Money Highway

Is Jay Powell the new Investor Relations Officer for all public companies? 

Before we answer, the tranquil image at right free of the Federal Reserve and all the travails of modern economics and politics (and investor relations) is Catamount Lake near Steamboat Springs.  I love this time of year, the way the mountains glow verdant and lakes lie full among the meadows.

Back to the Fed and IR, the gaping deficit in investor-relations today is an application of quantitative and behavioral analytics. We have them. You can use them.  They tell us just about everything one would want to know about the equity market.

For the hermitic amongst us, the Fed chair takes the mic tomorrow to end a two-day policy meeting. Some have asked about the impact of monetary policy on Market Structure Sentiment, our ten-point gauge for share supply and demand in your stock, peers, industry, sector, and the whole market, so we’ll address it briefly.

For those not reading the Fed’s balance sheet, you should know it’s $7.993 trillion currently, and includes commitments to buy mortgage-backed securities running north of $200 billion continuously (no wonder mortgage rates are low despite a dearth of homes), reverse repurchases are a record-shattering $720 billion, and excess reserves are nearing $4 trillion.

In 2007, excess reserves averaged $10 billion. It’s 400 times more now, money with no place to go save begging for 10-12 basis points of interest from the Fed, which gave it to banks to begin.

Yeah, weird, right?  Why would you create money and then pay interest on it? Because your models have convinced you this is “good for the economy.”

The Fed’s yearly calendar typically includes four meetings with policy statements in March, June, September and December. The Fed doesn’t convene in May or October and calls an abbreviated November conclave ahead of the US election cycle.

Central banks were considered lenders of last resort under the Thornton-Bagehot (badge-it) model from the UK. They took only good collateral for monetary support (limited by gold and silver) and charged high interest rates.  Central banks were not seen as the fiscal pantheon but a lifeline for only those capable of surviving.

Thus, economies washed out failure.  Economic crises throughout history always trace to the overextension of credit. They are normal parts of the tension between human fear and greed.

Today, central banks take bad collateral and offer low rates. They prevent failure. That truncates the market mechanisms wanting to remove excess capacity when credit is overextended. It obviates competition and promotes monopolism (then government decries business practices).

Failure transfers from economies to the public balance sheet (and citizens bemoan these bailouts that are only possible through the central bank). I’m sure it’ll all work out.  Cough, cough.

Market Structure Sentiment is a constant meter of human fear and greed, through stock-picking, macroeconomic musings, quantitative models and speculation.  We don’t need to make monetary policy a separate input. The behavior of money already tells us what people think.

Money is the drug. The Fed is the dealer. 

Broad Market Sentiment told us in April the monetary party was over. That’s when money stopped flooding to equities and Broad Market Sentiment stopped rising toward 7.0 and stalled near 6.0.  Broad Market Sentiment is falling at an accelerating rate now.

We like to track daily behavioral change in the S&P 500.  Most times it runs from basis points to a few percentages. June 14, with Sentiment accelerating down, behavioral change mushroomed to 14%.

Not good.

We’re all on the Money Highway, public companies. You can have the best strategy for driving 55 (Sammy Hagar notwithstanding! Musical humor for you oldsters like me.). But if the Fed governs the freeway to 30mph, you’ll be stuck in the traffic, no way out.

And you should be measuring the behavior of money because it will tell you what everyone is doing. It’ll tell you what your stock pickers think. It’ll tell you if Passive money is coming or going. If you’re in deals, it’ll tell you if that deal gets done or gets competition.

So, is the Money Highway crumbling? The dollar is rising despite the Fed’s best efforts.  It gets hoarded into assets, and then prices stop rising. I don’t know if we’re about to tip over. I do know that every market correction in the modern era has been preceded by the same data we see now.

I wish we could all get off the Money Highway and take the backroads.

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