Economics

Interest rates have declined from over 5% in the late 1960s to under 0.5% in 2020 (I’m using long-term treasury bond rates as an estimate of pure risk-free rates).

There’s clearly something unusual about savings rates, and it’s causing a semi-stable decline in interest rates.

In my review of Shut Out, I guessed that demographic effects of the boomer generation explain 25% the housing boom, via high savings rates and the resulting low interest rates. I’m now revising that estimate down to 10%.

I now see a similar but bigger effect from a different set of demographic changes. I changed my mind due to the paper by Mian, Straub, and Sufi titled What Explains the Decline in r*? Rising Income Inequality Versus Demographic Shifts (think or r* as an idealized version of interest rates).

Wealth affects savings rates more than age does.

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“Transitory Inflation”

Many pundits are arguing that this year’s inflation is due to temporary pandemic-related problems.

I expect that they’re half-right – we’ve got a one-time pandemic-related burst of inflation, but it’s likely to be bigger than pundits imagine, and the price changes are unlikely to be reversed much when the effects of the pandemic fade.

Also, the presence of one-time effects shouldn’t reassure us about the absence of longer-term pressures.

When evaluating inflation, I focus mainly on the supply of and demand for money. Supply chain problems may be important for many purposes, but they don’t explain a general pattern of dollars becoming less valuable.

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Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations tells us that in stable times special interest groups tend to slowly create increasingly rigid agreements to cement their income streams. Major wars, and other cataclysms of that size, occasionally sweep away those rigidities, creating conditions under which faster economic growth is possible.

COVID has been much less cataclysmic than what Olson talks about. Yet I see hints that the recent pandemic has had effects that weakly resemble war. I see stronger evidence that the pandemic was a useful trigger for overcoming the effects status quo bias. I’m writing this post to help clarify my thoughts about how significant these effects will be, and how they’ll affect stock markets.

Is the stock market’s impressive performance partly due to expectations that the pandemic caused a lasting increase in profits?

I’ll guess that it explains one quarter of the stock market’s rise. A fair amount of that guess reflects my intuitions about how much can’t be explained by other factors. That approach is at least as error-prone as estimating individual pandemic effects. So please interpret this post as mostly groping around in the dark.

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Book review: Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy, by Kevin Erdmann.

Why did the US have an unusually bad recession in 2008, followed by years of disappointing growth?

Many influential people attribute it to the 2004-2006 housing bubble, and the ensuing subprime mortgage crisis, with an implication that people bought too many houses. Erdmann says: no, the main problems were due to obstacles which prevented the building and buying of houses.

He mainly argues against two competing narratives that are popular among economists:

  • increased availability of credit fueled a buying binge among people who had trouble affording homes.
  • there was a general and unusual increase in the demand for homes.

Reframing the Housing Bubble

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It’s been a decade since I blogged about the benefits of avoiding news.

In that time I mostly followed the advice I gave. I kicked my addiction to The Daily Show in late 2016 after it switched from ridiculing Trump to portraying him as scary (probably part of a general trend for the show to be less funny). I got more free time, and only missed the news a little bit.

Then the pandemic hit.

I suddenly needed lots of new information. Corporate earnings releases were too slow.

Wikipedia, Our World in Data, Metaculus, and some newly created COVID-specific web sites partly filled that gap. But I still needed more, and I mostly didn’t manage to find anything that was faster or more informative than the news media storyteller industry.

That at least correlated with higher than normal stress. I suspect that paying attention to the storytellers partly caused the stress.

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I tried to finish this in time for April 1, 2019, but masterpieces take time, and I didn’t find the time to turn this into a masterpiece. Then I kept adding sections that didn’t fit with the April Fools spirit, for a result that, like South Park, is not suitable for any audience. Finally, an economic crisis prompted me to publish whatever incomplete version of it I could manage to write, before people notice that we’ve avoided a depression. I’m definitely not satisfied with the quality of this post, but can’t afford to put more time into it.

In this post, I’ll try to summarize my guesses as to what are the most controversial parts of Scott Sumner’s monetary policy ideas.

In the process, I’ll try to dress them up to look more like the kind of wisdom that requires years of study to master. After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to get the impression that the Fed’s highly educated experts could be replaced by, say, ordinary bloggers.

In particular, I will attempt to correct the serious shortage of equations and graphs that plagues market monetarist writings.

I’ve attempted to make this fancy enough to belong in a prestigious publication, but I’m little more than an ordinary blogger, and I doubt that I’ve been thorough enough, or have enough experience at creating a prestigious style. Please feel free to write a more sophisticated-looking version of this post, and borrow as much as you like, without any need to credit me.

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Lots of people have been asking recently why the stock market appears unconnected with the economy.

There are several factors that contribute to that impression.

First, stock market indexes are imperfect measures of the whole stock market. Well-known indexes such as the S&P500 are higher than pre-pandemic, but the average stock is down something like 10% over the same time period. The difference is due to some well-known stocks such as Apple and Amazon, which have unusually large weights in the S&P500.

See this Colby Davis post for some relevant charts, and for some good arguments against buying large growth stocks today.

Stock markets react to the foreseeable future, whereas the daily news, and most politicians, prefer to focus attention on the recent past. People who focus on the recent past see a US that’s barely able to decide whether to fight COVID-19, whereas the market sees vaccines and/or good treatments enabling business to return to normal within a year.

Stock markets don’t try to reflect the costs associated with death, chronic fatigue, domestic violence, etc. Too many people want the market to be either a perfect indicator of how well we’re doing, or to dismiss it as worthless. Sorry, but imperfect indicators are all we have.

Plenty of influential people have been exaggerating the harm caused by the pandemic, in order to manipulate the average person into taking the pandemic seriously. As far as I can tell, this backfired, and contributed to the anti-mask backlash. It also contributed to stocks being underpriced in the spring, so parts of the stock market rebound have simply been reactions to the growing evidence that most large companies are recovering.

The vaccine news has been persistently good, except for the opposition from big pharma and their friends at the FDA to making vaccines available as soon as possible.

Another modest factor is that many companies dramatically reduced their capital expenditure plans starting around March and April. That will reduce production capacities for the next year or two, thus making shortages of goods a bit more common than usual. This should prop up profit margins. But I haven’t noticed much connection between the most relevant industries and rising stock prices.

Why is there such a large divergence between the S&P500 and the average stock?

Investors have developed a somewhat unusual degree of preference for well-known companies whose long-term growth prospects seem safe.

I guessed last year that this would be a rerun of the Nifty Fifty. I still see important similarities in investor attitudes, but I see enough divergences in patterns of stock prices that I’m guessing we’ll get something in between the broad, gradual peak of the Nifty Fifty and a standard bubble (i.e. with a well-defined peak followed by a clear reversal within months).

Remember that high volatility is somewhat correlated with being in a bubble. We’ve recently seen Zoom Video Communications rise 40% in one day, and Salesforce rise 26%, in response to good earnings reports. That’s a $50 billion one-day gain for Salesforce. It reminds me of the volatility in PetroChina in 2007 (PetroChina has declined 87% since then). There was also that $173 billion rise in Apple after it’s latest earnings report, but that was a mere 10.5% rise.

Some of the divergence is due to small retailers losing business to Amazon, and to small restaurant chains losing business to fast food chains.

The bubble is a bit broader than just tech stocks – Home Depot and Chipotle are well above their pre-pandemic levels, by much larger amounts than can be explained by any near-term changes in their profits.

Incumbent politicians have been trying to buy votes by shoveling money to influential companies and people. There’s been some speculation that that’s biased toward large companies. It seems likely that large companies are better able to take advantage of those deals, because they’re more likely to employ someone with expertise at dealing with the government than is, say, a barbershop.

But I don’t see how that explains more than 1% of the stock market divergence. Stocks like Apple and Tesla have risen much more than can be explained by any change in this year’s profits. Any sane explanation of those soaring stocks has to involve increased optimism about profits that they’ll be making 5 to 10 years from now.

Large companies have better access to banks. Large companies typically have someone who is an expert at dealing with banks, and they have the accounting competence to make it easy for banks to figure out how much they can safely lend to the company. In contrast, a family-owned business will be slower to figure out how to borrow money, and therefore is more likely to go out of business due to unusual problems such as a pandemic. That might explain a fair amount of the divergence between the S&P500 and what you hear by word of mouth, but it explains little of the divergence between the S&P500 and the publicly traded companies that are too small for the S&P500.

I’ve only done a little selling recently, and I’ve been mostly avoiding large companies for many years. I’m guessing that Thursday’s tech stock crash wasn’t the end of the bubble. Bubbles tend to continue expanding until the average investor gets tired of hearing pundits say that we’re in a bubble. That suggests the peak is at least a month away, and I could imagine it being more than a year away.

Stock markets have a long history of being abnormally risky in September and October. Out of 10 months in which the S&P500 ended at least 15% lower than when it started, 3 were in October. Out of 31 months in which it ended at least 10% lower, 12 were in September or October.

I used to guess that this was due to the onset of seasonal affective disorder. That explanation was a bit unsatisfying, because SAD seems likely to be predictable enough that the effects could be mostly smoothed out by smart investors.

After looking at the 1957 pandemic and its possible effect on the stock market, I wondered whether infectious diseases was a better explanation.

I did a crude analysis of the correlations between flu deaths and stock market changes. I didn’t manage to get as good a dataset as I’d hoped for, and ended up settling for the monthly US data for selected seasons (12 in the period 1941-1976) in table 1 of Trends in Recorded Influenza Mortality: United States, 1900–2004.

I looked at correlations between monthly increases in flu deaths per 100,000 people and the monthly change in the S&P500. I was able to find a large effect, but it disappeared when I left out the 1943-1944 season (which was by far the worst season in that time period, yet wasn’t labeled as a pandemic).

Either there’s no effect in that time period, I don’t have detailed enough data, or the effects precede deaths by enough that the death data aren’t helpful.

I was mostly thinking that diseases might have affected the market via effects on investors moods or liquidity preferences, so I wasn’t assuming there would be much discussion of the topic. The paper The Unprecedented Stock Market Reaction to COVID-19 investigated whether newspapers mentioned the topic, and concluded:

In the period before 24 February 2020 – spanning 120 years and more than 1,100 jumps – contemporary journalistic accounts attributed not a single daily stock market jump to infectious disease outbreaks or policy responses to such outbreaks. Perhaps surprisingly, even the Spanish Flu fails to register in next-day journalistic explanations for large daily stock market moves.

So, after a fair amount of research, I still don’t have good evidence about what’s causing the September / October volatility.

P.S. For some strange reason, January is an unusually safe month, with no declines of more than 9% in the S&P 500.

P.P.S. VIX futures are saying that the S&P500’s volatility around late October will be 3.6 points higher the average of August and December volatilities. That compares to an average of 0.86 points higher (and a maximum of 2.1) over the prior 11 years in which VIX futures have been available (all of these numbers come from prices near July 20 of the relevant year).

So the markets expect something unusual this October. Something more surprising than they expected during the prior two presidential election years. Does anyone know whether this risk is due to weather-related pandemic risk or due to political risk?

New infections have been declining at an almost adequate pace (10% per week?) in most parts of the US, and probably the rest of the developed world.

The overall reported new cases look more discouraging, for two reasons.

One reason is the increase in testing. I estimate that two months ago, a bit less than 10% of new infections were being confirmed by tests, and I estimate that now it’s above 20%, maybe getting close to 25%. That means that if the new infection rate were unchanged, we’d be seeing a roughly 10% per week increase in reported cases.

Nearly all parts of the country have done a good deal better than that.

I estimate the change in new infections since the early April peak by multiplying the early April confirmed daily cases by 10 or 12, and the June ones by 4 or 5, and I get a current rate that’s about 1/4 to 1/3 of the peak.

The bad news is that there are some heavily populated areas for which the trend doesn’t look very good over the past few weeks. When the rate of new infections remains constant in some areas, but declines at exponential rates in others, the exponential declines stop affecting the total numbers before too long. E.g. much of California has suppressed the pandemic, but a few cities, such as Los Angeles and Oakland, are enough to keep the state’s total count of new infections steady.

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Long-term investors should stay away from most bonds for the foreseeable future.

Last summer, Colby Davis explained why portfolio managers might want to buy bonds that yield 2%. At the time, I was suspicious, but it felt premature to argue against it.

Since then, yields on 30-year government bonds have dropped to 1.44%. That means bond prices went up. His advice worked well as a hedge against pandemics.

Inflation expectations have dropped along with those yields.

30-year TIPS have an expected yield of -0.045%.

That implies expected CPI inflation of less than 1.5% over the next 30 years, and that, adjusted for inflation as measured by the CPI, investors who buy 30-year government bonds now should expect to lose wealth if they hold to maturity.

So why are investors buying bonds at these prices?

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