Our Background Approach - updated on 16th January 2022.

The successive new record highs on Wall Street over the past 13 years motivated us to set down our underlying philosophy and understanding of where the stock markets of the world are, in the context of where they have been in the past. Obviously, where they are, is a moveable feast, especially since the corona pandemic, but we believe that, without the framework that we set out here, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make sense out of what is happening in the markets day to day.

Wall Street

Prior to COVID-19, the S&P500 index was making a new series of record highs and was clearly in a massive bull trend which began in March 2009. Now that the pandemic is coming under control, that bull market has resumed - which is what we predicted in our article "Bear Trend?" published on 14th March 2020. The virus has caused a clear "V-bottom" which is now behind us. It has been followed by a series of new all-time record highs on the S&P500.

Consider the chart:


S&P500: February 2020 - January 2022. Chart by Share Friend Pro.

 

Technically, we regard this V-bottom, which lasted for almost exactly 6 months, to be an aberration within the underlying great bull trend which began in March 2009. To get a good understanding of what this great bull market means and how it came about, you need to first understand the long-term context of exactly where the world economy and more particularly, the US economy, is in relation to its history. Without this deeper understanding, you will be as confused as most economists and analysts seem to be in the face of the relentless and apparently unstoppable upward trend on Wall Street.

A Bit of History

Firstly, we need to go back to the crash of 1929 and the great depression. What few people know is that that crash was actually anticipated and predicted by a Russian economist, Nikolai Kondratiev, in his book "The Major Economic Cycles" which was published in 1925, 4 years before the 1929. What Kondratiev said was that roughly every 54 years there would be a collapse of commodity prices in the world economy. He traced this cycle back 300 years, but it had already been recorded thousands of years earlier on the Hammurabi stele (a stone onto which the leader Hammurabi etched his laws) which dates from 1770 BCE. This 3700-year-old stele talks about periodic economic booms and busts known as "Jubilees" which come roughly every 50 years. This idea is echoed in the Old Testament in the book of Leviticus (25, 8-13).

We believe that this historical cycle corresponds roughly to the economically active lifespan of man. In other words, you become economically active in your early twenties, and you cease to be economically active in your middle to late seventies. So, there is roughly 54 years during which your economic decisions will influence the economy and the markets.

Everyone who experienced the 1929 great depression first-hand took away from it a deep and immovable fear of debt. They avoided credit cards, trade accounts and overdrafts - in both their personal and business lives. The impact of this over the next 50 years was enormous.

But by 1987 the influence of this generation was waning rapidly. Those that were still alive were in their middle to late seventies and as their influence faded, so debt levels began to creep up again - personal debt, business debt, international trade debt and government debt.

So, in our view, Kondratiev's commodity price cycle is really a cycle of debt clean-outs. It is just most visible in the prices of commodities. It seems that every generation has to learn for itself that debt levels cannot keep going up forever:

At some point the piper always has to be paid

 

Another Bit of History

After the 1929 crash and during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes published his book "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money". In this book he argued that the Federal Reserve Bank (“the Fed”) had adopted exactly the wrong approach after the collapse of Wall Street in October 1929. He argued that instead of adopting a "tight" monetary policy, what they should have done was to inject additional funds into the economy to compensate for the wipe-out of wealth on the stock market. The tight monetary policy they adopted, said Keynes, caused the cycle of bank collapses and unemployment that came to be known as the Great Depression of the 1930's.

Fast forward to 1987, Ronald Reagan is a second-term Republican President and in October of that year the S&P500 index falls 23% in a single day. This is more than double the first day fall on "Black Monday" (that was 9% on 28th October 1929). The Republicans very much wanted to win the election in 1988 and so they called in their recently appointed Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan was an avid student of John Maynard Keynes and he told Reagan that he knew exactly what to do to avert another Great Depression. What he did was to gather the leaders of the G7 (the seven largest economies in the world at the time) and persuade them that they had to pump money into their economies to compensate for the collapse of their stock markets. They did exactly that - and the results were nothing short of spectacular. The stock market stopped falling in March of 1988 and, 23 months after the 1987 crash, it reached a new all-time record high.

So successful was this cash-injection policy that Greenspan repeated it at every stock market bear trend for the next 19 years that he was Governor, and his successors (Ben Bernanke, then Janet Yellen, and now Jerome Powell) continued in a similar manner. The problem is that in the 1980's it took an injection of tens of billions of dollars to turn the world economy around. In the 1990's it was hundreds of billions and in the "noughties" (i.e., 2000 to 2010), following the sub-prime crisis, it was trillions. In other words, each successive cycle required an exponentially more powerful stimulation to avoid the inevitable, periodic debt clean-out and collapse of commodity prices that Kondratiev observed and wrote about.

And debt levels went higher and higher. The US government debt was $3,5 trillion in October 1987. Today, at the start of 2022, it is  just under $30 trillion. If you really want to scare yourself witless go to the web site: https://www.usdebtclock.org/

The Sub-Prime Crisis

In 2008, following the sub-prime crisis, the Federal Reserve Bank of America, in its efforts to stimulate the economy, just ran out of money. But that was no problem. Taking a leaf out of Robert Mugabe's book (from Zimbabwe), they began to print money. They literally created massive quantities of money out of nothing and injected it into the US economy. Other first-world economies followed suit. Following the 2008 sub-prime crisis the central banks of the world created and injected well over US$12,5 trillion into the world economy.

This creation of money (known euphemistically as "quantitative easing" or Q/E), combined with holding interest rates at close to zero percent for at least 8 years, finally had the desired effect of pushing the US economy (and other economies) into a boom. At last, scared consumers and businesses began spending again. Up to then they had been sitting on cash, hoarding it in case things got bad again. It has been estimated that the non-financial companies of the world alone were at the time sitting on about US$7 trillion. In South Africa alone non-financial companies were hoarding about R750 billion.

After ten years of the most powerful monetary stimulation in history, the US economy slowly entered a sustained economic boom. Until February 2020, it was creating between 200 000 and 250 000 new jobs every month and unemployment was at all-time record lows. This boom was anticipated by investors and drove Wall Street and other world markets to a series of new record highs. By the middle of February 2020, the S&P500 index was trading at record levels and was probably due for some sort of major correction.

The Corona Pandemic

The impact of the coronavirus was completely unexpected. Investors world-wide were caught flat-footed and off-guard. None of the usual economic signs of the top of a great bull market were apparent. The world economy was gathering steam and looked to continue upward for some time. COVID-19 was a true "black-swan event" (refer to The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable., N. N. Taleb).

In our view, this means that the effect of the pandemic was always going to be materially different from other previous bear trends. We believed and said that its impact on the markets will directly reflect the perceived progress of the pandemic itself. We predicted a short V-bottom in our article of 14th March 2020 [link] at a time when perceptions were universally negative.

To assess the progress of the pandemic we needed to look closely at the progress of the virus in the country where it started and where it has had the greatest impact over the longest time period - China. In China more than 80 000 people were confirmed to have contracted the corona virus and as many as 4000 died. But by the middle of March 2020, it was apparent that China was past the worst. The rate of new infections and deaths was dropping rapidly, and the government was urging people to go back to work.

The rest of the world has more-or-less followed the example of China, and our prediction that by the end of 2021 the coronavirus will largely be a spent force appears to be materialising. Some countries have fared better than others because of their state of preparedness and the strictness with which they implemented counter measures to prevent the virus from spreading. The rapid roll-out of vaccinations worldwide has helped mitigate the pandemic.

Investors world-wide were also aware of these facts and they began to buy bargains in the share market as early as March and April 2020, especially because of the massive additional stimulation agreed by the US Congress. Indeed, in the almost 2 years since the pandemic began to impact markets, the Fed has injected a further $11 trillion into the US economy through Q/E. The S&P500 rapidly reversed its downward trend and completed the V-bottom which we predicted. Since then, it has been making a series of new record highs as investors try to discount the massive monetary stimulation since February 2020.

The great bull market has resumed - and gained considerable momentum from the additional stimulus and some notable efficiencies which have come out the lockdowns. We saw COVID-19 as a "bump in the road" (albeit a major bump) of this great bull market.

Now that corona is substantially behind us and as people rapidly regain their confidence they are spending more and more. That is creating even more jobs and bigger profits for companies - who are employing more people and paying those people higher salaries - which is resulting in even more spending. We believe that the non-financial companies of the world will not only spend the $7 trillion that they have been hoarding for the past eleven years, but they will inevitably borrow five times that amount and spend that too. As confidence grows, we will see a series of amazing asset bubbles such as the world has never known before. In our view, the Dutch tulip mania of the 1637 and the wild excesses of the early nineteen-twenties will pale by comparison.

Right now, many analysts, both inside America and outside, have been confused and bewildered by the relentless progress of Wall Street (and all stock markets world-wide). The corona downtrend was a brief respite and they remain very concerned about a bull market which had gone on for a record 13 years. They are finding it more and more difficult to justify the prices at which shares are trading based on the profits of the companies which they represent.

What is amazing is that none of these analysts appear to have considered the longer-term impact of the unprecedented monetary stimulation that has been applied to the US economy over the past 13 years - and to other major economies world-wide. It's as if they believe that the trillions that have been created and injected into the world economy are somehow irrelevant to Wall Street, and other asset markets - a part of history - but they most certainly are not. Their impact is only now beginning to really be felt.

We see this as the greatest bull market that the world has ever seen - driven by:

  • The most powerful monetary stimulation in history after the 2008 sub-prime crisis and then further expanded and enhanced by the central bank response to COVID-19.
  • The massive decline in energy prices which even now are about 40% below their highs, sparked by the collapse of oil in 2014 and 2015. We believe that this will be followed by even lower energy prices as electric vehicles and renewables become ubiquitous.
  • The enormous business and personal efficiencies being introduced almost daily by new technologies working off high-speed internet connection, smart phones, electric vehicles and rapid advances in battery technology etc. To this we must now add the boost to working from home and online shopping which has been massively accelerated by COVID-19.

The coronavirus has displaced none of those powerful forces. In fact, corona has almost certainly had the effect of accelerating some of these trends.

We believe that Wall Street is still a distance from being at the top of this great bull market.

We believe that the S&P500 index was and is again now simply discounting what is rapidly becoming a world-wide economic boom. Commodity prices from oil and copper to gold and coal were all rising before the pandemic and that trend is continuing now that the virus is being brought under control. The relatively low oil prices over the past four years have kept a lid on inflation so central banks are still much more interested in pushing growth than in defending the purchasing power of their currencies.

Inflation in the United States has reached 7% and the Fed is now beginning to take steps to contain it. They are ending Q/E much more rapidly than was expected and promise to put through at least 3 interest rate hikes in 2022. But even after these rates hikes, interest rates in the US will still only be 0,75%. In our view this will be insufficient to impact the profits of S&P500 companies in any material way. For that to happen, rates will have to climb to at least 4% - and that seems unlikely before some time in 2024. So, our prediction remains (as it has been for at least ten years) that the great bull trend will continue and even accelerate.

We suggest that, as a private investor, you need to take this scenario into account in your investment strategy. You need to make money out of the continuation of the boom in equities. The corona pandemic gave you a unique opportunity to buy high quality shares at a fraction of their value which we drew your attention to. Many high-quality shares on the JSE are still trading at very low multiples and represent bargains (like Aveng and Lewis). You must watch closely and pick your moment to buy in.

The American democratic system tends to encourage politicians to have a relatively short "time preference". They are motivated by the next election and their immediate popularity. Trump was a clear example of this. He was horrified by the corona pandemic because it came at the worst possible time for him in an election year. He did everything in his power to obscure the impact of the pandemic and reverse the downward spike in March 2020. Politicians inevitably fail to implement or support policies which will involve bringing them pain in the short term, but which have long term benefits. This explains why debt levels in America just keep on rising. It has become politically impossible and unacceptable for the Americans to have a significant economic recession.

The US economy was growing very rapidly before corona, stimulated by a decade of the most stimulatory monetary policy in history and now it has resumed its upward path with a vengeance. The stock exchange will certainly continue discounting that growth now that corona is substantially behind us. So, this is a good time to be watching closely for key buying opportunities.

You should bear in mind, however, that eventually the piper must be paid. No market goes up in a straight line. There are always corrections and ultimately every bull trend must come to an end. We just think that this bull trend still has some distance to go. At some point there will be another bear trend and this time it is unlikely that all the quantitative easing in the world will be sufficient to avert it.

For further insight, read the following related articles:

4th July 2016 Article 10 – S&P500, Quo Vadis?
21st July 2016 Article 13 – Elimination of the Bears
17th August 2016 Article 20 – Is George Soros Right?
21st November 2016 Article 47 – The Great Bull Resumes