grannysoo
Well-known member
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-bl ... ve-2009-10
Bill Gross":1250bptp said:PIMCO's Bill Gross with a great monthly letter. Here are the key points:
* Over the past 30 years, paper asset prices rose 2X as much as they should have based on economic fundamentals
* This was the result of leverage
* The asset price rise in turn pumped up the economy's fundamentals (Soros's reflexivity)
* The government wants to restore the "old normal" (2007) not the "new normal" (slower growth as asset prices return to trend)
* Therefore... The Fed will keep rates at 0% for at least 18 months into sustained 4% growth
* Next year, when the inventory restocking effect wears off, 4% will be tough
Bill Gross:
n a New Normal economy (1) almost all assets appear to be overvalued on a long-term basis, and, therefore, (2) policymakers need to maintain artificially low interest rates and supportive easing measures in order to keep economies on the "right side of the grass."
Let me start out by summarizing a long-standing PIMCO thesis: The U.S. and most other G-7 economies have been significantly and artificially influenced by asset price appreciation for decades. Stock and home prices went up – then consumers liquefied and spent the capital gains either by borrowing against them or selling outright. Growth, in other words, was influenced on the upside by leverage, securitization, and the belief that wealth creation was a function of asset appreciation as opposed to the production of goods and services...
My point: Asset prices are embedded not only in our psyche, but the actual growth rate of our economy. If they don't go up – economies don't do well, and when they go down, the economy can be horrid.
To some this might seem like a chicken and egg conundrum because they naturally move together... if long term profits match nominal GDP growth then theoretically stock prices should too.
Not so. What has happened is that our "paper asset" economy has driven not only stock prices, but all asset prices higher than the economic growth required to justify them...
[L]et me introduce Chart 2 a PIMCO long-term (half-century) chart comparing the annual percentage growth rate of a much broader category of assets than stocks alone relative to nominal GDP. Let's not just make this a stock market roast, let's extend it to bonds, commercial real estate, and anything that has a price tag on it to see if those price stickers are justified by historical growth in the economy.
This comparison uses a different format with a smoothing five-year trailing valuation growth rate for all U.S. assets since 1956 vs. corresponding economic growth. Several interesting points.
First of all, assets didn't always appreciate faster than GDP. For the first several decades of this history, economic growth, not paper wealth, was king. We were getting richer by making things, not paper. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the cult of the markets, which included the development of financial derivatives and the increasing use of leverage, began to dominate. A long history marred only by negative givebacks during recessions in the early 1990s, 2001–2002, and 2008–2009, produced a persistent increase in asset prices vs. nominal GDP that led to an average overall 50-year appreciation advantage of 1.3% annually. That's another way of saying you would have been far better off investing in paper than factories or machinery or the requisite components of an educated workforce. We, in effect, were hollowing out our productive future at the expense of worthless paper such as subprimes, dotcoms, or in part, blue chip stocks and investment grade/government bonds.
Putting a compounding computer to this 1.3% annual outperformance for 50 years, produces a double, and leads to the conclusion that the return from all assets was 100% (or 15 trillion – one year's GDP) higher than what it theoretically should have been. Financial leverage, in other words, drove the prices of stocks, bonds, homes, and shopping malls to extraordinary valuation levels – at least compared to 1956 – and there could be payback ahead as the leveraging turns into delevering and nominal GDP growth regains the winner's platform.
This 100% overvaluation from recent price peaks of course is crude, simplistic, and unrealistically pessimistic. It implies that stocks should be at – gasp – Dow 7,000 – and that home prices – gasp – should be cut in half from 2007 levels, and that commercial real estate (Las Vegas hotels, big city office buildings that are 20% empty) should likewise face the delevering guillotine. Some of these price adjustments have already taken place, and to be fair, corporate and high yield bonds as well, should be thrown into this overpriced vortex more resemblant of a black hole than American-style paper wealth capitalism.
This is where it gets tricky, however, because policymakers, (The Fed, the Treasury, the FDIC) recognize the predicament, maybe not with the same model or in the same magnitude, but they recognize that asset prices must be supported in order to generate positive future nominal GDP growth somewhere close to historical norms. The virus has infected far too many parts of the economy's body, for far too long, to go cold turkey. The Japanese example over the past 15 years is an excellent historical reference point. Their quantitative easing and near-0% short-term interest rates eventually arrested equity and property market deflation but at much greater percentage losses, which produced an economy barely above the grass as opposed to buried six feet under. The current objective of global policymakers is to do likewise – keep the capitalistic patient alive through asset price support, but at an "old normal" pace if possible, six feet or 6% in U.S. nominal GDP terms above the grass.
That support, of course, comes in numerous ways. Financial system guarantees, TARP recapitalization of banks, TAFs, TALFs, PPIFs – and in Europe and the UK, low interest rate term financing, semi-bank nationalizations, and asset purchase programs similar to the United States. In the case of the U.S., the amount of the implicit and explicit financial support given by policymakers totals perhaps as much as $5 trillion, which goes part way to support the $15 trillion overvaluation of assets theoretically calculated in the PIMCO model (100% of nominal GDP). China, interestingly, is taking another approach, throwing equivalent trillions into their real economy to make things as opposed to support paper, if only because exports are at the heart of their economic growth and they haven't caught the American virus or suffered, I suppose, a "paper cut."
At the center of U.S. policy support, however, rests the "extraordinarily low" or 0% policy rate. How long the Fed remains there is dependent on the pace of the recovery of nominal GDP as well as the mix of that nominal rate between real growth and inflation. My sense is that nominal GDP must show realistic signs of stabilizing near 4% before the Fed would be willing to risk raising rates. The current embedded cost of U.S. debt markets is close to 6% and nominal GDP must grow within reach of that level if policymakers are to avoid continuing debt deflation in corporate and household balance sheets. While the U.S. economy will likely approach 4% nominal growth in 2009's second half, the ability to sustain those levels once inventory rebalancing and fiscal pump-priming effects wear off is debatable. The Fed will likely require 12–18 months of 4%+ nominal growth before abandoning the 0% benchmark...
