It is bizarre to see intelligent persons come to such starkly different conclusions about the data we have on the economy and the subsequent direction of the markets. Kind of makes you wonder if anybody really knows anything. I’m beginning to think the market will go wherever it wants to go, pundits be damned. Sometimes I think everyone in this business is just an educated gambler.
We have bearish Morgan Stanley, rates (largest yield curve inversion ever) and oil both predicting a recession. You have “legendary” investors like Grantham on the bearish side as well, some predicting as much as a 60% drop across the board. In fact, most of the older crowd is quite bearish.
Bull Case?
Then you’ve got perennial bull Tom Lee together with televangelist Cathie Wood and her bazillion dollar Tesla price target insisting this market just continues to go higher. As far as I can tell, the pair of them have been bullish since time began, which is fine, and maybe we should all just go bury our heads in the sand and buy SPY or QQQ, but they aren’t the only ones drinking the koolaid. As the market goes higher, more analysts get on the bandwagon.
I can’t help but notice that much of the bullish sentiment is due to technical factors – momentum, moving averages, crossover points, etc. and very little about fundamentals. And we certainly cannot discount the technical analysis which really points to sentiment more than anything else. Sentiment, emotions are powerful things and move markets like crazy all the time, despite the sometimes irrationality of it all. But I just can’t get on board with that.
Different this time?
Yes, certainly. This market is different because of the unprecedented distortions of Covid and the subsequent government reactions. What have these events done?
- Insane amount of money created and pushed into the pockets of companies and consumers all the way through mid-2021. TRILLIONS of dollars.
- This extra cash, combined with supply chain issues, helped cause the highest inflation in decades and finally started the Fed on their cool-the-economy phase.
- Although much of this excess money has finally been spent, some remains and the residual effects are playing out over a much longer time horizon.
- In other words, despite the Fed’s best efforts to cool the economy, all the cash they and the government created in the preceding years has helped the consumer keep on keepin’ on and helped companies keep posting reasonable results, pushing out the onset of any recession, mild or otherwise.
- To back it up a second, and to be clear, consumer spending is what drives everything in our economy. Well, maybe it is 70%, I’m just rounding up to the nearest 100. So as long as consumers have jobs and money burning holes in their pockets, this economy does well.
Inevitably, the Money Runs Out
That doesn’t mean we will avoid a recession, far from it. When the money finally runs out, spending will take a serious hit and the normal cycles will resume. Will the Fed come to the rescue again as they have time and again these last 30 years? Time will tell.