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With policy interest rates near zero in most advanced economies (and just above 2% even in the fast-growing US), there is little room for monetary policy to maneuver in a recession without considerable creativity. But those who think fiscal policy alone will save the day are stupefyingly naive.
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Even people who don’t follow the stock market closely are aware that the global economy is weakening and appears to be heading into recession.
For those who track the stock market, the signs are ominous: the U.S. was the last major market to notch gains this year and in October the U.S. market followed the rest of the global markets into an extended slide which has yet to end.
Just as sobering, key sectors such as oil, banking and utilities have crashed with alarming ferocity, reaching oversold levels last seen in 2008 as the global financial system was melting down.
These sectors crashing sends an unmistakable signal: the global economy is heading into a potentially severe recession and assets will not be rising in value in a recessionary environment. So better to sell risk-assets like stocks now rather than later, and rotate the money into safe assets such as Treasury bonds.
And indeed, households now own more Treasuries than the Federal Reserve–a remarkable shift in risk appetite.
Many other indicators of recession are in the news: auto and home sales and global trade are all slumping.
Are we in a repeat of the global financial meltdown and recession of 2008-09? The sharp drop in equities is certainly reminiscent of 2008. Indeed, the December decline is the worst in a decade. Or are we entering a different kind of recession, the equivalent of uncharted waters?
And if we are entering a recession, what can central banks and governments do to ease the financial pain and damage? We can’t be sure of much, but we can be relatively confident central banks and states will respond to the cries to “do something.” This poses two questions: what actions can central banks/states take, and will those policies work or will they backfire and make the recession worse?
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The world economy has never faced a more perilous situation. While many have just started to debate whether a recession will start in 2019 or 2020, very few perceive the ’black hole’ the global economy is about to get sucked into.
The hole has two main “gravitational forces”: the wide-spread mispricing of risk and stagnating productivity growth. Central bank meddling with their bond buying programs (QE) have seriously distorted prices in the capital markets, which means that risk has also been mispriced in vast magnitude. The implications and repercussions of the six-year period of stagnating global productivity growth has also not been understood. These intertwined developments will lead the world economy into a serious economic downfall, a Global Depression.
See no risk, hear no risk
We devoted most of the March issue of our Q-review to explain how the asset purchase (QE) programs of the central banks have created an environment which encourages risk-taking, leverage and yield-hunting. At the heart of it is the suppression of yields on assets considered safe, most crucially government bonds, which have been the primary target of their QE-programs. QE created a stupendous, multi-year pulse of artificial central bank liquidity forced into the financial system. As the major central banks kept on pumping it eventually ended up increasing the price of almost every single asset class in the world with the possible exception of precious metals.
While leverage can be usually measured with some suitable metric (like debt-to-income or -equity), evaluating financial risk requires a reference point that is considered riskless. This creates a perplexing problem, because the QE -programs of the central banks have created a situation where we do not have any un-manipulated reference points telling us what the “riskless” rate of return actually is.
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Stanley Druckenmiller established himself as one of the most successful hedge fund managers of his generation thanks to an uncanny ability for recognizing signals in asset prices that portended an coming recession. So when he warns about rough times ahead, it’s probably worth listening.
Though he’s kept a relatively low profile since closing Duquesne Capital in 2010 and opening a family office based in midtown, Druckenmiller’s name has been popping up in the headlines of the financial press more frequently lately where his criticisms of the Fed were ridiculed (back in September he warned that we we are at the point in the tightening cycle where “bombs are going off”) before they were echoed by no less a figure than the president himself. Over the weekend, Druckenmiller offered his latest contrarian screed against Wall Street pearl clutchers by arguing in an op-ed published with former Fed Gov. Kevin Warsh that Trump has a point, and that the Fed already missed its opportunity to safely tighten monetary policy. Now, the Fed has two choices: either reconsider its plans to raise rates to 3% and beyond over the next year, or risk destabilizing asset markets and the broader economy.
And in an interview that bears similarities to Jeff Gundlachs’ “truth bomb”-strewn chat with CNBC, Druckenmiller sat down with Bloomberg for an hour-long interview where he warned that market conditions are about to get a lot worse.
The only question, in Druckenmiller’s mind, is not whether the selloff will worsen, but by how much? Because the indicators that Druckenmiller used to anticipate the last four downturns are once again turning red, suggesting the “highest probability is that we struggle going forward.”
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Back in June 2017, we wrote that if one had to follow just one macro indicator that impacts virtually every aspect of the global economy, that would be the Chinese credit impulse. Not surprisingly, the article was titled “Why The (Collapsing) Credit Impulse Is All That Matters.”
Today, almost a year and a half later, the world is once again on the verge of a recession, with China – whose recent economic data has been on the verge of disaster – closely watched as the spark that could light the next global economic and financial conflagration. And not surprisingly, it is again all about the Chinese credit impulse, which – it should come as no surprise – has dropped to just shy of a fresh post-crisis low (note how it was China’s record credit impulse burst in 2009 that dragged the world out of a global recession).
So with attention focusing on China, Nomura’s Ting Lu’s this morning reiterates his view on the sequencing of China’s economic data, and expects the front-loading of exports to continue over the 90-day truce period, which will help support production in December however this benefit will be somewhat offset by weakening external demand, and thereafter into 1H19 (esp Q2), data will show significant slowdown, as the pull-forward around the tariff front-loading will fade in conjunction with the negative impacts of the cooling housing sector and the overall credit down-cycle.
As a result, Ting believes it will be in 2Q19 when Beijing is forced to escalate policy easing/stimulus measures as the data negativity hits “breaking point,” with RRR cuts, infrastructure spending, VaT cuts, RMB depreciation and deregulation in large city property sectors, which will eventually drive a bottoming-out in the data thereafter.
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Inga Ting, Geoff Thompson and Alex McDonald provide and excellent set of graphics and information on the bursting of Australia’s housing bubble at House of Cards.
Home prices in more than four out of five council areas have reached their peak and are sliding towards an unknown nadir, according to the latest figures from property market analyst CoreLogic.
As the slump moves into its second year with little or no prospect of rebound, the downturn in capital city property markets threatens to drag down the rest of the economy.
And with a mixed outlook for the global economy, doubts are surfacing about where Australia is going to find the fuel to extend its near-record run of 27 years of unbroken economic growth.
Yearly Change in Median Dwelling Value
The graph in the article is interactive with a choice of eight cities. Sydey displayed above.
Major Declines Since 1980
Click on the graph for an even larger image.
Perth and Darwin have been clobbered. Sydney is in the works.
Every Bubble is Different
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The value of declaring the entire nation in or out of recession is limited.
Recessions are typically only visible to statisticians long after the fact, but they are often visible in real time on the ground: business volume drops, people stop buying houses and vehicles, restaurants that were jammed are suddenly sepulchral and so on.
There are well-known canaries in the coal mine in terms of indicators. These include building permits, architectural bookings, air travel, and auto and home sales.
Home sales are already dropping in most areas, and vehicle sales are softening. Airlines and tourism may continue on for awhile as people have already booked their travel, but the slowdown in other spending can be remarkably abrupt.
All nations are mosaics of local economies, and large nations like the U.S. are mosaics of local and regional economies, some of which (California, Texas, New York) are the equivalent of entire nations in and of themselves.
As a result, there can be areas where the Great Recession of 2008-09 never really ended, and other areas that have experienced unprecedented building booms (for example, the San Francisco Bay Area where I live part-time.)
Changes in sentiment are reflected in different sectors of the economy: people become hesitant about big purchases first (autos, houses) and then start deciding to save more by spending less (Christmas shopping, eating out, vacations, etc.)
Given the structural asymmetries of our economy (a few winners, most people lucky to be losing ground slowly), each economic class also responds differently. The lower 60% of households don’t have the disposable income of the top 10%, so “cutting back” for them might be buying fewer fast-food meals per week.
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Real estate, oil and the employment numbers are all telling us the same thing, and that is really bad news for the U.S. economy. It really does appear that economic activity is starting to slow down significantly, but just like in 2008 those that are running things don’t want to admit the reality of what we are facing. Back then, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke insisted that the U.S. economy was not heading into a recession, and we later learned that a recession had already begun when he made that statement. And as you will see at the end of this article, current Fed Chair Jerome Powell says that he is “very happy” with how the U.S. economy is performing, but he shouldn’t be so thrilled. Signs of trouble are everywhere, and we just got several more pieces of troubling news.
Thanks to aggressive rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, the average rate on a 30 year mortgage is now up to about 4.8 percent. Just like in 2008, that is killing the housing market and it has us on the precipice of another real estate meltdown.
And some of the markets that were once the hottest in the entire country are leading the way down. For example, just check out what is happening in Manhattan…
In the third quarter, the median price for a one-bedroom Manhattan home was $815,000, down 4% from the same period in 2017. The volume of sales fell 12.7%.
Of course things are even worse at the high end of the market. Some Manhattan townhouses are selling for millions of dollars less than what they were originally listed for.
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Photo Source wongaboo | CC BY 2.0
One of the key characteristics of the 2008-09 crash and its aftermath (i.e. chronic slow recovery in US and double and triple dip recessions in Europe and Japan) was a significant deflation in prices of global oil. After attaining well over $100 a barrel in 2007-08, crude oil prices plummeted, hitting a low of only $27 a barrel in January 2016. They slowly but steadily rose again in 2016-17 and peaked at about $80 a barrel this past summer 2018. Now the retreat has started once again, falling to a low of $55 in October and remain around $56 today, likely to fall further in 2019 now that Japan and Europe appear entering yet another recession and US growth almost certainly slowing significantly in 2019. With the potential for a US recession rising in late 2019 oil price deflation may continue into the near future. What will this mean for the global and US economies?
The critical question is what is the relationship between global oil price deflation, financial instability and crises, and recession–something mainstream economists don’t understand very well? Is the current rapid retreat of oil prices since August 2018 an indicator of more fundamental forces underway in the global and US economy? Will oil price deflation exacerbate, or even accelerate, the drift toward recession globally now underway? What about financial asset markets stability in general? What can be learned from the 2008 through 2015 experience?
In my 2016 book, ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’ and its chapter on deflation’s role in crises, I explained that oil is not just a commodity but, since the 1990s, has functioned as an important financial asset whose price affects other forms of financial assets (stocks, bonds, derivatives, currencies, etc.).
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Steen Jacobsen, Chief Economist and Chief Investment Officer of Saxo Bank sees economic slowdown ahead.
Specifically, his “Four Horseman” indicators: the drivers of economic growth, are all flashing red.
Jacobsen believes that the central banks will continue their liquidity tightening efforts for as long as they can get away with (i.e., until the financial markets start toppling over). In his opinion, they eased way too much for way too long; and the malinvestment and zombification that resulted needs to clear the system — and it will likely do so more violently and painful than the central banks will like:
I like to make things simple. Right now we have the Four Horsemen: the four drivers of the global economy. They are the quantity of money, which is falling; the price of money, which is rising; the price of energy,which is a tax on consumers and is rising; and globalization/productivity, which is falling.
So, if you look at the economy as a black box, I really don’t know what happens inside of it. But I can observe what goes into the black box: it’s these four things.
Globalization / productivity, we know that’s all about Trump, trade war and the likes. It’s not exactly improving; it’s actually worsening.
As for the quantity of money, a lot of people argue with me that the Central Banks are still expanding their balance sheets, but the fact of the matter is that the QT in terms of the U.S has been reducing the Federal Reserve balance sheet. And we have a stealth reduction of the balance sheet in terms of the Bank of Japan. The EBC would love to cut and is publicly committed to doing so. The Bank of England is doing its first hike. So the quantity of money is falling.
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Isn’t it obvious that repeating the policies of 2009 won’t be enough to save the system from a long-delayed reset?
2019 is shaping up to be the year in which all the policies that worked in the past will no longer work. As we all know, the Global Financial Meltdown / recession of 2008-09 was halted by the coordinated policies of the major central banks, which lowered interest rates to near-zero, bought trillions of dollars of bonds and iffy assets such as mortgage-backed securities, and issued unlimited lines of credit to insolvent banks, i.e. unlimited liquidity.
Central governments which could do so went on a borrowing / spending binge to boost demand in their economies, and pursued other policies designed to bring demand forward, i.e. incentivize households to buy today what they’d planned to buy in the future.
This vast flood of low-cost credit and liquidity encouraged corporations to borrow money and use it to buy back their stocks, boosting per-share earnings and sending stocks higher for a decade.
The success of these policies has created a dangerous confidence that they’ll work in the next global recession, currently scheduled for 2019. But policies follow the S-Curve of expansion, maturity and decline just like the rest of human endeavor: the next time around, these policies will be doing more of what’s failed.
The global economy has changed. Demand has been brought forward for a decade, effectively draining the pool of future demand. Unprecedented asset purchases, low rates of interest and unlimited liquidity have inflated gargantuan credit / asset bubbles around the world, the so-called everything bubble as most asset classes are now correlated to central bank policies rather than to the fundamentals of the real-world economy.
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When China finally has its inevitable growth recession – which will almost surely be amplified by a financial crisis, given the economy’s massive leverage – how will the rest of world be affected? With US President Donald Trump’s trade war hitting China just as growth was already slowing, this is no idle question.
Typical estimates, for example those embodied in the International Monetary Fund’s assessments of country risk, suggest an economic slowdown in China will hurt everyone. But the acute pain, according to the IMF, will be more regionally concentrated and confined than would be the case for a deep recession in the United States. Unfortunately, this might be wishful thinking.
First, the effect on international capital markets could be vastly greater than Chinese capital market linkages would suggest. However jittery global investors may be about prospects for profit growth, a hit to Chinese growth would make things a lot worse. Although it is true that the US is still by far the biggest importer of final consumption goods (a large share of Chinese manufacturing imports are intermediate goods that end up being embodied in exports to the US and Europe), foreign firms nonetheless still enjoy huge profits on sales in China.
Investors today are also concerned about rising interest rates, which not only put a damper on consumption and investment, but also reduce the market value of companies (particularly tech firms) whose valuations depend heavily on profit growth far in the future. A Chinese recession could again make the situation worse.
I appreciate the usual Keynesian thinking that if any economy anywhere slows, this lowers world aggregate demand, and therefore puts downward pressure on global interest rates.
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“If you’re a rational investor, you need only two words in your vocabulary: Trump and sell,” says David Stockman, former President Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget director, warning that a 40% stock market plunge is closing in on Wall Street.
While not the first time Stockman has warned of a catastrophe waiting to happen in markets, he told CNBC’s Futures Now that, after the worst monthly loss for global stocks since the financial crisis, that the early rumblings of that epic downturn are finally here.
“No one has outlawed recessions. We’re within a year or two of one,” adding that:
“fair value of the S&P going into the next recession is well below 2000, 1500 – way below where we are today.”
According to Stockman, Trump’s efforts to get the Fed to stop hiking rates from historical lows is misdirected…
“He’s attacking the Fed for going too quick when it’s been dithering for eight years. The funds rate at 2.13 percent is still below inflation,”
Specifically, Stockman notes the trade war is a major reason why investors should brace for a prolonged sell-off.
“The trade war is not remotely rational,” he said.
If the dispute worsens, it “is going to hit the whole goods economy with inflation like you’ve never seen before because China supplies about 30 percent of the goods in the categories we import.”
Stockman ends on an even more ominous note:
“We’re going to be in a recession, and we’re going to have another market correction which will be pretty brutal,” Stockman said.
“[Trump]’s playing with fire at the very top of an aging expansion.”
For now, all traders can think about is tomorrow – but we suspect Stockman will be right in the end.
Data dependent, they claim. They aren’t. Mario Draghi at his last press conference admitted, “incoming information, [is] somewhat weaker than expected.” There is so much riding on the word “somewhat.” Because of the weasel, the head of the ECB told the assembled media policy normalization was unimpeded. He did so with a straight face.
Good. Europe’s QE experiment needs to end. Not because it succeeded, rather since there was no hope for it from the beginning. It was a giant waste, at best an enormous distortion. At most, it was a huge distraction from the real problem.
You have to hand it to the Germans. They seem quite capable of the more serious business of economics (small “e”). Where Economists (capital “E”) like Draghi play the game of somewhat data dependent, businesses in Germany refuse license to the same luxury. They are business dependent, meaning that if things really were booming they would act that way. And if something like recession looms, the Germans would know it.
And that’s exactly what they’ve said for much of this year particularly the past four or five months. The global economy, which heavily influences Germany’s, is heading for another downturn. For Europe as a whole, it’s a whole lot of trouble.
The European Union’s statistical body confirms today what German sentiment has been warning about. The European economy is already on the precipice of recession. The ZEW survey in September was as low as it was when Europe was last contracting. In Q3 2018, Eurostat reports that GDP expanded by just 0.16% over Q2. That was about one-third the rate in Q2, which was itself about three-quarters the gain in 2017.
Data dependent. Like the ZEW index, GDP growth was the lowest since Europe’s last recession.
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Politicians have totally and completely misunderstood the trends within the global economy and as a result, they are actually creating one of the worst economic debacles in history. I have explained several times that the bulk of investment capital is tied up in two primary sectors – (1) government bonds and (2) real estate. Because of income taxes, real estate has offered a way to make money in capital gains without having to pay income taxes.
Money has looked to park in real estate around the world for many various different reasons as in Italy it was the escape from inheritance taxes as well as banks or in Vancouver to gain a foothold for residency fleeing Hong Kong. In Australia, there was the Super Annuation Fund which allowed people to use retirement funds for real estate. In New Zealand, the new government wanted to declare foreign investment just illegal and in Australia, they made it a criminal act for a foreigner to own property and not inform the government they were foreigners. Over in London, they imposed taxes on property which created a crash.
People spend more when they believe that they have big profits in their home. The recession of 2007-2010 was so bad recording the worst of all declines since the Great Depression all BECAUSE it undermined the real estate values. People then spent less because they viewed their home declined in value. As taxes have been rising and the average home value collapsed, the velocity of money kept declining. Especially as real estate values declined and interest on savings accounts vanished hurting the elderly who saved money for retirement and discovered their savings were producing less income, the velocity of money just plummeted. The velocity of money began to turn up finally in the USA ONLYwhen interest rates began to rise.
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CAMBRIDGE – If you ask most central bankers around the world what their plan is for dealing with the next normal-size recession, you would be surprised how many (at least in advanced economies) say “fiscal policy.” Given the high odds of a recession over the next two years – around 40% in the United States, for example – monetary policymakers who think fiscal policy alone will save the day are setting themselves up for a rude awakening.
Yes, it is true that with policy interest rates near zero in most advanced economies (and just above 2% even in the fast-growing US), there is little room for monetary policy to maneuver in a recession without considerable creativity. The best idea is to create an environment in which negative interest-rate policiescan be used more fully and effectively. This will eventually happen, but in the meantime, today’s overdependence on countercyclical fiscal policy is dangerously naïve.
There are vast institutional differences between technocratic central banks and the politically volatile legislatures that control spending and tax policy. Let’s bear in mind that a typical advanced-economy recession lasts only a year or so, whereas fiscal policy, even in the best of circumstances, invariably takes at least a few months just to be enacted.
In some small economies – for example, Denmark (with 5.8 million people) – there is a broad social consensus to raise fiscal spending as a share of GDP. Some of this spending could easily be brought forward in a recession.
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