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| Equities Could Fall And Not Come Back! |
A question lingering on the minds of thoughtful individuals is how "do we get there from here?" The fact is that events happen and generally not in a controlled way. Recency bias or our tendency to overemphasize the importance of recent experiences when estimating future events. Recency bias often misleads us to believe that recent events are an indication of how the future will unfold. An interesting mental exercise is to imagine what some of us might consider the unimaginable, a market "flash crash" from which the market does not recover.
The fact is most investors believe that even if the stock market drops they will be smart enough to get out after taking only a minor hit or simply ride it out. Others simply think no way exists for these markets to fall sighting a lack of investment alternatives and what they see as the "Fed put" having their back. Don't forget, the reason we talk about the "too big to fail" is that they did fail.
As we look at a bull market long in the tooth, a global economy that is rapidly slowing, and debt exploding across
the world, it seems any opportunity to panic the bears is not going unexploited. It is against this backdrop
that one allows optimist fellas to think, this time is different. The
thing many investors are not taking into consideration is that if the
market falls like a flash crash on steroids they could be trapped. Investors have been assured that can't happen because circuit breakers have been
put in place to arrest panic-style moves, however, imagine a market that
falls, trade is halted, and the market simply does not reopen for days
or even weeks. As remote as this might seem remember Japan's stock
market has only just recently taken out the high it made decades ago. See the 1980 to 2015 chart below.
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| It Has Taken Decades For Japan's Nikkei 225 To Take Out The 1980 High |
Also,
please take a moment to consider the possibility and the far-reaching
ramifications of stocks falling from grace. Not only would active stock
market investors get hammered but pensions, 401 plans, and most other
investment programs would be devastated unleashing a wave of contagion.
While you are imagining
this scenario remember that America's stock market is the gold standard
and consider how less stable global markets would react in countries
like China and Brazil.
I continue to contend that we have never recovered from the Great Recession or corrected the many problems that haunt our financial systems such as derivatives and collateralized debt obligations. By printing money, imploding interest rates, and exploding the Federal Government's deficit we have only delayed the "big one." These two quotes on macroeconomic stabilization and crisis speak volumes. First, from Macresilience;
"As Minsky has documented, the history of macroeconomic interventions post-WW2 has been the history of prevention of even the smallest snapbacks that are inherent to the process of creative destruction. The result is our current financial system which is as taut as it can be, in a state of fragility where any snap-back will be catastrophic."
And next from Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan);
"Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite."
These quotes suggest an analogy with ideas about forest management when natural fires are suppressed. If random fires do not periodically clear away forest underbrush, we see a build-up of flammable material sufficient to power a massive conflagration. I certainly think an equivalent truth applies to financial markets. The longer it has been since a painful collapse, the greater the willingness to pile on leverage and complexity, such that the next crisis becomes unmanageable. The "Too Big To Fail" and other policies implemented since 2008 have distorted markets across the globe and laid the groundwork for "The Big One", or what we will someday look back on as the mother of all sell-offs.
Over the years not only have we witnessed many cases of government overreach and many rule changes to protect the system at the expense of the people. What happened in Cyprus years ago should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks money in the bank is safe. A bad haircut, in this case, means you have been robbed. That may be the case if the government reaches in over a long weekend and steals money from your bank account. This is a horrible precedent to set, and the worst part may be how many people accept it saying it is OK as long as it is only on the larger accounts and only impacts the savings of someone else!
By not taking steps to correct many of the ills lurking in our financial system we have made things worse. Absent are actual structural changes necessary for our economy to become sustainable. Instead, we have put band-aid upon band-aid, upon band-aid while what was necessary was the amputation of a diseased limb. After all the threats that this market has avoided, and sidestepped, some investors have come to think of it as invincible. This market has overcome a struggling euro, the financial cliff, the end of Greece as we knew it, a trade war, and a global pandemic.
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