Salient

Because we are living in the Golden Age of Central Bankers, and that wreaks havoc on the fundamental nature of market expectations data....

1. the VIX is not a reliable measure of market complacency.
2. the wisdom of crowds is nonexistent.
3. fundamental risk/reward calculations for directional exposure to any security are problematic on anything other than a VERY long time horizon.
4. I’d rather be reactive and right in my portfolio than proactive and wrong.

The Golden Age of the Central Banker is a time for survivors, not heroes. And that’s the real moral of this story.

Today you can’t go 10 minutes without tripping over an investment manager using the phrase “Minsky Moment” as shorthand for some Emperor’s New Clothes event, where all of a sudden we come to our senses and realize that the Emperor is naked, central bankers don’t rule the world, and financial assets have been artificially inflated by monetary policy largesse. Please. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

When does the market break? When will the Narrative of Central Bank Omnipotence fail? Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in these questions is the belief that this – whatever this is – simply can’t go on much longer, that there is some natural law being violated in today’s markets that in the not-so-distant future will visit some terrible retribution on those who continue to flout it. There has never been a more unloved bull market or a more mistrusted stock market high. Public markets today are essentially hollow, as what passes for volume and liquidity is primarily machines talking to other machines for portfolio “positioning” or ephemeral arbitrage rather than the human expression of a desire to own a fractional ownership share of a real-world company. We believe that today’s public market price levels primarily reflect the greatest monetary policy accommodation in human history rather than the real-world prospects of real-world companies. We believe that the political risks to both capital market structure and international trade (which are the twin engines of global growth, period, end of story) have not been this great since the 1930’s. Simply put, we believe we are being played like fiddles.

It is not too early to ask how the present US business cycle expansion, already more than five years old, will end. The history of the last great US monetary experiment in “quantitative easing” (QE) from 1934-7 suggests that the end could be violent. Autumn 1937 featured one of the largest New York stock market crashes ever accompanied by the descent of the US economy into the notorious Roosevelt Recession. As we noted previously - it's never different this time...

Six months ago, it was this same Switzerland that, contrary to the prerogatives of the pervasive "fairness doctrine" taking the new socialist world by storm, rejected imposing limits on executive pay. Then mere hours ago, in a move that would give president Obama wealth redistribution nightmares for months, a whopping 77% of Swiss voters rejected an initiative for a national minimum wage of 22 francs, or just under $25, per hour, according to projection by Swiss television SRF. And confirming that when it comes to anti-socialism, Switzerland may well be the last bastion, not a single canton supported the measure.

Regardless of which side of the low labor force participation rate argument you stand on, it is hard to argue that it is simply a function of retiring "baby boomers." While political arguments are great for debate, it is the economics that ultimately drive employment. While the Fed has inflated asset prices to the satisfaction of Wall Street, it has done little for the middle class. It is ultimately fiscal policy that will help business create employment, the problem is that businesses need less of it while government officials keep piling on more. In the meantime, stop blaming "baby boomers" for not retiring - they simply can't afford to.

Does this look in any way normal to anyone?

Sadly, as far as markets are concerned, the more Sturm und Drang over Ukraine, the better... this all further strengthens the Narrative of Central Bank Omnipotence – the market-controlling common knowledge that market outcomes are the result of central bank policy rather than anything that happens in the real economy. How can you know if this Narrative starts to waver or shift? If and when gold starts to work. This is what gold means in the modern age... not a store of value or some sort of protection against geopolitical instability... but an insurance policy against massive central bank error and loss of control.

Dispassionate discussion of the near-term forces at work in the foreign exchange market.  

Simply put, there are three downside risks for markets - that appear to be off the 'meme of the day' beaten track of any average investor nowadays eyeing the record highs and gloating at any bear left standing:

1) China has shifted from a monetary policy of choice to a monetary policy of necessity.

2) The Narrative of Fed Omnipotence continues to reign supreme, but now in a tightening monetary policy environment.

3) The Hollow Market is cracked open by well-intentioned but destructive regulators.

Too long to read? Attention Deficit Disorder let you down...? Read!

Most of our readers probably know what we think of minimum wages, but let us briefly recapitulate: there is neither a sensible economic, nor a sensible ethical argument supporting the idea. So when we saw that the Swiss will vote in a national referendum May 18 on whether to create a minimum wage of 22 francs ($25) per hour, or 4,000 francs a month, we were stunned... If Swiss voters agree to introducing a new minimum wage law, they would end up doing incalculable damage to Switzerland's entrepreneurial culture. At the moment, Switzerland is still one of the freest economies in the world. It has been extremely successful so far and its achievements would clearly be put at risk. Hopefully Switzerland's voters won't be swayed by union's arguments.

What is an underlying explanation that can account for Momentum failing and Value working, but Quality NOT working? When one of my colleagues here at Salient saw these charts he said, “looks to me like the market is trading on a narrative of risk appetites and fear rather than toward some notion of seeking fundamentals or selling overbought growth stocks; otherwise Quality would be working, too.” To which I replied, “Amen, brother!” The notion that this market sell-off is limited to biotech or Internet or some other high-flying sub-sector because the market “realized” that these stocks were too expensive or out of concern with earnings this quarter (both explanations that I’ve seen of late in the WSJ and FT), just doesn’t hold water. These high-beta stocks are being hit hardest because they are at the epicenter of a broad market or beta earthquake. This is what it means to be high-beta…you live by the broad market sword and you die by the broad market sword.

What we’re witnessing right now in US markets is a shift in the Narrative structure around Fed policy, and it’s hitting markets hard because the Narrative structure around the Fed as an institution has never been stronger or more constant... "So now we will all start to act as if the statements are true for Fed policy, no matter what we privately think the Fed will do or not do, and that behavior becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a snowball rolling downhill, as more and more of all of us start to believe that this is what all of us believe. This is the power of a crowd looking at a crowd, and it’s a bitch."

If the current pace of reductions continues it is reasonable to assume that the Fed will terminate the current QE program by the October meeting. If we assume the current correlation remains intact, it projects an advance of the S&P 500 to roughly 2000 by the end of the year. But... the question is, can the US economy can stand on its own when QE completely winds down, not to mention when the Fed actually hikes rates? Amid such weak levels of economic growth does not leave much wiggle room to absorb an exogenous event, or even just a normal downturn, in an economic cycle. If the Fed is indeed caught in a liquidity trap, then the current withdrawal of support will quickly show the cracks in the economy pushing the Fed back into action. It is at the point of "monetary impotence" where the word "risk" takes on a whole new meaning.

The tyranny of models is rampant in almost every aspect of our investment lives, from every central bank in the world to every giant asset manager in the world to the largest hedge funds in the world. There are very good reasons why we live in a model-driven world, and there are very good reasons why model-driven institutions tend to dominate their non-modeling competitors. The use of models is wonderfully comforting to the human animal because it’s what we do in our own minds and our own groups and tribes all the time. We can’t help ourselves from applying simplifying models in our lives because we are evolved and trained to do just that. But models are most useful in normal times, where the inherent informational trade-off between modeling power and modeling comprehensiveness isn’t a big concern and where historical patterns don’t break. Unfortunately we are living in decidedly abnormal times, a time where simplifications can blind us to structural change and where models create a risk that cannot be resolved by more or better modeling! It’s not a matter of using a different model or improving the model that we have. It’s the risk that ALL economic models pose when a bedrock assumption about politics or society shifts.