Bear Market

The revaluation that is underway now is beyond the simple scope of corporate earnings valuations, going to the very core of the system itself.  Just like the equity pricing regime (and investor expectations for equity assets) needs to adjust to the twelve-year-old bear market reality, pricing within the global banking system as a whole needs to adjust to the reality that the artificial growth of the economic textbook is not replicable.  The economic truth of 2012 is that much of the science of economics, and the foundation that gives to finance and financial pricing, was a temporal anomaly befitting only those specific conditions of that bygone era.  In other words, the entire financial world needs to reset itself outside the paradigm of pre-2008.  The secular bear market in US equities is one strand of this changing landscape, perhaps the first stirring of the collapse of the activist central bank experiment. In the end, the potential selling pressure of the dollar shortage is irresistible, no matter how “cheap” stock prices are to earnings, but none of it may matter in the grander scheme of a dramatic reset to the global system.  The inability of that global system to escape this critical state, to simply move beyond crisis and function “normally” again, demonstrates conclusively, in my opinion, the foundational transformation that is still taking place well beyond the stock bear.  Everything is a locked feedback loop of negative pressures in this age, no matter how much we want to see “value” where and how it used to exist. 

Paradigm shifts are rarely orderly, but there are warning signs.

Now that stocks are back to reflecting nothing more than expectations of how many times the Chairsatan dilutes the existing monetary base in a carbon copy replica of not only 2011 but also 2010... and 2009 (because contrary to what purists may believe, the only way to inflate away unsustainable debt in a growth-free economy is by destroying the currency), and manic pattern chasers have crawled out of their holes proclaiming the death of the bear market after a two day bounce, what is happening in the actual economy, no longer reflected by the market, has once again been pulled back to the backburner. Which is sad, because while ever fewer people reap the benefits of artificial, centrally-planned S&P rallies, the rest of the population suffers, and what is worse: hope for a quiet, middle-class life is now an endangered species. Nowhere is this more evident than in the following list from David Rosenberg which summarizes how, quietly, the US labor force slipped back into a full-blown depression.

Last September we were delighted to bring you the following great news:

DAVID BIANCO NO LONGER WORKS AT BOFA, SPOKESWOMAN SAYS

Now, we are even more delighted to bring you the following breaking news:

BLACKROCK CHIEF EQUITY STRATEGIST BOB DOLL TO RETIRE

And then there were three...

"Expect the S&P500 to decline decisively below its March 2009, 666 intraday low. All hope will be crushed."

Facebook has officially entered bear market territory - down over 20% from its high print at $45 now with lows now at $33.05 today and 63mm shares trade so far today...

A rare moment of optimism from David Rosenberg: "I've said it once and I'll say it again. And believe me, this is no intent to wrap myself up in stars and stripes. But there is a strong possibility that I see a flicker of light come November. The U.S. has great demographics with over 80 million millennials that will power the next bull market in housing, likely three years from now. After an unprecedented two straight years of a decline in the stock of vehicles on the road, we do have pent-up demand for autos. I coined the term "manufacturing renaissance" back when I toiled for Mother Merrill and this is happening on the back of sharply improved cost competitiveness. Oil production and mining services are booming. Cheap natural gas is a boon to many industries. A boom in Chinese travel to the U.S. has triggered a secular growth phase in the tourism and leisure industry. The trend towards frugality has opened up doors for do-it-yourselfers, private labels and discounting stores.... Few folks saw it at the time. But it's worth remembering, especially now as we face this latest round of economic weakness and market turbulence. It is exactly in periods of distress that the best buying opportunities are borne...and believe it or not, when new disruptive technologies are formed to power the next sustainable bull market and economic expansion. Something tells me that we are just one recession and one last leg down in the market away from crossing over the other side of the mountain. And believe me, nobody is in a bigger hurry to get there, than yours truly. At the risk of perhaps getting too far ahead of myself, but you may end up calling me a perma-bull (at that stage, I must warn you, folks like Jim Paulsen will have thrown in the towel)."

Billionaire investor George Soros significantly increased his shares in the SPDR Gold Trust in the first quarter. Soros Fund Management nearly quadrupled its investment in the largest exchange-traded gold fund (GLD) to 319,550 shares - compared with 85,450 shares at the end of the fourth quarter. John Paulson maintained his large stake, the ETF’s largest stake and other large and respected institutional buyers were PIMCO and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. Paulson, 56, who became a billionaire in 2007 by betting against the U.S. subprime mortgage market, told clients in February that gold is a good long term investment, serving as protection against currency debasement, rising inflation and a possible breakup of the euro. Eric Mindich’s Eton Park Capital also bought  739,117 shares in the SPDR Gold Trust during the first quarter. The New York-based fund held no shares of the exchange-traded product as of December 31. Overall holdings in the SPDR Trust rose just over 8% in the first quarter, after a 2% gain in Q4 2011.

When given the opportunity to expand on his thoughts, Marc Faber, of the Gloom, Boom, & Doom Report, provides dismally clarifying detail on the state of the world. In this excellent (must-watch on a day when nothing changed but European stocks dead-cat-bounced) Bloomberg TV interview, the admittedly ursine Faber reflects on the US (slowing of revenue growth and the real linkages to European stress) noting that unless we get a huge QE3, there will be "a crash, like in 1987" noting he believes we have seen the highs for the year; on the likelihood of QE3 (agreeing with us that the Fed won't act unless asset markets plunge first); on Greece's exit of the Euro and whether policy-makers can manage the exit properly "bureaucrats in Brussels and the media are brainwashing everybody that if Greece exited the euro, it would be a disaster. My view is the best would be to dissolve the whole euro zone"; on the difference between investment markets and economic reality (thanks to financial repression); and on the global race-to-debase "I do not have a high opinion of the U.S. government, but the bureaucrats in Brussels make the government in the U.S. look like an organization consisting of geniuses. The bureaucrats in Brussels are completely useless functionaries".

Dollar vs. Stocks 

If the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick our central bank ever pulled was convincing the world we couldn’t live without it. For most of that past twenty years, that PR campaign has been centered on the Great “Moderation”, so called because it apparently represented the full embodiment of economic management – a period of unparalleled prosperity, a Golden Age of soft economic central planning. Give the central bank enough “flexibility” and it will produce unmatched economic and financial satisfaction.

We doubt many tears will be shed over the now official departure of Europe's most embarrassing political figurehead: the head of the Euro-area finance ministers, one Jean-Claude Juncker, whose presence did more documented damage to the credibility of Europe than... well, we would say virtually anyone else, but then again since everyone else in the European pantheon is a shining example of DSM IV-level sociopathology, we are kinda stuck. But anyway: Juncker is finally gone "he’s tired of Franco-German interference in managing the region’s debt crisis." And while the decision was known for a while, the ultimate catalyst is rather unexpected, and exposes just how frail the entire Eurozone is: “They act as if they are the only members of the group,” Juncker said today at a podium discussion in Hamburg." If this is coming from the man who admittedly lies for a living, we can't imagine just how bad the truth about the internal fissures within the Eurozone must be. Actually, we can.

Hugh Hendry is back with a bang after a two year hiatus with what so many have been clamoring for, for so long - another must read letter from one of the true (if completely unsung) visionary investors of our time: "I have not written to you at any great length since the winter of 2010. This is largely because not much has happened to change our views. We still see the global economy as grotesquely distorted by the presence of fixed exchange rates, the unraveling of which is creating financial anarchy, just as it did in the 1920s and 1930s. Back then the relevant fixes were around the gold standard. Today it is the dual fixed pricing regimes of the euro countries and of the dollar/renminbi peg."

While many will remember 1982 for its disco and the movie E.T., it is perhaps best known by an investing public as the end of a 16 year secular bear market. The 10% decline from 1966 was better, however, than the 38% loss from 1937 to 1941 and the 80% loss from 1929-1932 but together this triumvirate make up the secular bear markets. Luckily, as IceCap's Keith Dicker notes, for most of the investment industry they can gloss over these extended loss periods and instead focus on the long-run secular bull markets (cue Jeremy Siegel). However, he points out that unknown to many and ignored by the rest, "we are in the middle of another long and dragged out Secular Bear Market which has seen investors lose 7% since the year 2000 - that's 12 years of hopes for nothing." Understanding secular markets and how they transition from BULL to BEAR is perhaps the most rewarding investment perspective you won’t hear from anyone else. While financial markets continue to yo-yo with our retirements, the truth is, the next Secular BULL Market is not quite ready to perk its head up just yet as Dicker addresses P/E ratios during inflationary and deflationary periods summing up his view of the world rather succinctly: "As central banks continue to bail out banks and countries, they implicitly create an investment culture whereby failure is rewarded and success is taxed to reward those who failed."

It appears that when it comes to mocking consensus groupthink emanating from lazy career 'financiers' who seek protection from their lack of imagination and original thought, 'creation' of negative alpha and general underperformance (not to mention reliance on rating agencies, only to jump at the first opportunity to demonize the clueless raters), in the sheer herds of other D-grade asset "managers" (for much more read Jeremy Grantham explaining this and much more here), David Rosenberg enjoys even more linguistic flexibility than even us. Case in point, his just released trashing of the latest Barron's permabull groupthink effort titled "Outlook: Mostly Sunny." And just as it so often happens, no sooner did those words hit the cover of that particular rag, that it started raining, generously providing material for the latest "Roasting with Rosie."

One scene from the movie Titanic depicts a lounge in one of the upper class quarters of the ship as it slowly sinks beneath the waves. Notwithstanding the vessel listing alarmingly, a motley band of toff revelers are determined to go out in the finest style. Some continue to play at cards with a fatalistic resolve while others determinedly quaff spirits direct from the bottle. Having considered for some time the most appropriate metaphor for the current market environment, we think this may be it: one may be doomed, but one can still party on. Having already hit the iceberg, one major problem we see is the common perspective for both investors and the asset management industry to view debt and equity as the entire universe of investor choices available. Having long exhausted the armory of conventional policies to keep the unsustainably indebted show on the road, increasingly desperate politicians are doing increasingly desperate things, be that gifting money to the IMF in a brazen display of fiscal denial that we can ill afford (US, UK) or simply stealing from other sovereigns (Argentina). The ironic triumph of the Keynesians means that, in trying to save the economy, our central bank may end up destroying it completely by means of the printing press; as a consequence, we now get to experience some of the full-on horror of the Japanese malaise.