forces were marshaled to place around it Leviathan generators blowing air through the ships foundered compartments at velocity sufficient to expectorate the sea and set the ship aright.
Thus steadied on air, the ship is readied for sail again, surrounded by a flotilla of mighty blowers filling the below-decks with air and keeping the sea back from fissures in the ravaged hull by sheer force. Passengers are loaded aboard for good times and relaxation and led to believe that all is again as it was. As seaworthy as ever.
That’s where we are. We are coming off the peak now of our fourth stocks-to-dollars inflationary cycle since 2008. In each case, markets have retreated at least 10%. The cycles are shortening. And despite retreat we right now retain the widest gap between the two since July 2008, right before the Financial Crisis.
Why does the pattern keep repeating? Because central banks keep juicing the blowers as the vessel wilts and founders. That’s what you saw yesterday after the election. The Euro crisis, having gone to the green room for a smoke is back center stage as it a year ago. Money – air – leaves variable securities for the dollar. As air leaves, stocks falter.
We don’t say these things to be discouraging. It is what it is. The wise and prudent IRO develops an understanding of market behavior – so the wise and prudent IRO will be cool in the IR chair and valuable to management and able to retain sanity and job security in markets depending on giant turbines.
If you’re relying on the same information you did in the past, you’re ill-prepared. We are in a different world now.
