The Stock Market, QE3 and Voodoo Finance

As we look across the economic landscape there is an abundance of reason to anticipate a global economic slowdown. It is already well in the works as reflected in anticipatory data. It would not be a garden-variety recession emanating from some lull in spending but rather the grinding process of over-indebtedness and uncertainty due to tax and health care issues.

At the same time, over-indebtedness also creates a withering of financial valuations, which sets off another chain reaction called systemic financial meltdown.  This reduces the value of assets held by individuals and institutions such as banks, which in turn further dissolves financial wealth when assets are dumped in order to pay off fleeing depositors.

As a result, financial intermediation withers so that the process of matching of savers, if there are any, with investments is impeded. This in turn negates future growth. For example, systemic financial forces causing a recession visited the U.S.  in the late 1980s. At that time large commercial banks were overburdened with Latin American loan defaults and simultaneously savings and loan associations (remember them?) were decimated when inflation depreciated their book of long-term mortgages.  This limited systemic financial event resulted in a prolonged 1990 recession.

Hence whether the over-indebtedness first strikes spending or financial intermediation, it is difficult to discern as they interact and both income flows and financial valuations suffer, whichever occurs first.

Today, the developed world’s over-indebtedness reactions of the combined recessionary forces and bank runs are emanating from Europe’s southern tier. Unemployment numbers in Greece and Spain rival those of the Great Depression.

But the question on the table is the ability of Northern Europe and the U.S. (and, for that matter, the rest of the world) to escape at least temporarily the ill effects of the above degenerative process.

To gauge that, the market looks to the ability of monetary and fiscal policy to come to the rescue, and if the rescue is attempted will it work? Given the succession of bailout funds established but without the means to fund them, it is not a realistic option. To the extent country debt has been carried by other contributing countries, it is extremely limited and if, indeed, the Spanish bank bailout takes place, it exhausts all bailout funds from the Eurozone’s willing contributing countries.

Nonetheless, the contributing countries keep promising more and more, with the latest being a bank deposit insurance fund — and the market somehow believes it.

If fiscal resources from other contributing countries are extraordinary limited, what is the extent of monetary funding to aid both a recession and systemic financial meltdown? Well, there is some defense to the systemic financial event as long as the Fed and the ECB and other central banks are willing to keep expanding their balance sheets. There is no theoretical or legal limit to how much can be purchased to keep financial asset valuations afloat in order to prevent imminent financial meltdown, but to go overboard they are willing to give up all discipline of monetary control, and with it, holders of the currency go elsewhere.

Given the vulnerabilities present, how then can one explain stock price buoyancy? Since the beginning of the year the S&P 500 index is up approximately 6% and FTSE 100 index is up 2 percent despite the onset of recession and bank runs.

If there is any logic to it, it seems to be resting on less than a firm foundation. While equity investors rely on current known information such as earnings, they also project forward the value of the claims they are purchasing, hence making financial pricing a mixture of facts and a learned history to project forward.

What you often hear these days is a general awareness of the economic and debt problems but a faith that the bigger the problem, the bigger the government response will be. That is to say, any investor citing “in my 25 years’ experience” is a candidate to be projecting a future based on the Great Moderation Period of Greenspan Puts and currency solidarity in Europe.

Financial prices are inherently an extrapolation of a history, but it’s certainly not the Great Moderation, though that was the dominant influence in the thinking of the 25-year U.S. veteran stock market investor.

But then there is a newer history called the Bernanke Put, best characterized as a succession of QEs or other outside-the-box monetary stimulus, the latest of which is operation twist.

It’s now a common attitude that if the situation becomes bad enough there will be a response equal to the task needed to keep financial values afloat. Now being cited is the above chart showing how equity markets respond to QEs. It seems that the Fed has well trained stock market investors in Voodoo financial logic. The worse the economic problem, the better it is for stocks despite declines in earnings.

As a side note, QE faith stock valuations are throwing noise into the long term relationship of stock prices to earnings and as an early indicator of a recession. This is one of many structural changes that are occuring which implies that one must be careful of which history is chosen to extrapolate.

Before one relies on Voodoo finance and a faith-based QE3, one should note that additional Fed stimulus is almost certain in the face of a systemic financial institution collapse but is less certain and will be less dramatic due to a softening economy. Systemic financial defense was the raison d’etre for the Fed and remains its number one policy objective, but some token form of monetary aid has now become necessary to prevent a collapse of the Voodoo expectations the Fed has created. If that occurs, expectations have become self-fulfilling.

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