Déjà Vu for the Stock Market

Yet again, central bank stimulus has given the markets a boost...

THOUGH it might seem a churlish observation to make amid so much barely-suppressed exuberance about the prospect for the markets in 2013, in many respects the past twelve months have shown much the same pattern as has marked each of the preceding four years, writes Sean Corrigan for the Cobden Centre.

Characterized by the grinding hysteresis which we foresaw as far back as the end of 2008, this has broadly materialized in the form of rallies which stretch from one year end into the succeeding spring before a sell-off occurs which then extends into late summer-early autumn, whereupon the cycle reverts to rally and so on round again. 

Each time the Groundhog recovery in asset prices has been based upon the delivery of a stimulus from one or other of the major central banks which has temporarily brightened sentiment – and even improved the macro numbers for a while – before what a physiologist would call a 'tolerance' of the credit injection has set in, the economic data has deteriorated, and the unresolved and unliquidated problems which still linger from the preceding Boom have surfaced again to frustrate the optimists. 

Last year began amid ever more undeniable evidence that China was suffering a mini crisis of its own, with profits evaporating, unpaid bills mounting, and trade stagnating,  while the disparities between Europe's sorely-afflicted south and its better-placed north blew up in to surging sovereign spreads and a €1 trillion-plus mountain of blocked credits piled up across the T2 system.  A further hiccup was then suffered as the two main American political parties acted out their tired old kabuki over the dire state of the nation's budget.

However, on all three continents, the Keystone Kops aboard the imperilled paddy wagon just managed to wrench the wheel over in time to avoid the looming cliff edge.

For their part, the Chinese did exactly what they assured us they were not going to do and launched a vast new wave of stimulus in order to ease the new regime into office. Eastward, across an increasingly tense stretch of sea, the soon-to-be-Premier of Japan browbeat the BOJ into conducting an escalating series of interventions while, the other side of the wide Pacific, the defeat-disheartened Republicans bent the knee to their triumphantly re-elected opponent and quailed at the thought of being blamed for slashing government spending while the cynically–opportunist Bernanke Fed exploited a patch of economic softness to go all-in with a promise of unlimited bond buying.  

In Europe meanwhile, ECB Chief Mario Draghi declaimed with a truly operatic flourish that he would 'do whatever it takes' to keep the cash flowing to the olive basket and so magically relieved the tension in the Eurozone in true Wizard of Oz style.

After a last lurch down around the time of the US presidential vote, the markets have responded with increasing enthusiasm to the realisation that disaster has been postponed once more (if, sadly, not definitively averted). Hope has sprung eternal as stock markets have rallied, junk and emerging market debt spreads have collapsed, volatility has been crushed, and the erstwhile safe havens – such as US Treasuries and gold – have begun progressively to lose their allure.

Alas and alack, as a reflection of the growing disenchantment with what have frankly been the disappointing returns offered by the asset class over the past eighteen months, commodities have taken a deal longer than the other 'Risk On' assets to respond to this perceived good news, only beginning to hold their own (on a relative basis) as the new year began.

And so, at January's close, we found ourselves flushed with the glow of higher prices and complacent in the face of further central bank largesse. Adding to the urge is the undeniable fact that we are all heartily tired of sitting on a stockpile of boring old, precautionary cash for quarter after fretful quarter.

Around such intangibles a new consensus has formed that equities are king, bonds are dead, and commodities—if we must pay them any heed at all—are the things to buy to protect against those few dark clouds, no bigger than a man's hand, which serve to remind us that central banks cannot go on indefinitely adding money to the system at or below zero real interest rates while budget deficits yawn in undiminished magnitude without risking a conflagration of values too awful to fully contemplate. 

The irony is, of course, that the thing most likely to blow these few wisps of cumulus up into a terrifying inflationary gale is simply that people come to express more and more confidence that neither this eventuality, nor its gloomy deflationary opposite, will come to pass and so the money which is currently only burning a hole in their trouser pockets is brought out to set light to the world at large.

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