** 14-Jul-2021 World View: Fed and the stock market
Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Jul 14, 2021 11:13 am
> Emergency Alert. The S&P is on its low of the day. Better call
> in the cavalry to counterfeit several more trillion and throw it
> into the stock market.
> Cities can burn and people can go hungry but the stock market must
> go higher and higher.
Vince makes an interesting point here.
vincecate wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 4:11 pm
> Many people think there is another two years before the Fed
> changes policy. If you look at the graph in the link below you
> can see that whenever inflation is above 3% and going up fast it
> suddenly goes down and there is a recession. This is the Fed
> taking away the punch bowl. It can not wait 2 years.
>
https://howfiatdies.blogspot.com/2021/0 ... -bowl.html
Vince points out that there's a correlation between falling CPIs and
recessions. However, once the correlation has been identified,
identifying causation is more complicated.
The easiest, knee-jerk thing to say it's that it's all the Fed.
The Fed's money policy controls the level of CPI and controls
whether we have recessions.
I've been saying that the Fed has nothing to do with it in America
in the current era. Maybe the money supply mattered in the Weimar
Republic, and in Zimbabwe, and in Venezuela -- and we could discuss
why those situations are different from ours -- but not America
in the current era.
What I'm saying is that inflation is correlated not to the money
supply but to people's willingness to go (further) into debt. In the
1970s, when national debt was low, people were willing to go into
debt, and that resulted in high inflation. Today, people are already
deeply in debt and afraid to go deeper, and so the inflation rate is
lower. All it would take is one more adverse financial event to
trigger an even further pullback in debt, and an increase in savings
(i.e., decrease in velocity of money).
So Vince argues that the high rate of inflation means that the
Fed has to "take away the punch bowl" -- i.e., end massive
bond purchases to decrease the money supply. But the Fed is saying
that the inflation is transitory, and anyway, increasing the
money supply has nothing to do with inflation.
So I think that the sequence of events in each of these events is
the following:
- There's a spike in inflation, due to shortages. This causes
economic growth, since it's probably correlated with a spike in
borrowing.
- There's a pullback in borrowing, which causes lower inflation
and a recession.
- The Fed panics and increases bond purchases to "print" money.
This money goes into the stock market, so stock prices go up,
even though there's a recession.
I'm not sure that entirely makes sense, but I think it's a good
starting point. It's certain a lot better than "more dollars chasing
fewer goods," which never works.
But if this analysis is correct, then inflation will fall (Law of
Reversion of the Mean), there will be a recession, and the Fed won't
dare "take away the punch bowl," meaning that printed money will
continue to pour into the stock market. This is the way it's been
for over a decade -- the Fed promises to reduce bond buying "soon,"
but can't or won't risk the negative consequences ("taper tantrum").
So if this is correct, then the Fed will NOT reduce bond purchases
this year, or in 2022 or 2023. This is an endless cycle that will be
broken in only one way -- global financial crisis and world war.
"If something can't go on forever, then it won't."