Category: Economy

Analysis of the global economy

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Consumer behavior has indelibly changed

From David Uren at The Australian:

A research study by Commonwealth chief economist Michael Blythe, which draws on surveys of the bank’s customers, backs the Reserve Bank’s view that elevated housing debt is not an imminent threat to financial stability, with the largest debts held by those best able to afford them. But Blythe shows the build-up of debt is having a significant effect on consumer behaviour, which has responded to the growth in housing wealth very differently from the housing boom in the first half of the 2000s.

…The boom has greatly increased household wealth — ABS estimates show the value of the housing stock has risen by $2 trillion over the past 4½ years. Blythe says that traditionally, households spend about 4c out of every dollar of additional wealth, however this has not occurred during the boom. Instead, households have been making net equity injections into their housing, while consumer lending indicators show no appetite to tap into accumulated wealth.

The difference in consumer behavior after the DotCom bubble and the 2008 Financial Crisis is marked. When the bubble burst in 2001 the economy went into a recession. Before long investors found another asset, real estate, that promised them effortless wealth — just add debt. The ensuing 2008 crash, on the other hand, was not a normal recession. Labeling it the Great Recession is putting lipstick on the pig. The proper name for it is a Banking Panic, as in 1907 and 1930, when the banking system threatened to implode. Faith in the entire financial system was rocked and is likely to change consumer and investor behavior for a generation. Not just a 5-year cycle.

Hat tip to Macrobusiness.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore. ~ Samuel Clemens as Mark Twain

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Life left in US stocks

According to market pundits, the latest stock sell-off was fueled by concerns over rising bond yields and slowing growth for Caterpillar (CAT).

From CNBC:

….Caterpillar shares reversed lower during the call, when Chief Financial Officer Brad Halverson said first-quarter adjusted profits per share will be the highest for the year because of increased investment later in 2018.

“We expect the targeted investments for future growth to be higher over the remaining three quarters,” Halverson said. “The outlook assumes that first-quarter adjusted profit per share will be the high-water mark for the year.”

Caterpillar (CAT)

The stock fell 6.2% on Wednesday, ignoring the earnings report:

In the earnings report, the Illinois-based machinery manufacturer raised its 2018 profit outlook by $2 a share over the previous quarter, to a range of $10.25 to $11.25 per share. The rosier guidance exceeds a Reuters analyst survey that expected a range of $8.39 to $10.60 a share. The company cited better-than-expected sales volume as the main driver of its improved full-year guidance.

Since when has “better-than-expected sales volume,” upward earnings revision and increased new investment been a bear signal? The market is unusually jittery at present, focusing on any semblance of bad news and ignoring the good.

Even concern over rising bond yields is nothing new.

10-Year Treasury Yields

10-Year Treasury yields are testing resistance at 3.0%. Breakout would complete a double-bottom reversal, warning of a bear market in bonds as yields rise. But rising long-term rates are not bad news for stocks, especially when off a low base as at present. I would go so far as to say that, over the last 20 years, rising 10-year yields have been bullish for stocks. The chart below compares annual percentage change in 10-year Treasury yields and the Russell 3000 Total Market index.

10-Year Treasury Yields and Russell 3000 Index 12-Month Rate of Change

There is plenty more good news that the market seems to be ignoring.

First quarter 2018 corporate earnings have so far impressed. According to S&P Indices, 117 stocks in the S&P 500 had reported results by the morning of April 24th. Of those, 91 (77.8%) beat, 10 (8.5%) met and 16 (13.7%) missed their estimates. Misses are largely concentrated in Materials ( 3 of 5), Industrials (4 of 26) and Consumer Discretionary sectors (5 of 13).

Freight activity remains strong, signaling a reviving economy.

S&P 500

Wages growth remains tame, with average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory employees increasing at an annual rate of 2.42%. Growth above 3.0% would warn that underlying inflation is rising and the Fed will be forced to tighten monetary policy. But that does not appear imminent.

S&P 500

Muted wages growth allowed corporate profits (the blue line below) to rebound after a threatened down-turn.

S&P 500

Consumption has recovered. Per capita consumption of non-durable goods is recovering after a flat spot in 2017, consumption of durable goods has been rising since 2016, while services remain strong.

S&P 500

In financial markets, risk premiums on corporate bonds (Baa minus Treasuries) have declined to below 2.0%, suggesting a healthy credit outlook.

S&P 500

Bank credit is recovering after faltering in 2017.

S&P 500

The yield curve is flattening as the Fed gradually raises interest rates. A flat yield curve is not a threat. Only if it inverts, when the yield differential (gray line on the chart below) falls below zero, is the economy at risk of falling into a recession. Growth in the money stock (green MZM line on the chart below) has slowed but remains healthy.

S&P 500

The Fed has committed to shrinking its $4 trillion investment in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) run up by quantitative easing (QE) between 2009 and 2014. So far the decline has had no impact on financial markets as bank excess reserves on deposit at the Fed are declining at a similar rate. The effect is that net assets (Fed Assets minus Excess Reserves) are holding steady at $2.4 trillion.

S&P 500

The Philadelphia Fed’s Leading Index remains healthy at above 1.0 percent.

S&P 500

And our estimate of real GDP is rising (2.14% in March 2018), suggesting that the economy is recovering from its flat spot in 2016/2017.

S&P 500

Valuations are high and investors are jittery but the bull market still appears to have further to run.

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Does China have the ‘financial arsenic’ to ruin the US?

The media has been highly critical of Donald Trump’s threatened tariff war with China, suggesting that China has the stronger hand.

Twitter: US-China trade deficit

I disagree on two points:

  1. Trump is right to confront China. Even Paul Krugman, not a noted Trump supporter, called for this in 2010.
  2. China’s position may not be as strong as many assume. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard sums this up neatly in The Age:

The Bank for International Settlements says offshore dollar debt has ballooned to $US25 trillion in direct loans and equivalent derivatives. At least $US1.7 trillion is debt owed by Chinese companies, often circumventing credit curbs at home. Any serious stress in the world financial system quickly turns into a vast dollar “margin call”. Woe betide any debtor who had to roll over three-month funding.

The Communist Party leadership will not kowtow to Donald Trump.

Photo: Bloomberg

The financial “carry trade” would seize up across Asia, now the epicentre of global financial risk. Nomura said the region is a flashing map of red alerts under the bank’s predictive model of future financial blow-ups. East Asia is vulnerable to any external upset. The world biggest “credit gap” is in Hong Kong where the overshoot above trend is 45 per cent of GDP. It is an accident waiting to happen.

China is of course a command economy with a state-controlled banking system. It can bathe the economy with stimulus and order lenders to refinance bad debts. It has adequate foreign reserve cover to bail out its foreign currency debtors. But it is also dangerously stretched, with an “augmented fiscal deficit” above 12 per cent of GDP.

It is grappling with the aftermath of an immense credit bubble that has pushed its debt-to-GDP ratio from 130 per cent to 270 per cent in 11 years, and it has reached credit saturation. Each yuan of new debt creates barely 0.3 yuan of extra GDP. The model is exhausted.

China has little to gain and much to lose from irate and impulsive gestures. Its deep interests are better served by seeking out the high ground – hoping the world will quietly forgive two decades of technology piracy – and biding its time as Mr Trump destroys American credibility in Asia.

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Trade Wars: Playing hardball with China

Remember North Korea and the imminent nuclear war? With leaders trading insults on Twitter and bragging: “My nuclear button is bigger than yours.” It may resemble a WWF arena more than international diplomacy but that is how Donald Trump conducts foreign affairs.

The current Twitter war over trade tariffs is no different. Threat and counter-threat of wider and deeper trade tariffs are likely to bounce back-and-forth over the next few weeks. Xi Jinping thinks he has the upper hand because he doesn’t face criticism from a hostile media at home. Nor does he need to front up to a hostile domestic opposition. They’re all safely tucked away in jail. His stock market has already crashed, so there is not too much to worry about on that front either.

Shanghai Composite Index

Xi will do his best to undermine Trump’s shaky support. Targeting Trump’s electoral base with tariffs on soy bean imports (farming states) and steel tubing (Texas) in order to undermine his support. Targeting technology companies like Boeing and Apple, where China is a large slice of their global market, is also likely to elicit strenuous lobbying in Washington. As are well-timed tweets aimed at undermining stock support levels, threatening a major stock market rout.

Dow Jones Industrial Average

Trump probably recognizes that China can withstand more pain, but figures that he has the capacity to inflict more pain. The US has a large trade deficit with China.

Twitter: US-China trade deficit

And exports comprise a larger percentage of China’s GDP.

In 2010, Paul Krugman wrote:

Some still argue that we must reason gently with China, not confront it. But we’ve been reasoning with China for years, as its surplus ballooned, and gotten nowhere: on Sunday Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, declared — absurdly — that his nation’s currency is not undervalued. (The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that the renminbi is undervalued by between 20 and 40 percent.) And Mr. Wen accused other nations of doing what China actually does, seeking to weaken their currencies “just for the purposes of increasing their own exports.”

But if sweet reason won’t work, what’s the alternative? In 1971 the United States dealt with a similar but much less severe problem of foreign undervaluation by imposing a temporary 10 percent surcharge on imports, which was removed a few months later after Germany, Japan and other nations raised the dollar value of their currencies. At this point, it’s hard to see China changing its policies unless faced with the threat of similar action — except that this time the surcharge would have to be much larger, say 25 percent.

I don’t propose this turn to policy hardball lightly. But Chinese currency policy is adding materially to the world’s economic problems at a time when those problems are already very severe. It’s time to take a stand.

Krugman (no surprise) now seems more opposed to trade tariffs but observes:

….I think it’s worth noting that even if we are headed for a full-scale trade war, conventional estimates of the costs of such a war don’t come anywhere near to 10 percent of GDP, or even 6 percent. In fact, it’s one of the dirty little secrets of international economics that standard estimates of the cost of protectionism, while not trivial, aren’t usually earthshaking either.

I believe that Krugman’s original 2010 argument is still valid and that Trump is right in confronting China. The gap between imports and exports of goods is widening, especially since 2014, not shrinking.

Exports and Imports: Value of Goods for China

But let’s hope that Trump has done his homework. At this stage this is just a Twitter war rather than a trade war, intended to soften up your opponent rather than inflict real damage. But for Trump to succeed he must demonstrate that the US is prepared to endure the pain of a lengthy trade war if needed.

Men naturally despise those who court them, but respect those who do not give way to them.

~ Thucydides (circa 400 BC)

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“Headwinds have turned into tailwinds”

“While many factors shape the economic outlook, some of the headwinds the U.S. economy faced in previous years have turned into tailwinds. Fiscal policy has become more stimulative and foreign demand for U.S. exports is on a firmer trajectory.”
~ New Fed Chair Jerome Powell in his first testimony before Congress

Two very important sentences for investors. Expect further rate hikes but at a moderate pace.

Bond yields have climbed in anticipation of higher inflation. Breakout above 3.0 percent would warn of a bond bear market, after the bull market of the last 3 decades, with rising yields.

10-Year Treasury Yields

The five-year breakeven rate (Treasury yield minus the equivalent yield on inflation indexed TIPS) has been climbing since 2016.

Fed Excess Reserves

But core CPI (CPI less Food & Energy) remains subdued.

And average hourly wage rates, reflecting underlying inflationary pressures, continue to grow at a modest 2.5 percent a year.

Private Sector Average Hourly Wage Rate Growth

Real GDP is likely to maintain its similarly modest growth.

Real GDP and Estimates

While the Fed is sitting on a powder keg of more than $2 trillion of commercial bank excess reserves, no one is playing with matches. Yet.

Federal Reserve Bank: Excess Reserves of Depositary Institutions

Those excess reserves on deposit at the Fed have the potential to fuel a massive bubble in stocks or real estate. But investors remain wary after their experience in 2008.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

~ Samuel Clemens

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Ben Bernanke: We’re very sorry…. we won’t do it again

….I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

~ Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke
At the Conference to Honor Milton Friedman on his Ninetieth Birthday, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
November 8, 2002

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The Fed and Alice in Wonderland

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland a young Alice experiences a series of bizarre adventures after falling down a rabbit hole. The new Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will similarly have to lead global financial markets through a series of bizarre, unprecedented experiences.

Down the Rabbit Hole

In 2008, after the collapse of Lehman Bros, financial markets were in complete disarray and in danger of imploding. The Fed, under chairman Ben Bernanke, embarked on an unprecedented (and unproven) rescue attempt — now known as quantitative easing or QE for short — injecting more than $3.5 trillion into the financial system through purchase of long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities (MBS).

Fed Total Assets

The Fed aimed to drive long-term interest rates down in the belief that this would encourage private sector borrowing and investment and revive the economy. Their efforts failed. Private sector borrowing did not revive. Most of the money injected ended up, unused by the private sector, as $2.5 trillion of excess commercial bank reserves on deposit at the Fed.

Fed Excess Reserves

Richard Koo pointed out that the private sector will under normal cirumstances respond to lower interest rates with increased borrowing but during a financial crisis, when their balance sheets have been destroyed and their liabilities exceed their assets, their sole focus is to restore their balance sheet, using surplus cash flow to pay down debt. The only way to prevent a collapse is for the government to step in and plug the gap, borrowing surplus capital and investing this in infrastructure.

One Pill Makes you Larger

Fortunately Bernanke got the message.

US and Euro Area Public Debt to GDP

… and spread the word.

Japan Public Debt to GDP

And One Pill Makes you Small

Unfortunately, other central banks also followed the Fed’s earlier lead, injecting vast sums into the financial system through quantitative easing (QE).

ECB and BOJ Total Assets

Driving long-term yields to levels even Lewis Carroll would have struggled to imagine.

10-Year Treasury Yields

The Pool of Tears

Then in 2014, another twist in the tale. Long-term yields continued to fall in Europe and Japan, while US rates stabilised as Fed eased off on QE. A large differential appeared between US and European/Japanese rates (observable since 2014 on the above chart), causing a flood of money into the US, in pursuit of higher yields.

….. with an unwanted side-effect. The Dollar strengthened. Capital inflows caused the trade-weighted value of the US Dollar to spike upwards beween 2014 and 2016, damaging US export industries and local manufacturers facing competition from foreign imports.

US Trade-Weighted Dollar Index

The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

A jobless recovery in manufacturing and low wage growth in turn led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 promising increased protectionism against global competition.

US Manufacturing Jobs

Then in 2017, to the consternation of many, despite rising interest rates the US Dollar began to fall.

US TW Dollar Index in 2017

Learned analysis followed, ascribing the weakening Dollar to rising commodity prices and a recovery in emerging markets. But something doesn’t quite add up.

International bond investors are a pretty smart bunch. When they look at US bond markets, what do they see? The new Fed Chairman has inherited a massive headache.

Donald Trump is determined to stimulate job growth through tax cuts and infrastructure spending. This will certainly create jobs. But when you stimulate an economy that is already at full employment you get inflation.

Who Stole the Tarts?

Jerome Powell is sitting on a powder keg. More than $2 trillion of excess reserves that commercial banks can withdraw without notice. Demand for bank credit is expected to rise as result of the Trump stimulus. Commercial banks, not known for their restraint, can make like Donkey Kong with their excess reserves provided by the Bernanke Fed.

Under Janet Yellen the Fed mapped out a program to withdraw excess reserves from the market by selling down Treasuries and MBS at the rate of $100 billion in 2018 and $200 billion each year thereafter. But at that rate it will take 10 years to remove the excess.

Bond markets are worried about what will happen to inflation in the mean time.

Off With His Head

The new Fed Chair has made all the right noises about being hawkish on inflation. But can he walk the talk? Especially with his $2 trillion headache.

….and the Red Queen, easily recognizable from Lewis Carroll’s tale, tweeting “off with his head” if a hawkish Fed threatens to spoil the party.

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall

….When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low….

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

~ White Rabbit by Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane (1967)

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Richard Koo: Surviving in the Intellectually Bankrupt Monetary Policy Environment

Richard C. Koo, Chief Economist, Nomura Research Institute, at the ACATIS Value Konferenz 2016 in Frankfurt

Why QE doesn’t work.

I have the greatest respect for Richard Koo and his unconventional, balance-sheet-recession approach to economics.

It strikes me is that if central banks lower interest rates to stimulate borrowing and borrowing does not rise because borrowers are repaying debt to restore solvency, then it will backfire and hurt GDP. Households reliant on income from investments, especially in financial assets, will experience a significant loss of income from lower interest rates and will reduce their consumption accordingly. Falling consumption will cause a drop in GDP.

Investments in financial assets consist not only of household bank deposits and bonds, but also insurance sector and pension fund investments in financial assets (mainly bonds) which will raise insurance premiums and lower pensions as a result.

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