The stock market always has been considered a “leading” They are “administered” by central banks (the Fed, the European Central Bank, the Peoples’ Bank of China, the Bank of Japan, etc.), which set and manipulate the rates. When interest rates are determined by other than market forces, you can be assured that scarce resources are inefficiently allocated. We need only look to the long period of administered artificially low rates under the Greenspan Fed to realize that such a policy was a major contributor to the housing bubble last decade.

Expectations

Given the recent collapse in basic, fundamental worldwide economic activity (consumption, orders, employment), one must be skeptical of an equity market that continues to, apparently, defy gravity. Investors, or more accurately, speculators, await the next Fed or ECB policy-easing move, not wanting to “miss” the inevitable market updraft that they hope occurs. (Of course, they could be hugely disappointed, as were the initial investors in Facebook!) Could it be that market expectations of such moves already have driven prices up, and the policy-easing moves themselves will be anticlimactic? In market parlance, this is known as “buy the rumor, sell the fact.”

Recent market reactions

Sooner or later, markets will come back to valuations based on the underlying fundamentals. This isn’t the first time that the markets have exhibited extreme sentiment. And it won’t be the last. So, let’s examine some of the recent “policy” issues and data releases in light of market sentiment.

 

• On July 26, ECB President Mario Draghi (“Super Mario”) said, “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro,” adding later, “Believe me, it will be enough.” The market interpreted this as a pledge that the ECB would directly purchase the debt of Spain and Italy, thus reducing pressure on interest rates in those countries. The Dow Jones rose 3.2 percent during the next two days. On Aug. 2, when the ECB met and didn’t announce
anything major, the Dow sold off .7 percent, only to begin a rise again on Aug. 3 when the market realized that Spanish and Italian two-year rates, which is where those two countries are selling new debt, were now falling. Apparently, the markets now believe Super Mario’s words.

 

Nevertheless, no amount of liquidity can resolve the solvency problem that exists in Europe’s southern nations. No matter what these politicians do, short of an unlikely fiscal union, the euro will be pulled apart. The northern countries — Finland, Denmark, Germany — have attitudes toward work, debt, inflation and socialism that are diametrically opposed to the attitudes in the Mediterranean countries.

 

So, Europe likely is to remain in a recessionary/slow growth mode for the foreseeable future, and debt issues there will continue to impact capital markets worldwide.

 

• On July 27, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the real GDP grew at an annual rate of 1.5 percent in the second quarter. (The measurement methodology of the price deflator is questionable as it biases the real GDP number significantly upward. While every other indicator of economic activity is declining, it doesn’t seem logical that this one is rising.)

 

The markets had expected a worse report, and breathed a sigh of relief, advancing 188 Dow points that day (1.5 percent). But, even a cursory analysis of the underlying data reveals that the private sector remains in stagnation. In the second quarter, nominal dollar GDP grew by $117.6 billion or by $1.29 billion/day. However, the federal government added $274.3 billion in new debt ($3.01 billion/day). Thus, it took $2.33 of new debt to increase GDP by $1. Would anyone in their right mind sign up for a loan of $233,000 if the lender was only going to fund $100,000?

 

• The Aug. 3 employment report was “stronger” than expected, according to the media, with the Establishment Survey showing new job growth of 163,000. (June’s 80,000 job growth was revised downward to 60,000.) The headline “unemployment rate” went up to 8.3 percent. It was widely reported that the rise of the unemployment rate was due to the fact that fewer people were discouraged and more people entered the labor force. After all, how else could the unemployment rate rise when 163,000 jobs were created? The answer is, after all these years, the media doesn’t know that the headline unemployment rate is calculated using a completely different survey. The Establishment Survey queries 141,000 businesses, while the Household Survey queries 60,000 households. The Establishment Survey adds in a residual factor of about 50,000 jobs per month, created out of nowhere, from what is known as the birth-death model (the BEA assumes 50,000 more new small businesses are created every month than are closed; this is clearly an historical artifact and doesn’t exist in today’s world, but it is still added to the data). The Household Survey actually showed a decline of 195,000 jobs (all of which were full-time jobs) in July, and because the labor force declined by 150,000, the unemployment rate went up. The labor market is nowhere near healthy.