The following is an excerpt from the weekly market commentary of John Hussman, president of the Hussman Trust, for the week of February 28. To read the full commentary, please click here.
Last week, the S&P 500 pulled back by less than 2% - certainly not sufficient to clear the overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yields syndrome that we observe in the market, but enough to bring our estimate of S&P 500 10-year total returns from an expected 3.06% to an expected 3.25%.
From the standpoint of prospective investment returns, it is important to recognize that the main effect of quantitative easing has been to suppress the expected return on virtually all classes of investment to unusually weak levels. It's widely believed that somehow, QE2 has created all sorts of liquidity that is "sloshing" around the economy and "trying to find a home" in stocks, commodities, and other investments. But this is not how equilibrium works.
Here's how equilibrium does work. Every security that is issued has to be held by someone, in precisely the form in which it was created, until that security is retired. Period. That means that if the Fed creates $2.4 trillion in currency and bank reserves, somebody has to hold that money, in that form, until those liabilities are retired. The money ultimately can't go anywhere. If someone tries to get rid of their cash in order to buy stock, somebody else has to give up the stock and hold the cash. In the end, every share of stock that has been issued has to be held by somebody. Every money market security that has been issued has to be held by somebody. Every dollar bill that has been created has to be held by somebody. None of these instruments somehow "find a home" by going somewhere else or becoming something else. They are home.
Let me be clear - the additional monetary base created by the Fed certainly is "liquidity" from the standpoint of the banking system, and does amount to funding the U.S. deficit by printing money, until and unless the transactions are reversed. As I've noted previously, at what is approaching 16 cents of base money per dollar of GDP, there will also be significant inflationary risk in the event of even modest upward pressure on short term interest rates. The point, however, is that it is incoherent to say that this "cash on the sidelines" will somehow find a home in some other financial market, or anywhere else in a manner that makes it vanish from "the sidelines" - until it is explicitly retired by the Fed.
So what is the effect of creating an extra $600 billion dollars of monetary base by having the Fed purchase $600 billion dollars of Treasury debt? The same thing that happens anytime any security is issued. Somebody has to hold it, and the returns on all other assets have to shift by just enough to make everyone in the economy happy, at the margin, to hold the outstanding quantity of all of the securities that have been issued. In practice, the only way you can get people to willingly hold $2.4 trillion in non-interest bearing cash is to depress the return on all close substitutes to next to zero. So short-term Treasury bill yields have been pressed to nearly nothing.
Of course, people also look at risky assets and ask whether they might be able to get higher risk-adjusted returns by holding those instead. In order to make people happy to hold the outstanding quantity of zero return cash, the prospective returns on other risky securities have also collapsed (securities are a claim to future cash flows - as investors pay a higher price, they implicitly agree to accept a lower long-term return). In my view, this has gone on to an extent far beyond what is likely to be sustained, but thanks to eager speculation, the S&P 500 is now priced, by our estimates, to achieve annual returns of just 3.25% over the coming decade.
Likewise, all of those securities yielding zero or nearly zero returns have to compete with commodities. Here, the markets have responded to the massive deficits of world governments by increasing their expectations regarding inflation. Now, if you're looking at a zero nominal return on money-market instruments, as well as expected inflation over time, it's natural to start hoarding commodities. See, if you expect your dollars to buy fewer goods and services in the future, and you're not earning interest to make up for it, you'd prefer to stockpile goods right now. This, of course, has created terrible problems for people in less-developed countries, who are experiencing soaring prices for food and fuel, but commodity hoarding was a predictable outcome of QE2.
The real question is how high commodity prices have to rise until people are indifferent between holding non-interest bearing cash, and commodities that are elevated in price. The basic answer is that commodity prices have had to "overshoot" the expected future level of broad consumer prices by enough that both cash and commodities can now be expected to suffer a negative real return as measured against a broad basket of consumer goods. This sort of overshoot is necessary to make people indifferent between holding one versus another, and it restores equilibrium in the face of the negative real return available on money market securities. As with stock prices, I believe that this has already gone too far, but the civil unrest in the Middle East has certainly worsened the situation over the short-term.
This is a critical point - commodity prices tend to swing by a much greater amount than consumer prices. You can easily get periods where general consumer prices are advancing, yet commodities prices are advancing slower or even falling. In my view, QE2 has provoked an "overshooting" advance in commodities prices, which has been necessary because the Fed is holding real interest rates at negative levels. In the face of moderately higher consumer price inflation, coupled with short-term interest rates at zero, the only way to get people to be comfortable holding that much cash is to make the prospective returns on every possible alternative just as bad.
If investors don't understand that this is how QE2 is "working," they are likely to be as blindsided by the coming decade of weak investment returns as they've been over the past decade. It's notable that the weak returns achieved by the S&P 500 over the past decade were predictable, and our estimates of projected total returns have remained quite accurate in recent years. It bears repeating that our difficulty in 2009 was not that we viewed stocks as overvalued, but that we were forced to contemplate data from periods other than the post-war period, which had generally required much more stringent criteria for accepting market risk. At the 2009 lows, stocks were priced to achieve 10-year total returns in excess of 10% annually by our estimates. The problem is that similar expected returns were not sufficient to end prior declines during much lesser crises even in post-war data.
As for the Depression, stocks were priced to achieve negative 10-year returns, by our estimates, at the 1929 peak. After losing half their value, stocks were priced to achieve 10-year returns in excess of 10%. From there, stock prices dropped by an additional two-thirds before bottoming.
Whatever value was available at the 2009 lows is long gone. Our miss in 2009 was emphatically not the result of inaccurate valuation estimates - it was the result of having to contemplate data outside of the post-war period. I've extensively discussed the adjustments we've made (see recent commentaries as well as our semi-annual report). Still, there is nothing in recent data, nor long-term historical data, that creates meaningful doubt for us that stocks are priced to achieve bitterly small returns over the coming decade.
As it happened, much of the 10-year prospective returns that were priced into stocks at the 2009 low have been compressed into the advance since then. For long-term investors, there is now a great deal of risk with not much prospective return to compensate them at current prices. There will still be periods warranting at least a moderate exposure to market fluctuations based on shorter-term considerations, but with the market still characterized by an overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yields syndrome, now is not one of them.
