The Market Is A Drug Addict For More Stimulus

• Hussman Funds – Begging for Trouble
With the daily focus on European crisis and the hope of central bank intervention, one of the essential features of the investment climate – at least for long-term investors – is easy to lose in the shuffle. That feature is valuation. It’s an easy concern to overlook, because with corporate profit margins close to 70% above historical norms (largely because of unsustainably large government deficits coupled with low private savings rates – see Too Little to Lock In), Wall Street is quite happy to look at the ratio of prices to near-term earnings estimates and conclude that valuations are satisfactory. But stocks are not a claim on one year of earnings. They are a claim on a very long stream of cash flows that will actually be delivered into the hands of investors. Unfortunately, the conclusion that stocks are appropriately valued rests on the implicit assumption that profit margins will remain elevated into the indefinite future. We presently estimate a projected 10-year total (nominal) return for the S&P 500 of less than 4.6% annually. Nothing in recent years, much less the past decade, indicates any material change in the relationship between actual market returns and expected market returns as we estimate them using a range of fundamentals including normalized earnings. Indeed, the 5.1% total return of the S&P 500 over the most recent 10-year period has been right on target (see also my July 7, 2002 comment). It’s notable that even without compelling valuations a decade ago, we lifted 70% of our hedges several months later in early 2003, at what turned out to be the start of the next bull market – something to remember for those who misunderstand our two-data sets issue of 2009-early 2010 and assume that we’ll never lift our hedges until the market is deeply undervalued.
• Sprott Asset Management – The Solution…is the Problem, Part II
Once the exclusive domain of central bankers and policy makers, acronyms such as QE, LTRO, SMP, TWIST, TARP, TALF have found their way into the mainstream. With the aim of providing stimulus to the economy, central planners of all stripes have both increased spending and reduced taxes in most rich countries. But do these fiscal and monetary measures really increase economic activity or do they have other perverse effects? In today’s overleveraged world, greater deficits and government spending, financed by an expansion of public debt and the monetary base (“the printing press”), are not the answer to our economic woes. In fact, these policies have been proven to have a negative impact on growth. While it hasn’t received much attention in recent years, a wide body of economic theory suggests that government policies and their size relative to the total economy can have a significant detrimental impact on economic growth. A recent paper from the Stockholm Research Institute of Industrial Economics compiles evidence from numerous empirical studies and finds that, for rich countries, there is overwhelming evidence of a negative relationship between a large government (either through taxes and/or spending as a share of GDP) and economic growth.1 All else being equal, countries where government plays a large role in the economy tend to experience lower GDP growth.
• MSN/Money – Bill Fleckenstein: The Fed’s inflation ‘solution’
If you think you haven’t been paying high enough prices, you’re in luck. Some Federal Reserve officials agree with you
Prominent articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times on Tuesday discussed interviews given Monday by the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Eric Rosengren, and they naturally goosed the market while also getting under my skin. For one, the articles made it painfully obvious that Rosengren is a central planner at heart. If he had his way, he would unleash as much money as it took to force the economy to deliver the lower job and higher inflation rates he wants: “You continue to do it (print money, monetize debt) until you have documented evidence that you are getting growth in income and the employment rate consistent with your economic goals . . . . For the first seven months we’ve been treading water. That’s different from what we expected at the beginning of the year,” Rosengren said.
• American Spectator – Lewis E. Lehrman: Fight The Fiat
The Consequences of Disorder
The Economic Crisis We Endure Today is only the latest chapter in the century-long struggle to restore financial order in world markets — a struggle whose outcome is inextricably bound up with U.S. prosperity and the promise of the American way of life. As we think through the consequences of financial disorder, what come to mind are the economic heresies of fascism and bolshevism, and the catastrophic world wars of the 20th century. These historical episodes compel us to remember that floating exchange rates and competitive currency wars became the occasion for violent social disorder and revolutionary civil strife in the first half of the 20th century. They remind us that natural resource rivalry, monetary depreciation, mercantilism, and war clouds have appeared together from time immemorial. The monetary disorder and national currency wars of that era are now being repeated in our own time, and have again led to social disorder and pervasive civil strife. I cite only one example among legions. The recent “Arab spring,” a revolutionary upheaval of the suppressed Islamic poor and middle class, was triggered by a vast food and fuel inflation, transmitted to the dollarized world commodity markets by hyper-expansive Federal Reserve monetary policy during 2008-2011. Huge price increases for basic necessities penetrated into the heart of all subsistence economies — in this case, North Africa. Because the dollar is the official reserve currency of the world trading system, when the Fed creates excess credit to bail out the banks and the U.S. government deficit, it exports some of the excess liquidity abroad, igniting basic commodity inflation and the social strife this engenders. At home, the same rising prices of food, fuel, and other basic needs impoverish those on fixed incomes. Moreover, they lower the standard of living for the middle class, held back by wages and salaries that always lag rising prices.