I'm going to explain what has happened so far. What happens next entirely depends on how inflation continues and the feds reaction.
1. We had zero percent interest rates. This causes the value of assets with cash flows out into the future (think speculative tech, Tesla) to accelerate.
2. We had massive herding in megacap tech. These valuations are high in part because for a decade you would not have beat the index without having these names in your portfolio.
3. These valuations blew up even further because of call squeezes during the 2020-2021 bull. Tesla even managed to get itself into the S&P.
5. Then in December, the megacaps we're squeezed further until the S&P 500 had a negative return relative to price!
A lot of this occured because people remained under the impression that bond yields would never normalize. Now that they have, there is a risk free alternative to stocks.
Now for the next complications: Ukraine + Russia, economic war with China, inflation, how the fed will respond, gas prices.
If inflation continues and the fed becomes aggressive with hiking, all assets are dead. Bonds will be wrecked, stocks will be wrecked, cash is wrecked, even gold (depending on how aggressively they hike) will be dead because it's actually a really good deal to buy bonds when they yield north of 10% (if we get there).
Say the fed decides not to hike as aggressively and inflation slows, then you'll be holding the S&P 500 likely for yield than growth. In the case of a recession or further inflation, that yield may be at risk depending on the sectors you're invested in.
In this context the correction in names like Target make perfect sense. The dividend was near zero at it's price before the cut. Same thing happened in a company like Newmont mining.
At 10% rates I think the fair value of the S&P becomes something like 2000 assuming the same earnings. High yield rates would moon and tons of bankruptcies would ensue. Consider how heavily pensions and retirement accounts are concentrated in stocks.
The ramifications of reaching a point like that would be devastating, so yes, I think dead is not alarmist but appropriate.
The one time in history they have gone beyond 10% it took 2 years to go from 7.32% in Sep 1977 to reach 10% in October 1979, and then peak at 15% in 1981.
It's not impossible bonds will reach 10% again. But it seems unlikely, and it seems safe to think it would take 3+ years to get there.
I think 10% happening is not that unrealistic. If oil prices return to 2008 levels ($150 a barrel) that's effectively another 36% inflation. If natural gas prices in the US converge with European prices, you have another 400% increase in the cards.
The fed will have a choice: hike rates to slow demand (10%) *OR* keep rates highish and allow financing for more supply to come online (5%). Who the hell is going to finance new gas exploration at 10%?
The OP wrote: "If inflation continues and the fed becomes aggressive with hiking, all assets are dead. Bonds will be wrecked, stocks will be wrecked, cash is wrecked, even gold (depending on how aggressively they hike) will be dead because it's actually a really good deal to buy bonds when they yield north of 10% (if we get there)."
Reads like they are referring to the Fed. Even if they aren't, US AAA-rated bonds generally track the Fed rate +1% to 1.5%[1].
So corporate bonds at 10% means the Fed rate is 8.5%+. I don't think this is realistic within the next 2 years.
OP may have speculated on outlook for the next decade, it’s possible that interest rates rise and inflation remains. This would be the case if inflation is not a domestic phenomena land is instead driven by war, china, and tariffs.
You forget very expensive crop failures caused by environmental degradation and global warming, too. India just went from promising wheat to fill the supply gap left by Ukraine to banning the export of wheat within the span of a month. Queensland's drought and now flooding is a separate disaster. It's not just too much money chasing too few microchips or cars because of logistical issues or covid shutdowns; it's too much money chasing shortages of highly inelastic basic requirements for survival, like bread and milk. This is the sort of thing that contracting the money supply can't fix, because it's not excess consumption that can be discouraged away. Considering inflation in the UK just hit 9%, EU 7.8%, even Japan going from deflation to 2.5% inflation, it seems probable this is a long haul global problem. It's a really lousy environment when the dollar is inflating and strengthening against other currencies at the same time. Higher interest rates will tamp down spending on discretionary goods, but much less so the inelastic ones we're seeing shortages of; nor will they drive investment to create more of what can be created.
That's only true if investors think the 10% rates are permanent. Future interest rates are a time series not a single value, and I suspect most will use a lower rate in later years reflecting some mean reversion.
A 10% rate on a 30-year treasury, is for all intents, permanent.
Think of it this way - a person buys a 30-year bond yielding 10%. Then, for the next 30 years, no matter what happens to interest rates or prices, they will earn a 10% return on their original bond purchase, risk free.
Remember also that 30 years is approximately your adult working life, so a really long time that people tend to think of a “permanent”.
Is it truly permanent? No, but for purposes of discussion and financial planning, it’s close enough.
If they hike the rates too much then debt servicing would be costly. This is different from 1980, because back then US gov debt was about 30% of GDP and now it is 120% of GDP (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S#0)
What are the realistic values here? I have no clue, but a good analysis should cover this.
> If they hike the rates too much then debt servicing would be costly.
The Fed doesn't care about the cost of servicing the debt. That's the US Treasury's job. By law, the Fed has the dual mandate to keep both inflation and unemployment low. That's it. Nothing to do with the cost of servicing the Government debt.
If the interest on the Government debt becomes too high, nobody will point the finger at the Fed. If however inflation is high (like now) or unemployment high, you can start hearing people accusing the Fed of gross negligence. In the extreme, the Chairman of the Fed may be sacked, then brought in front of various Congressional investigations, and may even find himself in contempt, or some other very unpleasant situation.
Bottom line: the Fed really cares about inflation, and doesn't give a damn about debt servicing.
I don't buy this argument. There are good arguments to the contrary which Jerome can bring up and has at previous hearings.
Say demand quiets but the price of inelastic goods (gas and food) continues to skyrocket due to greater demand from developing nations who demand more resources to have a better standard of living. How will hiking to 10% fix anything?
Sure you'll kill demand, but you'll also kill financing supply which will only exacerbates the issue over the long run. We need more drilling, more refining, more farming now that Russia is out of the picture and the Saudis are playing games.
Hiking too far is actually a horrible policy choice, and Powell can make a cogent argument about it: he already has mentioned this in hearings. You can't address supply related constraints with higher rates. At some point, they might justify capping rates to finance the needed supply, and that argument smells like the yield curve control of the 1940s. I suspect this argument will become more palatable if we have high unemployment and high inflation. [0]
I have a feeling whatever policy rate they pick will aim to be slightly sub neutral (negative real rates) as they pray inflation resolves itself, while constantly pointing out they have no control over whether Brazil has a successful wheat harvest.
You are not actually responding to my argument. I was arguing that the Fed does not care about the cost of servicing the Government debt. I wasn't arguing about how much the Fed will hike. They will stop hiking when they consider fit, but the interest on the Government debt will not be one of the factors they'll include in their decision.
They definitely care about second-order effects. If for example they raise the rates enough that debt servicing starts to become a real issue and this leads to higher taxes and spending cuts, then that is an extra economic headwind which they must consider.
They don’t care about the debt figure per se but they do care about the economic implications of that debt, and how other entities are likely to react to it.
> If for example they raise the rates enough that debt servicing starts to become a real issue
then they would've realized they hiked too much. That's why the current Fed hikes are conservative - a lot of people are claiming that they are late, and should've done it earlier, but i think they are doing it right. Slow and steady, and be conservative.
I actually agree that hiking too high is a very poor policy choice for a number of reasons but for your example of fuel, if you kill the demand for it, the price will not skyrocket. On the other hand, however this would also mean that the economy as a whole is dead so again not the best policy choice (but it is likely to rein in inflation)
That's true in theory, but in practice I don't think it works that way. The executive and popular opinion can put pressure on the fed, and even absent that the fed does in fact care about the stability of the nation more broadly than that mandate suggests. I agree with the parent that the fed is very unlikely to raise rates to double digit levels given the high level of government debt. More likely we'll have an extended period of high-but-manageable inflation, and inflate away some of that debt (and some of everyone's savings).
That’s just not true. The Fed will take into consideration all of the consequences of their actions. They’re not going to do whatever they want and put the country in historical depression.
This is one one of the ways to fix the economy in times like this requires congress to reign in spending. It's not just on the Fed to try to fix things, both sides of the equation need fixing.
If you think that there is some major economic turmoil ahead with dropping asset values across the board (and I personally this is fairly likely), the general advice is to aim for a positive alpha. That is, if you are moderately well off or better, invest to "go down less than your neighbors". Assets across the board lose value, but if at the end of the fall you preserved a higher fraction of your money to invest than your neighbors and are willing to pick the best assets after the collapse you can reap huge benefits.
The counter argument to this is that the above approach absolutely requires an iron discipline. And without experience non-professionals are prone to making very costly mistakes (e.g., invest on feelings, double down inappropriately, etc.). So, a general audience advice is usually: do not invest money you need within 5-10 years and do not make rash decisions; it is better to ride this train down and then hopefully back up than jump randomly. And diversify (across countries, economies, asset classes, etc.).
I think this is probably the most useful wisdom for the average person:
> do not invest money you need within 5-10 years and do not make rash decisions; it is better to ride this train down and then hopefully back up than jump randomly.
Gaming the market successfully requires a ton of skill and knowledge, and even then you are not guaranteed success.
Most people are better off focusing on asset-class diversification (i.e. spreading money across many different kinds of asset classes - i.e. physical assets, securities, commodities, cash, etc) than playing just the stock market.
And even when playing the stock market, most people are better off focusing on "time-in-the-market" vs "timing the market".
As long as you heed standard advice (treat stock as nice to have but value it at zero during wage negotiations) then the impact on your net worth should be minimal :)
> The general advice is always to aim for a positive alpha.
On the contrary, for the past 20+ years the general advice has been to specifically aim for the alpha of zero ("just use index funds"), not for a positive alpha ("don't try to beat the market", etc.).
> No investor aims for a negative alpha, regardless of the economic climate.
Factors other than alpha are way more important for most people. Many retirees put a high value on low volatility or stability of dividends and are perfectly OK with getting a small negative alpha as part of the package.
Original hedge funds (before they joined a cutthroat trading jungle) set up with a similar goal in mind: a small negative alpha, but protected against the loss of the principal. And had plenty of wealthy investors who were happy with this deal.
Alpha becomes the critical parameter to optimize for when actively investing in times of turmoil (then a negative total return on a positive alpha on the down leg is a success). But few people actually do that, so few care about alpha.
Yes, but it's unclear how to intersect this with a reasonable tax strategy for many retail investors. i.e. do I sell everything and pay capital gains or sit?
I actually don't have a good answer for this. Not financial advice. Talk to a fiduciary.
The problem with inflation is that you need to protect yourself before the fact, and at this point, it's difficult to read to what extend the fed will respond with rate hikes and how much inflation we get going forward.
In my personal view, it would be stupid to hike to 10% since that will also cut off the needed supply response: this will decapitate energy, farm, and housing expansion while at the same time decimating all forms of wealth. But there is a possibility depending on how trigger happy the fed becomes.
More likely than not, they raise rates, but it stays below the rate of inflation (3-5%), so anything that yields above that range is a good investment. Anything below would be protective.
As for stocks, I'm looking at individual companies that are cheap with high cash flow that have macro tailwinds, but I'm still waiting. There are always bull markets inside of bears, but you have to look for them. Mind you, bear markets have vicious rally from time to time which fool people into getting an all clear signal. A bear markets job is to bleed everyones money dry, which is why I'd recommend people stay away until no one is interested in stocks anymore.
> In my personal view, it would be stupid to hike to 10% since that will also cut off the needed supply response: this will decapitate energy, farm, and housing expansion while at the same time decimating all forms of wealth. But there is a possibility depending on how trigger happy the fed becomes.
The only reason Volcker managed to bring down inflation is because he was willing to actually do what needed to be done. If borrowing money is cheaper than inflation, why would anybody not just continue to borrow money indefinitely? The Federal Reserve can fight inflation or it can fight a recession; it cannot do both simultaneously.
You have to decide which is a bigger problem: a recession, or inflation. The notion that you can walk a tight rope between the two is disconnected from reality. And while you continue to make inflation worse, you only make the inevitable recession worse. Tick tock.
Lots of assumption buried in your comment/worldview about what's actually causing inflation. Is it actually just a slow accretion of growing costs for resources, distribution? Is it companies deciding that now would be a great time to increase prices "because inflation" and thus get ahead of the nascent wage growth that was threatening to take off post-pandemic? Clearly it's a mixture of the two but the implications are completely different if its 90/10 vs 10/90.
Honestly, that's really not that important for what I was saying, because we're talking about the Fed. The Federal Reserve can choose to fight inflation or it can choose to inflate assets, and that lies on a spectrum. The "why" of inflation isn't nearly as important as the severity of it. If inflation is at 10% you're not going to debate it before doing something about it - that just allows the situation to fester instead of taking initiative. The reason we're in this situation where inflation is still getting worse, a year after being told not to worry about it, is because it's politically untenable to actually try to fix the problem. Meanwhile inflation continues to worsen while we make symbolic gestures about fighting it.
Yes, understanding what's causing inflation matters. I'm not saying it doesn't. But when you have a crisis, you want to focus on mitigation first and then root causing it after the situation is averted.
Also you mention two possible causes of inflation. Limited resources and distribution, and companies deciding to raise prices because they can. What about the Fed printing money like crazy, flooding the M2 money supply? That's the one that's relevant to this conversation.
The Fed can't do much at all to stop corporate-controlled price increases. Increasing interest rates makes it more expensive to borrow money, but that has little impact on a company choosing to bump its retail prices by 25%.
M2 is only relevant to a point. The increase in the money supply does not, in and of itself, cause any change in prices at all. Individuals and corporations have to make explicit decisions to respond to what they can see of the M2 effect, and none of these decisions are a law of nature. Rents don't have to go up just because M2 grew. Landlords sense that they can, and then they choose to do so. They could choose not to do so, too, but they don't because we're taught that this would be irrational, or something.
> Individuals and corporations have to make explicit decisions to respond to what they can see of the M2 effect, and none of these decisions are a law of nature.
The law is called supply and demand. If there are more dollars and the same amount of resources, the value of a dollar goes down.
Inflation is still going up because there’s a war between Ukraine and Russia. This has caused food and energy prices to skyrocket. The Fed can raise rates to 69% but it’s still not going to cause (say) the grain in Odessa to make its way to people’s stomachs.
Is a certain amount of rate increase justified? Yes, you don’t want an inflation spiral to develop. Beyond that, we are going to have to live with a certain amount of inflation until the situation in Eastern Europe normalizes and the supply chains normalize after COVID. And the interest rates should be kept on the lower side so that companies can still finance solutions to this mess.
If it was just one item you would expect that consumers would cut back elsewhere. Instead we see that they can demand more wages, and companies can demand higher prices even if they are decoupled from wheat.
The latter is only possible if there is too much money in the system, the signal about wheat production gets lost. As the feds money printer doesn’t work evenly, those who are closer to it get more money. I can only speculate that eventually, like any corruption, the effect is to diminish productivity in the real economy in favor of a special class.
> ...until the situation in Eastern Europe normalizes and the supply chains normalize after COVID.
They won't "normalize" though (imho), as the reason is not really COVID anymore, it is China gaining ground and trying to do as much damage to the western economy as possible.
Very low interest rates and high asset prices indicate that 2020s can be another lost decade for investing that follows the great decade of 2010s. 2000s was also a lost decade, and unfortunate thing about it was that even if you managed to time the bear market perfectly and entered at the very low in 2002, the decade would still be lost to you, because the market in 2009 was below 2002 lows.
While many do not believe it's true, timing the market is possible and its a skill. *Find good active managers that have a track record of positive returns and low losses.*
While they did not beat the index in the last decade, I'm fairly certain they will going forward or more importantly minimize the drawdowns.
instead of pursuing speculative gains consider investing it in yourself or in your immediate locale or region, in the economic and ecological transformation we all sorely need
devaluation of everything is a consequence of unsustainable economics and the fix is not to find a convenient hidey-hole for your money but to invest time, money and attention building a future sans witless speculation, profligate consumption, public and corporate unaccountability, and consumer monoculture
I appreciate this comment. I think the way that it’s written might drive off, say, a more traditional conservative — but I think if rephrased, they would agree.
“Spend time at your church, and spend money to invest in a local private school” would line up perfectly w/ 75% of Republicans that I know, (and, if I may assume your views, probably does not line up with them); and yet I think it is a very similar line of thinking.
I am trying to orientate the way that I spend my money and my time more towards my local community. It’s surprisingly difficult. Not everyone does it. And we would be better off if they did!
I wrote it to try to appeal to traditionalists and progressives and people of all political persuasions!
spending time building a religious or spiritual community is fine by me, especially if it provides material services to the locality and a sense of civic responsibility
also fine with private schools although I do think they should cater to students without the means to pay exorbitant tuition (some provide tuition aid, in fact I went to one that did) and I think there is something to be said for allowing public schools some degree of curricular independence, which might make them more appealing to those who presently prefer private alternatives
really I think there's a lot most people can agree on and I hope we can begin to identify less with team R or D and reason from principles in our politics
> It’s surprisingly difficult. Not everyone does it. And we would be better off if they did!
If all assets are dead, you can spend your assets now to improve yourself or family. If you've been wanting some time to go to school or pursue some other self improvement, maybe spend some assets now to do so. Education and skills are an asset like any other, and can also be devalued though. I wonder how personal skills will fare in the coming years?
Unless you’re retiring in the next 10 years, or planning on purchasing a house in the next few years, then just make your emergency fund a little bigger and hold on to your job. Follow your normal financial planning.
You’re not going to outplay market trends, and if you’re young/middle aged then it doesn’t matter any way.
Yes it does. If you invested near the dot com peak or the japan peak, you still haven't made your money back.
This notion of passive investing that has been pounded into peoples heads for years is complete bullshit and has only worked because there was always someone else ready to pay more for the same asset and because rates were perpetually held low. Some points to consider:
(1) You have fewer millennials than baby boomers, as the baby boomers cash out from their vanguard accounts, who makes up for the difference?
(2) If the S&P 500 contains companies built for a certain macro regime (low inflation, low interest rates), and the macro regime is shifting, you can be penalized by owning a set of assets that do not provide adequate returns (Tesla is currently the 5th largest weighting in the S&P, they don't pay you squat.)
Go look at charts of the S&P 500 beyond the last 40 years when rates were more variable, you'll see the market can at times be a shit investment vehicle that might not give you a return by the time you retire and on an inflation adjusted basis has a negative return!
> If you invested near the dot com peak or the japan peak, you still haven't made
your money back.
What does this even mean? That you invested the only money you ever invested entirely in the relatively brief period of the dot com peak? Who does that? (Obviously not nobody, but ...)
To all effects and purposes, nobody does that. So what it really means is "the money you invested during that one period (perhaps a year or so), and likely only the money you invested in dot com and adjacent stocks, has yet to be made back". In the meantime, the other money you invested before and after the dot com peak has done rather well, unless you specifically made some particularly disastrous choices.
The dot com crash was not associated with a particularly noticeable "underwater" period for real estate, so if you bought a house during that time, you're not likely to "still be underwater", which was the GP's claim.
The obvious issue with the obvious plan is that you can only tell what's "high" and what's "low" in retrospect, and if you time your lump sum investment wrong (dot com peak, Japan peak etc), you end up negative for a long, long time. Whereas DCA or equivalent guarantees that you capture the ups as well as the downs.
Great advice. So, ummmmm, how long is patient enough? 18 months, 3 months? What's low? Is this the lowest it's going to get? If you have answers to all of this, I want to invest in your fund.
> You have fewer millennials than baby boomers, as the baby boomers cash out from their vanguard accounts, who makes up for the difference?
The Boomers are using or investing that cash, though. Sooner or later anyway. And that cash would flow to the current owners of the things they are patronizing.
It's not like they're investing in dry ice and then throwing it in the ocean.
As others have said, portfolio diversification (i.e. spreading your money around between lots of different asset classes) is more important than playing the stock market well.
Most people cannot play the stock market well, and even those who make it their day-job often don't end up playing it well. The reality is that the stock market is just too random to game reliably.
Same as always, keep investing in a well-diversified spread. The stock market as a whole will always bounce back. That or society collapses and your numbers in a computer are worthless anyway.
This is the first big downturn I've been prepared to invest in, so personally I'm going to buy more than usual. I see it as stocks being on sale.
> The stock market as a whole will always bounce back
Japan is the common counterexample. It is entirely possible the stock market will stagnate in the future as the era of American economic hegemony comes to an end.
That only provides a counter example to investing all your money into a single country. Unless you think every stock market in the world is going to do poorly, that's a reason to buy a globally diversified index fund (like VT), so even if American economic hegemony ends, you can pick up on growth of other countries.
Is there really any western country that is "on the rise"? If the US is a poor choice, what else is there? I don't wanna invest in China as that could be throwing money into a black hole. I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling this way.
It's true that 2021 saw the highest rate of GDP growth in 30 years, but that came immediately after the largest GDP decline in 30 years during 2020. So that can be explained as an aberration due to the pandemic shutdowns and subsequent rebound:
Why does it need to be collapse or all time highs? Stagnation and decay seem entirely possible. Negative real returns seem entirely possible when bonds had negative nominal returns.
Long term your best bet is still stocks. Stocks naturally resist inflation- when inflation goes up earnings will go up with them. The current P/E is high but it's not insanely high. Sure, stocks can still go down 10% or 20% (or 30% or 40% though less likely) but your cash is also going to get eroded by that much over the next few years and at least you have a productive investment.
Whether real estate is worthwhile depends on your local markets. In some parts of Europe it might be. If you need a place to live, and you think the prices are reasonable (e.g. it's a market that hasn't seen crazy prices due to QE and low rates) and you can afford it then I'd definitely consider keeping in mind that it's also a long term play, not a short term one. If it's purely investment property the calculation is different.
> Sure, stocks can still go down 10% or 20% (or 30% or 40% though less likely) but your cash is also going to get eroded by that much over the next few years and at least you have a productive investment.
The current trend is that stocks are going down in dollar value, not just in real value after adjusting for inflation. Are you saying you expect that to reverse?
Ofcourse it will reverse. Sure, the P/E is on the high side and so the expected returns won't be as good as they can be but hey, you're already 20% down (or more in real terms). If we we're going to see 8% inflation over the next few years then sitting in cash is going to see your money get erased. Bond rates are still way too low. Housing is somewhat inflation resistant but it has also been terribly inflated. So stocks look like the best option right now, if we go more down they'll be even better ;)
EDIT: Just to be more specific, I'm pretty sure that in ~5 years you'll at least maintain your real value and in 10 years you'll have a decent real return. Pretty decent probability anyways. In 10 years you'll beat the 10 year bond and the housing market (or gold, or cash or bitcoin). I'm sure some sectors will over-perform and some will under.
I'm not convinced the current trend is going to go particularly negative from a 2+ year perspective. Things got super overheated in 2020-2021 but demand is still strong, so I wouldn't be surprised if things level back off after the steam is let out.
Real estate is going to be gutted - increasing mortgage rates (already have been happening) will decimate qualified buyers. Decreasing prices will further decimate those willing to Hail Mary with cash offers hoping to get something after years of frustration.
But the effective, on-the-ground housing shortage is going to continue to keep demand for housing extremely high in almost all areas with reasonable economic options or amenity migration destinations.
The only reason there is a housing shortage is because there is an excess of jobs and money in that place.
Which is changing. Houses in sunnyvale went from 750k-1m and impossible to find one for sale to 350k (yes really!) and on the market for years around ‘08.
Nope. For one thing, there's the largest generation of the 20th century at peak retirement, cashing out of family houses that have gained huge amounts of value, and looking to move to amenity-rich locations.
For another thing, the investment industry, short of other options, has started buying houses to rent them (short or long term), squeezing supply and driving up prices in many markets.
For another thing, short term rentals (AirBnb, VRBO etc.) have had profound impacts on the availability of property in heavily visited areas (in fact, it's not so much absolute visitation rates, but vists-per-resident that characterizes this).
Other factors too. That doesn't mean the market can't crash, but it will be something very different from what happened in 2008.
> cashing out of family houses that have gained huge amounts of value, and looking to move to amenity-rich locations.
They can only cash out if people are willing to buy. And fewer people will be willing to buy (at least at the prices the retirees want) with interest rates going up.
So the retirees will either put off their plans for a while in the hopes that things will recover, or will accept lower prices for their homes.
> For another thing, short term rentals (AirBnb, VRBO etc.) have had profound impacts on the availability of property in heavily visited areas
Is this true? Last I was reading about this (a few months ago), the number of housing units in San Francisco listed on Airbnb was around 8k, which is around 2%. Meanwhile, a report from this February estimated that over 40,000 residential units (10% of total) in SF were sitting empty in 2019 (and that number has likely been growing over the past 3 years, as it has been since 2013). Why are we all upset about short-term rentals when so many real estate speculators are sitting on more than 4x as many vacant properties?
> Why are we all upset about short-term rentals when so many real estate speculators are sitting on more than 4x as many vacant properties?
I would guess partly because almost all of the short-term rentals represent either (a) previously long term rentals that are no longer available to people who live and work in that location or (b) new construction that doesn't address housing shortages.
The boomers heading into retirement situation is a reflection of 40-50 years of economic policy and has no connection with recent "cheap money".
Actual investment in single family and apartment housing is almost entirely tied to its low risk/return ratio compared with (the perception of a lack of) other options for investment at this time. The money sloshing around for investment is as much as function of the effective privatization of retirement funding as anything else.
The short term rental market is in part the perfect expression of how a relativel small number of wealthy individuals can totally distort a market to follow their own preferences, and reflects income/wealth inequality and lack of regulatory enforcement (they're freakin' B&B's people!) as much as anything else.
Cheap money has almost nothing to do with any of them.
The ‘cheap money’ issue isn’t a short term one. It’s been steadily dropping with only minor hiccups since the mid 80’s - about 40 years ago. The last time the US had a inflation hit, at that time due to the Oil crisis.
Mostly to keep juicing the economy, which has steadily been needing it more and more to grow/less responsive to stimulus.
Folks I know who have done the AirBnB route were often getting mortgages and buying properties to let out, using the short term cash flows to pay the (low interest rate) mortgage.
Which makes sense as an investment, because the mortgage was cheap (cheap money) compared to current cash flows.
It has become more and more
pervasive, until it stopped being able to make money due to saturation. Younger folks traveling around during Covid using AirBNBs helped (they were trying to avoid lockdowns and ‘dirtier’ hotels), but not sure how it is going to play out now.
Anyone who had a 30 year mortgage they got then is going to do pretty fine though as long as they have cash flow.
Bay Area has the highest price to rent ratios in the US. Rent really hasn't changed that much since 2020 and if the betting stops it'd make sense to go back to 2020 prices (which is like a 50% "crash" in parts of the Bay)
I would so much welcome a 50% crash but I’m afraid we’ll never ever see it in the Bay Area. There are just too many people, job or not, in a very strong financial position.
I’m sitting on $600k+ cash for a down payment and if I see townhouses correcting I’ll snatch one up immediately. And I am a very small fish compared to the wealth that’s around.
My personal bet is that the Bay Area will just stay at 0% growth until the market recovers.
A lot of speculators also bought assuming increasing property values, so if it’s flat for 5 years or whatever, then that’s going to nuke their gains. Meanwhile they’re paying out real cash every month.
The rental market in many previously hot areas (SF, South Bay) has taken a hit, but not sure where it will land long term.
Medium term there is a LOT less pressure with a lot of techies having relocated and remote work being accepted.
Don’t forget though that anyone who is a ‘bigger fish’ (looking to invest many millions or half a billion or so) in a high inflation environment is going to be looking for as sure a bet they can with as high a return they can.
And since money isn’t as cheap anymore, those are easier to find and get.
So while it may not be bad returns, it may be bad returns compared to something else (a new business, for instance).
It'll make housing even more expensive in 10 years as builders will be decimated like in 2008, we won't build housing for half a decade, and a new generation will look for housing while boomers sit on their 80% vacant 4bd houses they paid 1/5 of the current market price for.
>> It'll make housing even more expensive in 10 years as builders will be decimated like in 2008, we won't build housing for half a decade
This is already happening in the Midwest. Builders have stalled or trying to wait out this supply side shortage - the prices of all building materials have skyrocketed because of it and just in an adjacent neighborhood where they had torn down three houses, the lots are all vacant now and for sale. Builders who had planned to build huge mansions all pulled out and are now just selling the lots.
This has also had a ripple effect on down the amount of houses up for sale. My wife and I decided not to move and have remodeled our entire main floor and are now working on the bathrooms. We're staying put. I heard on a weekend real estate show they were saying two months ago, that out of the 15,000 houses/condo's/townhomes available, when you start to filter out townhomes and condos, then take out all the million dollar and above houses? You're left with less than 200 single and multi-family homes on the market. An absolute staggering number.
A lot of people on both sides are trying to wait this out. But like you said, its going to have some serious long-term consequences for everybody.
71 million alive in 2019 of 76 million born[0]. If the oldest boomer is 76 now, their life expectancy is over 10 years[1]. Most boomers have more years life expectancy than that i.e. most boomers will live longer than 10 years. And in a couple one will live longer, perhaps not releasing a house.
Aside: most people mentioning “boomers” normally are saying something offensive - similar to making inane stereotypical comments about disabled people as an example. The term is very American-centric, and in my country the word mostly is used offensively. We mostly don’t know what gen__ means either.
Edit: 25% of boomers don’t own a home. Today, white millennials are almost three times as likely as Black millennials to own their homes. If you are white, then every time you make a comment about a group that has it better off than you, lookout behind you. Goes double for complaints about the wealthy if you live in the US: you are the wealthy from the point of view of most people in the world.
You're arguing that those who survived this long will survive more than 10 years. I mean, yes, but
1) food in this economy is still delicious so heart disease is still the cause of 50% of deaths, and
2) humans only have one copy of p53 from each parent, so everyone dies of cancer if Heart disease or <random> doesn't get them first.
Given 1 and 2, the boomers are on their way out. My mom (born 1953) might make it another 20 years, but my dad (born 1945) is living on borrowed time (20 pk-yr history and cancer).
It is how actuarial tables work. Baby boomers in 2032 will be between 68 and 86 years old, and mortality increases rapidly up to and including those years.
Serious question: Instead of riding the ETFs down, what if I sell investments now and move to cash/gold? Cash would lose value at the rate of inflation, while ETFs can drop 30-40% more if the FED makes mistakes.
I am bullish for software developers. Since 2001 I have not been fired or laid off. I have been able to get a job within 4 weeks the whole time. (Probably 1 week if not fussy and just need money). Software is still eating the world, it just might have a bit of constipation during this period.
Developers can save companies money - handy in a recession. Developers can sell their skills globally (that has negatives too though...). And if a software company is still running it needs developers to fix the bugs, support the system.
I sure hope so because I'm out here reading Stroustrup and CLRS to start a career at 30. But it really seems like there's a glut of tech companies with investment capital paying people 300k to make apps for stuff that's trivial. Juicero tier stuff, all over the place. I worry it will collapse and SWE is gonna be your run of the mill 45k job from then on.
>> But it really seems like there's a glut of tech companies with investment capital paying people 300k to make apps for stuff that's trivial.
I work for one of the largest health care companies in the world. In the US, there are only three or four major health care companies and they're all massive. My company has repeatedly said its too big to move as fast as smaller startups who are coming in and disrupting one niche of the entire market.
For example, we have something like 4-5 different billing systems, none of which are able to talk to each other. They're monolithic, they're 10 years past what you would consider "legacy" software. So in comes all these companies building billing apps for health care companies. My company? We can't compete, so we're constantly buying other companies, and integrating their tech into our company.
Today in Health Care, startups with good ideas and good products? They're not lasting and are being bought up at a record pace. My company? Bought 15 companies last quarter, we're on pace to buy more this quarter. So instead of creating and building this tech in-house? They're just buying up these smaller startups and using their technology instead.
My advice? Build a decent product/app/platform for a niche area in Health Care and you'd be surprised how fast one of these companies will be knocking on your door.
Then you take one of those issues and see if you can find a problem worth fixing. Develop a program or application around solving that particular problem. I'd also start looking at attending healthcare conferences and focusing on that issue and going to see what industry people are complaining about and see if you can get more insight from them. Start networking with people at the conferences.
It wouldn't take long to get an inside track through networking and research to find a niche where you can build something that will really get a companies attention.
I don't think so.. good software engineers are still somewhat rare and you need good ones to not blow up your code base once it reaches a certain size/complexity.
Any high school kid can make a website, but if you want your app to grow for 3 or more years, it has to be built well-ish.
Good devs are only really needed by good companies. Majority of companies are not FAANG. Everyone else will take whatever trash they can find and those companies will probably pursue downward pricing pressure.
You could apply for jobs in businesses that are not affected by economic vagaries, or government jobs, or jobs at counter-cyclical businesses like debt collection.
invest in your education and personal development if you are young. start a startup. invest in your career. have children and invest in them. this is all real economic growth; money number is fake right now. if you are old and need financial security, invest your time in learning about future relevant sectors like energy, climate, bio. commodities. toilet paper. trash bags.
I would be very scared to hold Euros. Either CHF or USD, or a mix. It is paradoxically better to hold cash than to invest in equity, bonds or real estate.
I motice that you left out real estate from your analysis.
RE is interesting because it's both an asset as well as something you can use. So if there's general inflation, it's got both upward pressure (because it's an alternative to rent from a consumer standpoint) and downward pressure (because bonds are an alternative to RE from an investment standpoint).
I like the comment: “I think one of the problems in this discussion is that the word ‘shortage’ doesn't have a clear meaning. If gas is $6 a gallon, should we say there is a shortage of gas? If I get stuck in traffic on the way to work, can I say there is a shortage of roads? If I have to park 4 blocks away from my apartment, is there a shortage of parking?”
Worst part is the utterly absurd shortage means RE is never going to meaningfully dip for any period of time without serious structural reforms. The focus on interest rates as the main RE driver is almost completely cope and I wish I could believe it.
Low-rate mortgages certainly aren't helping, but they're "not helping" in the same way that hucking an armload of kindling into an already-raging house fire is "not helping".
I'm cautiously optimistic that societal unrest from this will eventually forcibly neuter local zoning controls but short of that we're just going to keep subsidizing demand and kicking the can down the road as if people don't need places to live.
I agree that local zoning is a problem, but I've seen a trend to try to turn it into the wild west. I'm not sure people building duplexes in R1 is really a solution. It seems like we need more medium density in commercial areas (e.g. four stories of apartments on top of one floor of commercial).
That could bring down rents and improve quality of life, and improve the suburbs as well. If you drive by a poorly-maintained house in the suburbs, that's probably someone who would live in medium density if it were available.
There’s a housing emergency in most places people want to live. If society wanted to have moderate solutions, they should have tried these conservative solutions before crisis point.
It’s like saying pouring water on a house fire is too extreme, maybe try an ABC extinguisher instead. The time for half measures is long past. If NIMBY home owners don’t like that there’s an apartment in their neighborhood, they can choke.
The problem is that everyone has their own oppinion on the matter, and will block anyone from trying out any other opinion.
At some point, you just need to build. If some ideas don’t pan out… then people will move, investors will lose. At present, even in densely populated Boston, any type of housing will command a high rate.
I've heard the idea to zone for one level above the average in an area, to avoid the wild west situation. Doubtful that would fly with some very rich single family neighbourhoods near cities, but perhaps it's too late for the gradual re-zoning and a more blunt approach is necessary.
Aside... where the heck is tech in building housing faster? Where's the prefab and automated assembly? Too many building regulations? Entrenched interests? Incredibly hard problem for large scale engineering?
New rules that mean that property owners have a mostly automatic consent, if you build within the limitations. Councils and neighbours are mostly prevented from blocking development. There are rules/constraints on height, setbacks, shadowing (recession planes) etcetera, however the restrictions are not ridiculous.
I would say NZ is fairly similar to Oregon if you want to compare size, population etcetera against the US. Although looks like NZ has more population in major cities than Oregon (Greater Auckland population 1.5M, cf Portland 650k). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_New_Zealand
Government is doing everything it can to prop up the assets of voters. MBS bailouts haven't stopped, Biden housing plan is all about subsidizing buyers, mortgage forbearance is as much as ever.
Will it work idk but if there's one thing the state is scared of it's voting boomer homeowners.
New buying gets hit hard. In the US, fixed rate 30 year mortgages mean that a lot of existing owners are isolated from rates (albeit not from market price devaluations).
It's outside the US too, but holy moly is it dirt cheap in the US, averages not even 4% [1]. When I looked last year RBC showed like 8% (now 9.75%[2]) for 25 years fixed in Canada; tougher choice against 5 year terms than down South.
I just wanted to call out that must-sell (2008, falling market prices, unaffordable adjustable high-rate mortgages, low inflation) is different than can-hold (falling market prices, affordable recent low-rate mortgages, high inflation).
If you've got a fixed-rate mortgage at 3%, there are worse forms of debt...
And the must-sell, can-hold (and I'd add must-hold, where you can afford what you have but any buy+sell would be result in an untenable downgrade) statuses have a big impact on prevailing prices .. since you don't get the fire sell busts outside of must-sell
Boomers all over Silicon Valley are still paying 1976 tax rates on their properties worth $2m+ now. Disneyland is a huge beneficiary[2], but ANY efforts to reform Prop 13, even just for commercial, are met with "slippery slope" arguments from the same boomer homeowners (and PR campaigns funded by real estate groups that benefit from it).
They're paying (at most) 2.5x what they paid in 1976 (1.02 ^ (2022-1976)). In the grand scheme of things, that's not far off from 1976 rates, given that many properties have appreciated 10-20x.
Real estate is interesting. The issue is will you be able to make enough rent to actually get a return. I think at this point that's still the case over a 30 year period, but I'm not quite sure what that'll look like in time.
Aside from the leverage issues other point out in RE, you have to consider the political risk.
How safe do you feel that a piece of paper saying that plot of land is yours will hold up when there's a raging mob threatening politicians to do something about homelessness/housing prices/AirBnB/Asset managers holding all the properties?
The political risk in the West is at Emerging Markets levels. We've seen G7 nations de-bank their citizens extra-judicially, seize assets and remove licenses, remove freedom of movement, create an entire second-class of citizenship, lock up people for committing no crimes. This is normal. No one is protesting. The media agrees as does Hollywood.
If I had anything beyond my one property in which I reside I'd actually be pretty scared. This stuff happens in Emerging Markets all the time: the government tells anyone with more than one property to pick one to keep. All foreign property owners have their property forfeit or taxed to the point where they are forced to sell.
These actions are not out of the realm of possibility in the West any more, especially with the current leaders. There will be no tears shed for the poor landlords and property owners who can only keep their principal residence.
Sounds like a lot of FUD, the politicians won’t do anything like that because free stuff very easily causes divisive policies. What will happen, and is happening, is that more luxury housing is being built and less code ( regulations ) implemented. So the result is more inventory, which puts pressure on housing. Also there’s a LOT of vacant homes which have high carrying costs; eventually those owners will get margin called and have to either rent them out or sell them, which will put even more pressure. So I agree with the ends of your thesis, but not the means.
The entire reason that leveraging up real estate 5x is a widely accepted practice is that you can't get margin called as long as you keep making payments. Reg T margin will margin call you if you go under 25-50% equity, but mortgages will never margin call you.
I meant "margin called" figuratively, not literally. Essentially investors will start seeing negative cap rates and either demand redemptions or will start liquidating their RE portfolios, which isn't a real margin call, but "margin call" is a convenient term for what's happening.
Also, carrying costs of vacant properties are high. I'm predicting large writedowns of RE, and especially commercial RE in the coming 5 years.
This is absolute nonsense. Ocasio-Cortez is not far off of a bog-standard social democrat and she would be at best boring almost anywhere else in the industrialized West. (Maybe not "making majority policy", but not controversial.)
I can’t tell you how much I hope they crack down on people owning multiple houses. It’s just criminal. Not only do they own two houses but instead of renting it at market rate they put it on Airbnb an inflated price three or four fold.
The truth is under capitalism everyone cannot be a Capitalist. Please, I need you to think deeply about that last sentence. It’s not as simplistic as it sounds.
Until we treat housing as a cost and not an investment none of this will end.
They own the politicians. Its our fault. Turnout in primaries are very low, people don't even know their representatives. Its hard enough with all the tactics used to suppress candidates/prevent voting but until this changes then policy won't change.
As per some recent estimates SF commercial vacancy is over 2M sqft - this roughly translates to 2000 full apartments - more if we build dorm-rooms. We have a similar situation in other parts of CA. Is there any reason why we cannot solve homelessness by re-zoning these to temporarily to house them? Post COVID, people returning to office will be fewer. In addition if there is a recession, there will be fewer companies as well.
I wonder to what degree generational culture plays a part. My father, for example (born pre-WWII), would never buy growth stocks. Not even when he was young. He bought only dividend yielding stocks, reinvested 100% of the dividends and never sold anything until his retirement. My generation (X) has a more balanced approach, with a mix of growth and value stocks dependent on risk tolerance, trending toward value stocks the older we get. Moreover, a lot of us learned some hard lessons from the first internet bubble.
Granted that they're still younger and should be in a more risk-tolerant phase of life, but what I see in Millennials, and Gen Z especially, is a culture of growth-only, with no interest in boring old investments that are intended to earn and build value over long timescales. I think at least some of this has to do with the gamification of investing; in my Dad's time, a normal person couldn't just sit at a brokerage and watch a stock ticker all day. Free trading has intensified it by removing the barriers to full-time gambling. Remember that Millennials are a much larger generation and we're just still early in the period when they're growing wealth; I wonder if what we're seeing isn't the beginning of what it will take to change the culture... or if we'll continue to see endless bubbles because the steady-as-she-goes, long term investment mentality is just disappearing in the face of permanent FOMO. Sure, it's not glamorous, it won't make you a millionaire overnight, but that's really not what investing your savings should be about.
Yeah, I get that. And that's natural. But if a huge population swell is accustomed to treating the market as a get-rich-quick casino, the market stops serving its purpose and I guess we're in for a really bad series of shocks.
The scary thing for me is the 2nd order effects of this activity as companies try to act increasingly like meme stocks to boost share price and abandon all pretence of P/E ratios and profitability.
This. Also, in terms of downstream effects: Taking sibling's point, even now at $650B Tesla has market cap equivalent to the next 10 largest automakers combined, while having a P/E ratio ten times higher than Toyota, 32 times higher than BMW. Isn't the effect that other automakers are undercapitalized? The distortion of the market that's inflated Tesla has funneled investment away from productive non-meme competitors. That means layoffs and more supply chain problems. And that capital just gets wiped out when the bubble bursts, leaving a giant supply-side hole.
>> but that's really not what investing your savings should be about.
I just had a follow-up thought to my own post (too late to edit).
Maybe part of this culture is that many of the most aggressive young growth stock investors are not investing their savings. That is, what's been inflating these bubbles is inherited wealth being directed away from responsible investments and towards speculation. Contrary to what I'm saying, I do know a few people (not just Millennials) who have blown uncomfortably large portions of their actual earned income / work savings on bad crypto investments... but I still feel like people are more careful and conservative when they're investing money they actually worked to earn.
Or they were. Maybe the whole society tips over towards hype and FOMO when it's all we see online everyday.
Assuming you're expecting inflation to moderate over 10 years.
I think people who expect we're going to go back to pre-pandemic supply chains are vastly underestimating the difficulty of bringing a complex system like the economy up from a cold start. In my experience with complex systems that are much less complex than the economy (merely a few hundred million lines of code), it can't be done. You have to incrementally build a new system and then cut over parts of old system as their replacements start to function better than the old degraded experience.
This'll likely take a decade or two. Expect it to be a good decade for startups as changing relative prices make new business models viable against soaring existing prices. It's going to be very bad for consumers and for incumbents, though.
Luckily, this is completely tradable, so if you believe that inflation is going to average 3% over the next 10 years you can buy all those treasuries and I can short all those treasuries and one of us will be rich and the other broke. Events will tell who is who.
your point cannot be overstated. my biggest fears around the pandemic shutdowns came from my own experience managing production systems, and I think our policymakers were frighteningly naive as to what it meant to shut down the economy. and here we are.
I don't think there's even going back to pre-pandemic supply chains solely because how the West's cancel culture effectively ended globalization when Russia invaded Ukraine.
There will be no global supply chain any more. Any country with a brain now knows they have to be completely independent of the West in every aspect. Sovereign assets must be within their borders. Currency reserves? Held at domestic banks as much as possible. Even within the West there needs to be some level of distrust because history shows that there are no perpetual alliances.
We are going to have several hundred supply chains that often don't interact, even if it would make economic sense for them to do so. This is tremendously inflationary and it's only just begun.
I guess economic sanctions against belligerent aggressor nations is also 'cancel culture' now. Is that another one of those terms that is just slowly morphing to mean 'thing I don't like'?
I'll go even further: de-globalization pits governments (who want to become independent of other nation-states) against their people (who have benefitted from cheap goods, and will have to deal with the inflation). The likely outcome is that at least some of those governments are going to fall, and the nation-state system is likely to collapse.
Unfortunately this by itself isn't good for globalization, because it relies upon free trade, stable legal systems, and secure supply lines to work. So even if you get rid of the governments that seek to detach from the world economy, the goods can't get to consumers when they get intercepted by warlords.
I think that eventually the world may converge upon city-states as a cultural unit and corporate feudalism as an economic one, but it's likely to be an exceptionally bloody transition.
Standing in the way of corporate or city-state primacy is the hyper-efficiency of the modern global economy.
Bearing the cost of ones own defense and foreign policy, instead of outsourcing it to your host government, is incredibly inefficient and leaves you open to price competition from your government-sheltered peers.
That's the entire reason the global economy of politcal-economic alliances and trade policies was created: to benefit from global, lower-cost manufacturing while still retaining the benefit of government protection.
It seems more likely we'll revert to a multi-polar late-Cold War state of affairs, with global supply chains much more influenced by current military alliances.
I would've agreed with you until about 5 years ago. The reason I disagree with you now is because technology and methods of war-fighting have changed.
Emerging defense technologies like drones, lasers, robots, micro-scale manufacturing, and self-driving vehicles - along with the latest generation of existing weaponry like MANPADS and anti-tank missiles - all preference the defender. They allow a group of relatively untrained and loosely organized defenders who know the terrain well to deploy extremely effective resistance against an attacker, as long as it's at short range. A drone swarm can quite literally destroy all hostile forces within an area without risking a single person, but it can't do this beyond say 100 miles out. These technologies are all for defense, not power-projection.
This has a similar effect as the development of the musket in the 1500s. The musket allowed relatively untrained militias to enjoy superior firepower over the knights and longbowmen that had trained professionally their whole lives. As a result, smaller city-states and colonies could defend themselves against the large standing armies that kings and emperors could wield, and so the feudal system collapsed. This reversed with rifles (their greater accuracy benefitted from more professional training) and modern armor & explosives (which required an industrial base and supply chain greater than any city could muster), ushering in the era of nation-states. Military technology is changing again, and that's why I believe the nation-state system is again going to revert to smaller decentralized units.
> Emerging defense technologies like drones, lasers, robots, micro-scale manufacturing, and self-driving vehicles - along with the latest generation of existing weaponry like MANPADS and anti-tank missiles - all preference the defender.
> They allow a group of relatively untrained and loosely organized defenders who know the terrain well to deploy extremely effective resistance against an attacker, as long as it's at short range. A drone swarm can quite literally destroy all hostile forces within an area without risking a single person, but it can't do this beyond say 100 miles out.
We already have this "drone swarm", we just call it a guided missile.
The hard part in fighting a modern army isn't killing them, it's finding them. The defender is inherently at a disadvantage in this regard because they have things to defend, which necessitate that they're position in the vicinity.
Russia is struggling at the moment not because defenders are inherently advantaged but because they're relying on conscripts and relatively untrained soldiers.
> The musket allowed relatively untrained militias to enjoy superior firepower over the knights and longbowmen that had trained professionally their whole lives. As a result, smaller city-states and colonies could defend themselves against the large standing armies that kings and emperors could wield, and so the feudal system collapsed.
The exact opposite of what you're describing happened with the wide utilization of gunpowder. Pre-gunpowder, city-states and small kingdoms enjoyed relative independence due to the sheer expense of penetrating walls. Post-gunpowder, artillery (not rifles) required a whole professional organization to be utilized effectively, and formed the backbone of the army, so small states could no longer field or effectively defend against larger states, leading to increased centralization of authority, well before the creation of nation-states. "Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age" covers this transition pretty extensively.
> Russia is struggling at the moment not because defenders are inherently advantaged but because they're relying on conscripts and relatively untrained soldiers.
Yes; this, and all of NATO is assisting Ukraine with G-2 (intelligence) and G-4 (logistics).
Russia isn't struggling because of conscripts and untrained soldiers. Ukraine has conscription, and many of its TDF troops are relatively untrained. Russia is struggling because of a military philosophy that has lead to leadership failures from the officer level up to Putin himself. In addition to endemic corruption, the Russians also failed to remember things like rasputitsa, the principal of "economy of force", the importance of unit cohesion, of command centrality, of the 3:1 rule of thumb.
In other words, Russia created a military that was bad at being a military.
The only good thing that will come of this conflict is a revitalization in the study of military arts.
Cities are delicate clockwork machines with complicated supply chains: the attacker might struggle against a city’s hacker weapons, but the city will fall because a city is complex and a city needs many specialty inputs to function.
Changing topic: you said upthread “[people are] vastly underestimating the difficulty of bringing a complex system like the economy up from a cold start. In my experience with complex systems that are much less complex than the economy, it can't be done.”. Your personal example is irrelevant because it is a single person trying to restart an economy. Cities recover after earthquakes (my city Christchurch 2010) and wars (I have visited ex-Yugoslavia) due to many independent actors working, perhaps not so much due to your “command economy” example. Capitalist individuals route around damage. Although I admit effective centralised government helped Christchurch recover quickly.
Great synopsis of the trends in military technology. Very much in line with The Sovereign Individual, which states that the logic of violence determines the structure of society.
There will still be global supply chains outside of the pariah states. But purchasing will be diversified across more sources so as to mitigate the risks of disruption from politics, violence, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. This will be a more stable and resilient system, but it will be less efficient (Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage), and the average rate of economic growth will slow down.
The supply chain disruptions get worse as the China lockdowns and commodity prices make their way through the economy.
When you have a supply shock on raw inputs, it takes time for that to make its way through the economy. Businesses along the way keep inventory, they've locked in forward contracts, they can eat the cost increases to avoid losing market share until they're sure the price increases are persistent. But eventually they realize that everyone else in the industry is facing similar price increases and they'll go out of business if they don't, so they raise their prices too. This eventually propagates down the supply chain as inventory runs out and new contracts are negotiated. The price increases of late 2021 were triggered by the initial shock of March 2020. The Ukraine war & China lockdown shocks of early 2022 aren't going to be seen until about 2024.
By the time businesses have adapted to this round of shocks, we may be dealing with new shocks like a war in Europe or the retirement of baby boomers.
> The price increases of late 2021 were triggered by the initial shock of March 2020
It was the biggest shock: panic lockdowns across the world, not just initial. Chances are that supply chains have been adapted, and current localized lockdowns in China will not make significant damage.
But we will see.
Fed was aggressively printing starting 2008, and we didn't observe much inflation, meaning those money didn't go to real economy, but went to some big investment speculations and real estate.
This is the truth. What people do not understand is that interest rates will have to rise above inflation for in inflation to slow down. I assume the FED is trying to figure out how much inflation is caused by the money supply and how much is caused by supply chain issues. But too me this means even more trouble because they are waiting when there was obvious asset inflation well before the supply chain issues.
IMHO, we will not see a recession, we already are in a recession. What we will see a depression.
Can you explain why interest rates will HAVE to rise above inflation for it to slow down? CPI is already slowing down, although we have some very limited data points currently. A lot of inflation is driven by expectation, and raising interest rates is a way to tame those expectations for consumers, but I don't think the rates have to arbitrarily go above inflation to tamper it.
The Taylor rule gives the math behind it, but the layman's explanation is that as long as rates are lower than inflation, you turn a profit by borrowing money and buying a basket of assets, since their price will rise alongside inflation. This incentivizes people to borrow more money, which increases the money supply, which further exacerbates inflation.
This is the first term 'p' in the Taylor rule, which corrects the nominal interest rate that the Fed sets into a real interest rate that accounts for inflation.
There are plenty of assets that don't have an expiration date, like real estate or stocks of profitable companies with pricing power. And those are the assets that people are actually buying, and there prices have been going up to match.
r = nominal fed funds rate
p = the rate of inflation
y = the percent deviation between current real GDP and the long-term linear trend in GDP
As I said, the FED is betting that inflation is being caused by supply chain issues alone. This is obviously not true. It will get worse, so much worse, because the FED is in fact acting too slowly.
"interest rates sharply, and keep them high for several years, even if that causes a painful recession, as it did in the early 1980s in the United States, United Kingdom, and much of Europe. How much pain, and how deep of a dip, does it take to stop inflation and to keep inflation in check? The well-respected Taylor rule (named after my Hoover Institution colleague John B. Taylor) recommends that interest rates rise one-and-a-half times as much as inflation. So if inflation rises from 2 percent to 5 percent, interest rates should rise by 4.5 percentage points. Add a baseline of 2 percent for the inflation target and 1 percent for the long-run real rate of interest, and the rule recommends a central-bank rate of 7.5 percent. If inflation accelerates further before central banks act, reining it in could require the 15 percent interest rates of the early 1980s."
"During periods of stagnant economic growth and high inflation, such as stagflation, the Taylor rule provides little guidance to policy makers, since the terms of the equation then tend to cancel each other out"
Although I wouldn't go as far as to say we are in stagflation, it seems like the current environment wouldn't be an optimal place to use the rule. Ultimately I think the Fed took a view and have stuck with that, for better or for worse, and they are valuing consistency over diverging economic models.
The "2" is actually a parameter of the rule, and is the desired inflation target. OP is just hardcoding it in because the Fed's stated inflation target is 2%. If you leave it parameterized you can't simplify the equation further, as the 0.5 distributes over the desired inflation target parameter as well.
For that matter, the 0.5 is also a parameter, and is basically saying "Weight the goals of full employment and stable prices equally." If, say, you wanted to weight Fed policy 80% toward controlling inflation (to a target of 2%) and 20% toward maximizing employment, the equation would be r = p + 0.2y + 0.8(p - 2) + 2.
Risk-free loss? But maybe it's better than cash, the only other risk-free alternative? Perhaps you're paying for preservation of capital as the asset bubble deflates, and maybe that's not a bad deal?
If inflation somehow keeps rocking at 8.5% for a decade straight we have a much bigger problem on our hands than the relative yield of a treasury bond. Technically anything is possible…but I’m willing to risk saying that won’t happen.
I get what you are saying but the point of my comment - and I see why it didn’t come off this way - is that it won’t be 8.5% for a decade, so no, buying a treasury bond is not -5.5%. To emphasize this point, I said we’d have a lot worse problems because for it to be true the US would be experiencing an unprecedented economic catastrophe.
Yet the government keep spending like debt isn't high ($40B to Ukraine aid) and ignoring causes of inflation for political gain (Biden tweeted: it's time to for corporations to pay their share to bring down inflation)
I personally believe that the vast majority of the inflation we are seeing today has nothing to do with government debt/deficits, so the government reducing its deficit will have minimal impact on inflation.
However, a lot of people do believe, or at least claim to believe, that inflation is almost entirely being driven by government deficits, in which case corporations paying more in taxes would certainly have an impact on inflation, so tying the two together is certainly not misinformation, and if this view is correct, then it will reduce inflation.
> 1. We had zero percent interest rates. This causes the value of assets with cash flows out into the future (think speculative tech, Tesla) to accelerate.
You’re on to an important point, but your statement is inaccurate. Firstly, it’s a fall in the rate of interest that is equivalent to a rise in the present value of a future cash flow. And vice versa. Notice this has nothing to do with “high” or “low” interest rates (whatever that means, exactly), but a change in the rate of interest. Secondly, this is not related to speculative stocks. All companies with an expected future income are affected by this, ie. almost all companies in existence.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the experience of those living through your extreme scenario will vary greatly based on age.
Someone just starting their career benefits from cheap assets, high rates mean down payments will probably be cheaper, stock declines don’t matter if you don’t hold stocks. High inflation means their wages relative to debts such as student loans or first mortgages will increase.
Retirees with fixed incomes might get crushed. These folks were pushed into stocks and alternatives due to low interest, declining assets remove income and high inflation reduces the real value of the income.
There are a lot of people in between who will experience churn. However given the current demographics of the US, having two groups experiencing different versions of the economy will pose political as well as economic challenges.
Target shocked investors because not only did they suffer from rising costs due to inflation that they are currently subsidizing by not meaningfully raising prices but because they reported rising inventory in discretionary spending categories as consumers pull back likely due to higher prices they are facing nearly everywhere.
This has more to due to impact of inflation and less so just a function of a dividend and rates.
> "Credit card balances declined by $15 billion, in line with seasonal trends typically seen at the start of the year, but are still $71 billion higher than in 2021:Q1, representing a substantial year-over-year increase."
While your points are very solid, the first point may be overweighted. I can see why some naive in stocks may weight lower on lower rates, i can tell you as someone in corp finance we never adjusted our risk rates (weighted average cost of capital) below 12% (which is what they have been 5-7 years ago. These types of downturns are modeled in. Yes there are some cowboys that aggressively drop these rates, but it’s very risky. We are seeing some folks suffer now because of this and more soon for sure.
What? Rates matter. A lot. If you are in some corp fin job and you discount projects at 12%...fine. But saying they don't matter for equity valuations doesn't make sense. The evidence, not just lately, but throughout the last 100 years is overwhelmingly that they matter.
Oh, I'm also going to add that bear markets typically have a lot of brutal rallies. We had one in march as part of the rotation from tech into value stocks. We're probably about to witness a second.
Bear markets typically have several short covering rallies of large magnitude on the way down. Use these rallies to unwind your portfolio. Use the dips to buy hard assets and stocks with high yield that can withstand inflation (honestly everyone's margins are probably screwed). Make sure you leave some portion of your portfolio to hedge. Never overstay your welcome. Risk management is key.
> it's a huge danger once a populace learns it can vote itself money. Charles Munger [1]
(This follows him saying that "inflation is how democracies die" and is followed by several historical examples)
I know several committed voters of the previous administration and an almost universal complaint of the current administration is how their _personal_ wealth is being affected. We don't [yet] have a positive sum economy: in order for someone to win, someone has to lose. In the case of the previous administration, it's future generations.
First of all, the entire stimulus was $4.5 trillion, and most of it was allocated to handouts. A lot of the handouts were necessary, like expanded unemployment, but others were complete wastes of money, e.g. giving checks to families making 6 figures or forgiving loans for billion dollar "small businesses."
Second of all, QE isn't money given to the banks. When we have a deficit, the government sells bonds to banks. "Naturally" this would drive up interest rates for businesses because unlike the government, they can't issue an infinite number of IOUs and have to compete for a limited amount of liquidity. If interest rates rise too much, businesses will be forced to shut down, especially when people spend less money during a pandemic. Quantitative easing is a tool that allows the Fed to lower interest rates purchasing by these bonds back from the banks. The more debt the government issues, the more debt the Federal Reserve needs to purchase in order to lower interest rates. Basically, the root of the problem is that Congress is incapable of balancing a budget.
> but others were complete wastes of money, e.g. giving checks to families making 6 figures
Remember that the cutoff for stimulus was from prior year's taxes. This means you could have been making 6 figures in 2019, and then be making significantly less due to covid job loss or reduction when stimulus was handed out. As a matter of fact, stimulus helped my family greatly even though we made 6 figures in 2019. So following through on your claim would have meant my family suffering. YMMV.
Should is the operative word there. One could be in school for a while deeply in debt for a decade, get a 6 figure job in a high COL area right after graduating, then lose that job due to covid within a year. How would they have a decent sized emergency fund saved up? Why would such a family not be deserving of relief?
Shrinking the money supply is an awful idea. If money supply shrinks is decreases investment, increasing unemployment. Commerce stops (because people assume there money will be worth more in the future so they reduce spending) which increases unemployment more.
There's a reasonable debate to be bad about tax rates for wealthy people. I don't think any economist on either side of politics thinks decreasing money supply is a good idea.
Taxing the wealthy does not shrink the money supply unless you destroy the taxed money (which as we all know, the government will never do). In fact, it's probably inflationary, since most wealthy people have their money invested into assets and therefore that money is not being actively spent, but the government is going to immediately spend it.
After this episode, I strongly believe Fed should be ended. They have established a very poor track record on managing monetary policy and consequences and at this point basically have zero public trust. Since Greenspan Fed has been an absolute disaster. They hiked too little, too late. Now there is no such thing as soft landing as they are espousing just as their messaging around the whole transitory inflation thing.
Institutions such as Fed are now completely detached from their mandate and instead under bureaucratic capture devoid of any meritocracy. There is a revolving door between Fed officials and Banks/capital management firms. Bernanke, Powell, Kashkari, Yellen, Brainard - these are poster children of corrupt kleptocracy with revolving door arrangements between Fed and firms like Citadel, Goldman, Pimco. At least Bernanke had economic background. Powell doesn’t even have so. And his messaging has been super confusing with very little forward guidance which constantly confuses the market. I am not sure what qualifications even they attach to these utterly detestable individuals working for Goldman, Citadel, Pimco, and Brooking when they hire them. Oh let me guess, they work for the same people that fund our executive and legislative branch officials.
Risk in this context means uncertainty - since the government can print money it is always able to pay its debts. You might not get a great return on your investment, but the government always has the capability to pay you back. There’s little reward with no risk.
When I lend 2022 dollars to the government, I give away a certain amount of buying power.
I don't know if I will get that buying power back when I get my 2032 dollars.
The government does not always have the capability to pay me back my buying power. It cannot create value at will. It can create money at will. But the more money it creates, the less value it has. So it cannot create value at will.
The FED can buy bonds in an auction at will. Because it prints the money to do so. It's not like the FED goes "Uh oh, those bonds are too expensive for me".
> How is holding a bond risk free? It is a promise to give you a certain amount of money at a certain time in the future.
I Bonds. They are guaranteed not to lose purchasing power and not to have a negative return. Unless the U.S. government defaults on its debt obligations. That is as close to risk free as one is going to get :-)
A guaranteed return of dollars. What those dollars are worth is not guaranteed.
Imagine Tesla would hand out a certain type of share that after 10 years turns into 2 shares. Nobody would call that a risk free return. Because you don't know how much dollars you will get for those two shares.
The same with dollars. You don't know how much Tesla shares you will get for those dollars.
Tesla is a poor example of speculative tech. From 2019 to present they went from losing money to substantial and growing profitability. Better example would be things like Peloton, Beyond Meat, or Robinhood who all had sky high stock prices and have yet to turn a profit.
I don't understand the US stock market, re: Beyond Meat. It's a fucking recipe. Where I live in Ireland there a dozen different fake-meat brands, and they're even getting competition from supermarket "own brand" products (burgers, sausages etc). Don't get me wrong, beyond meat isn't a bad product, but how the hell is a recipe and a few business deals worth IPO and wild speculation? What do they have beyond, uh, fake meat recipe?
It seems to me that with the pandemic ebbing, that the only systemic shock going on right now is the war in Ukraine. Russia can't sustain either its offensive or its separation from global fuel markets for very long without collapsing. Developed economies aren't sitting on giant piles of toxic assets or collapsing consumer demand and employment is still sky high. I don't see how this goes much beyond an asset correction. We've only seen companies floating on untenable valuations get hurt thus far and it seems unlikely that will be a contagion to the rest of the economy.
If inflation continues hot don’t stock prices eventually have to go up though? If Apple raises the price of iPhones 50% because its input costs went up 50% and (assuming sales remain the same, I’m only talking inflation, not a depression), then they’re making $9/share instead of $6/share so unless people think Apple at a 15 PE is overvalued its share price would go up.
bonds aren't currently yielding north of 10%. If they are currently at 2.5% (using your number, not to pick on you, but it is what I have at hand), then move to a 10% yield, the people who bought at 2.5% get a haircut.
In the hike case cash would not be wrecked. It is paradoxically a good position to hold cash. Consider this. When they hike rates you can roll very short term treasuries, and you can buy assets on the cheap.
I'm pretty sure Russia disagrees, and it remains to be seen how China and other foreign holders of US treasuries will look at US (and other foreign) bonds in the future.
1. Zero Percent interest rates doesn't necessarily cause a bubble. It's the excess liquidity in the market that causes the bubble (too many financial assets chasing real assets).
Zero percent interest rates cause a bubble because valuations have to increase to the point where their forward-looking returns are a risk premium above bonds. When rates are zero for a long time, that means valuations go very very high. When rates come back up, valuations drop. Speculation can add further overshoot in both directions.
> Are their countries with negative nominal rates without asset bubbles?
That's very hard to know, but to be clear it's negative real rates that drive the bubbles. There's much more incentive to speculate when cash is a hot potato. For example Japan is much less bubbly these days than in the 1980s, even though nominal interest rates are lower now.
> Have their been high interest rate countries with asset bubbles? E.g., dutch 1600s interest rates or 16% during Tulipmania.
Presumably, that's why Tulipmania was confined to tulips, instead of spreading euphoria to absolutely every asset class. Even with high rates it's absolutely possible to have local bubbles in things like tulips, beanie babies, or Dogecoin. It only takes the promise of high real returns. When real interest rates are negative, even the promise of zero real return becomes mouthwatering.
I'm not saying that you can time the market. It's a lot more nuanced than that.
* You don't know the long term path of interest rates. Even the Fed Chair doesn't, because they don't know what will happen with inflation. (They do know the short term timing though, which is why they're not supposed to trade.)
* Even if you're expecting a correction, you don't know when the correction will occur or by how much. It could stay aloft like Wile-E-Coyote after the fundamentals drop out, or crash early in anticipation of the fundamentals changing.
* And when it does fall, you don't know where it will land, nor how many times it will bounce along the way down.
I thought that the liquidity was driven by the money multiplier and the Fed's quantitative easing. If the fed set the interest rate at 10% but put in 20 trillion dollars into the economy there'd be bubbles everywhere.
But Feds have both put trillions of dollars into the economy and kept the interest rate near zero. So I think it’s useless to argue which exactly of these moves has caused bubbles.
Why would they be able to put 20T$ into the economy at a 10% interest rate? Who are the counterparties? In other words, who is taking those loans in your mind?
The Fed can buy mortgage backed securities like they have done since they've started quantitative easing. The Fed has purchased Apple bonds. This is in addition to US Treasuries.
My original comment was a mechanics related comment in which liquidity (credit + cash) pushes up asset prices and not rates (although there's high correlation especially in the past 20 years in the US).
The volume of mortgage backed securities is based on the volume of loans that people take. At higher interest rates, people take out fewer and smaller loans. The Fed buying up more MBS would put downwards pressure on interest rates, which would be diametrically opposed to their goal (in your scenario) of maintaining high interest rates.
There is a correlation between liquidity and rates, but it's an inverse correlation. That's Open Market Operations 101.
Besides, if your macroeconomic goal is to reduce inflation (which is the reason for raising interest rates in the first place), one subgoal should be to reduce the volume of loans that are being issued. After all, bank-issued loans are new money, which adds to demand, which helps prop up inflation. That's Monetarism 101.
Our disagreement appears to be this. You believe that zero interest rates lead to bubbles. I believe that excess liquidity is responsible for bubbles. They frequently both happen together because that's how the Fed tries to stimulate growth and spending.
My example of the Fed with high interest rates and a lot of QE was a way to see where our disagreement would appear. It's similar to the great recession where there were interest rates lower than they are now, but because the private sector wasn't extending credit (less Cash + Credit); there didn't appear to be any asset bubbles.
The volume of mortgage backed securities is based on who can and want to get loans. During the great recession it was hard to qualify for a mortgage even though many people wanted to do so.
I appreciate you trying to get to a shared understanding. I don't have too much time, so just the short version:
> The volume of mortgage backed securities is based on who can and want to get loans. During the great recession it was hard to qualify for a mortgage even though many people wanted to do so.
"Want" is a difficult word. I want a private island, but I can't afford one. So my contribution to effective demand for private islands is zero. In the same sense, I don't think the effective demand for mortgages was particularly high during the great recession. But anyway, we agree on the observation that low interest rates and low mortgage volumes can go hand-in-hand.
One point where I think we differ is the direction of causalities in central bank behavior. My point is that central bank QE causes low interest rates (but low interest rates don't necessarily cause QE). The upshot is that while "low interest rate policy, no QE policy" is possible, "high interest rate policy + QE policy" is not possible. The two policies would be in logical conflict with each other.
people withdraw into conservative assets (relative to what they have their future outgoing cashflows, ie. if they have to pay for food in dollars, they'll hold dollars to minimize risk of exchange rate shifts)
and to cause a dam burst it's enough for a trickle of retail investors to start doing this. and .. bam. you saw the last few weeks. (as others notice that there's less and less chance of making money they also withdraw to minimize risk)
Previously purchased bonds will decline in relative value. E.g. say you bought a 10 year corporate bond a couple years ago, say at 2% interest. Newer bonds will be issued at a much higher yield to be attractive in a higher fed rate/inflation environment, making all these old bonds lose value in comparison.
I think the idea is that bonds at higher rates are a better alternative ("better deal") compared to cashflow from an asset.
But if you actually buy that bond, and the rates keep going up, then new bonds will be an even better deal than the bond that you bought, and so to sell it you'd need to sell at a discount ("wrecked").
I feel like this misses a sense of scale. Sure, everyone loses, but some choices must be superior to others in a rising-rates environment.
Cash would be wrecked due to inflation. However it should be less wrecked than other asset classes in the short term. I know nothing about bonds so I also hope they reply.
This sounds a bit like doom and gloom. While I don't disagree, it is important to look at AMZN after the dot com bubble burst. Traders fled, but people who believed in the company did very well.
> Traders fled, but people who believed in the company did very well.
Yep, I did well, and I loved to show people AMZN stock price graph, like “can you identify the dot-com crash here?”. But I believed in the company then. Big question is: should I believe in the AMZN now?
Personally, I’ve stopped using Amazon when they started to support censorship - I’ve grown up in a totalitarian country and things likes censorship are revolting to me. I never suffered after leaving Amazon using Walmart for goods delivery and B&N for books. So Amazon is not unique and irreplaceable anymore.
So, let’s ask people who continue to use Amazon - how the company is doing these days? Do you think it will go on growing?
Good questions. Can they maintain the high performance culture without large stock compensation?
The best option I see following a similar path is TSLA. They currently have 2% of us auto sales. The energy business is tiny, AI/FSD is controversial, but if it works it will be worth a lot.
The goal is to sell 20M vehicles in 2030. They sold 0.93 in 2021. They are planning on Insurance,Energy,AI each to more than 10x.
P/E is 40 currently. Historically very large companies have had P/E between 4-30. So the question is what is Tesla's earnings in 2030 and what will average P/E be across all large companies.
I believe Amazon's retail business will remain on top, or highly competitive, for the foreseeable future.
AWS, in my not-quite-amateur opinion, will remain dominant in the industry. The best IAM of the big three, incredible availability and they aren't undercut on price by their kitchen sink adversaries.
Azure has Office and AD integrations, GCP has some ML advantages. But AWS is strong long term. They're peak IBM.
If you bought in at the 2000 peak, it took about ten years to break even, and you'd have to have kept holding it through the 2008 crisis when you might have been losing your house.
Also, there were a lot of other companies that people believed in that didn't fare so well.
Most people don’t save a bunch of cash and then dump it all in the market at once, though. Continue to invest in diverse assets throughout downturns and you’ll be fine.
In 1998 Greenspan cut rates due to the Asian financial crisis and worries over Y2K which blew up the dot com bubble. Then they slashed rates down to nearly ZIRP and held them low which blew up the housing and finance bubbles that deflated in 2008.
None of this started in 2008.
What is different this time is the wage inflation and the unionization drives that we're seeing. The Fed is likely to hike rates much more aggressively in order to stop that from taking off.
When you talk about inflation, though, asset prices and commodities don't matter anywhere near as much as wage inflation. And wage inflation is high due to the low number of job seekers, likely a result of other factors like death and disability due to the pandemic removing workers from the workforce and boomers retiring. As a result the rate hikes are likely to be more severe and the downturn is likely to more severe.
I would be worried that this downturn looks more like a depression than a recession. Of course it may just unwind as before and as the economy pops they slash rates and do ZIRP and the rich people buy up even more of the economy and the cycle continues.
I think there's a good chance the average Millennial gets pretty decimated by the next downturn and crypto should get tested and there's a pretty good chance that the Ponzi all unwinds and goes to zero (which will destroy all the Millennials using crypto as a 401k). I'm still not sure that crypto has gone up enough so that a few billionaires couldn't rescue it and keep the game running though.
I still think we're going to see a relief rally short term though and that the downturn won't really take off until 2023/2024 when the yield curve inverts. We're not quite there yet.
We've also had prices being out of whack with fundamentals for decades, that is also nothing new. Also don't go predicting hyperinflation or raising long rates. That has been predicted for decades as well, and it never happens. The Fed raising rates is designed to cause a recession and disinflation. Long rates won't rise and long-term inflation will remain contained. We're not in the 70s and we're not going back to the 70s.
The thing to be MOST worried about is political. Since the 2008 crisis there's been a rise of people who just seem to want the system burn and where they won't bailout the system in the event of a financial crisis. That increases the chances that the economy could really lock up and institutions could fail. There are a lot more crazies in power.
At some point the cyclical game that we're in with engineered recessions, low rates, low risk premiums, cheap money, insane valuations, asset bubbles, etc has to break. I think its way too soon to call it as broken though. The commodities inflation that we're having right now is not that unprecedented (and a lot of it is ultimately transient and due to bullwhip effects) and the Fed is showing that they're going to take action to stop it. That means that we're likely to just have another recession then another long period of ZIRP and asset bubbles and crazy valuations continuing again.
Not a direct response to the parent post but it had the most keywords in common with my question:
>The Fed is likely to hike rates much more aggressively [...]
I agree, and they're about to start letting the balance sheet run off too, though at half the rate they accumulated.
My question for the wonks here: will it be difficult or expensive to hold rates above, even say, 5% for very long if needed? US national debt is over $30T. Assuming inflation persists and rates are raised to 5%, the approximate steady-state cost of servicing the debt is $1.5T/year, more than pre-pandemic US discretionary spending, and more than 33% of federal revenues. I asked a friend about this and they said not to worry, it takes a while for the national debt to roll over, but looking this up it seems most US debt is in instruments with a horizon of less than a few years.
also, I imagine Debt:GDP is not the most appropriate stat here but in the 1970s it was 30-35% and now we're over 120%. Some other countries are over 200%. And in a recession, by definition the denominator gets bigger. Or maybe the broader question is at what point does national debt matter?
I sort of feel the Fed is playing everyone's expectations, talking to cool things off and even name-dropping Volcker while hoping to keep interest rates more at 4% than his 20%. I'm not crying conspiracy or complaining -- if it works they could get their soft (now "soft-ish") landing.
> We've also had prices being out of whack with fundamentals for decades, that is also nothing new.
isn't this a bit more complicated than that? for example in housing though the prices are propped up by the tech companies (and startups), which can pay all those high salaries thanks to their valuations and cashflows (which are fueled by cheap credit, eg. credit cards). but also low rates allowed people to get bigger mortgages. so in that sense the fundamentals (cashflows) are there, but things with limited supply blow the fuck up, whereas wages barely moved up in comparison, and PCE was slightly below 2% (which was the target).
> There are a lot more crazies in power.
very underappreciated risk.
> At some point the cyclical game that we're in with engineered recessions, low rates, low risk premiums, cheap money, insane valuations, asset bubbles, etc has to break.
yes, but also these valuations are so high because the expected cashflows are also high, because almost everything (not just tech) is global and the world got a LOT richer (eg China)
the risks are structural (politics, eg. wars, crazy tariffs, brexit), but the potential for solving them are too (easier migration [eg Japan], more trade harmonization [US-EU], education and healthcare reform [US])
Speaking as someone who experienced both the dot-com crash and the financial crisis from ground zero, this feels nothing like them. I did not see widespread risk taking across the board. A lot of Gen Xers, such as myself, almost instinctively recognized current bubbles and either steered away from them or played them as such. People are also a lot more financially savvy. Even if people made leveraged bets, they leveraged with options instead of loans which meant they didn't lose more than what they committed. Sure, some parts of crpyto is very fluffy but I still don't think it is all that widespread.
I think a lot of people calling for a great crash will be disappointed this time around.
I really think it’s insulated especially compared to the housing market collapse. This is because most banks will not take your crypto as 1:1 collateral whereas housing was perceived to be nearly risk-free. A big difference. I am not saying we are not in an asset bubble. But it would be a mistake to draw simplistic comparisons.
You’re forgetting about the overpaid tech workers who are soon to be laid off, possibly underwater on their mortgages, and decide it’s time to downsize.
Would you like to place a wager? I bet that the median home price in tech-centric metro areas (seattle, sf/bay, la, nyc) will decline by 10% or more in July 2023 versus July 2022.
For many in tech metros their homes could decrease in value by 25% or more from their current values and the home would still be worth more than they paid for.
In any case they won’t want to sell for a mortgage that effectively costs the same over a 30 year loan with a higher interest rate.
They are not valued on a binary positive or negative cashfows. They are valued at NPV of future cashflows. You can justify a high burn rate with the expectation of earnings in the distant future. But as inflation/rfr goes up then then investors value money today more and more and money in the future less and less.
Overpaid in the same way publicly traded tech stocks and VC/PE valuations were grossly inflated. Salaries are going to come down just like valuations. As people generally won’t accept paycuts, it’ll come in the form of laying off 2 engineers and backfilling 1 of them at half the prior salary rate.
VC backed companies will start dropping like flies and the market will flood and salary requirements will drop fast.
Totally anecdotal, but I know a couple who are renting out their house they highly and renting a place to live because the interest rate they secured (2.75%) means renters paid their mortgage and then some (about 40% on top), so they basically make like $200/mo to live somewhere else as renters pay for their home.
This doesn't make sense or you are omitting key information.
If a homeowner rents their place for more than it costs them in mortgage + property taxes and makes $200 on top, that's fine and quite a nice deal. However you're suggesting they're also subsidizing their own rental and +$200.
That only makes sense if they're renting well below their means or in a different market entirely while their home is in an ultra prime location. If not the renter of their home should simply have rented out the place the owners are living at a substantial discount.
New Orleans has wild real estate. It’s not San Francisco but it’s way above the average income here and swings wildly from neighborhood to neighborhood. Home prices flip radically even just a few blocks over. We’re talking $400k->$800k if you move 5, maybe 6 blocks. Sometimes fewer than that - saw a near-turnkey place go for $500k and another for $900k 2 blocks from each other right by me about 3 or 4 years ago (obviously the latter was very nice new construction, but you get the point).
They own in a solid neighborhood, one that was “up and coming” 5 years ago, and rent in an average one (it’s in a higher risk flood zone which factors in a ton). Irish Channel vs. midcity, if you know the area at all.
They don’t have kids and see their rental as a place to sleep. It’s small, barely what I’d qualify as enough for two people. But it works for them so power to them I guess. Making out like bandits.
I get why you’re skeptical but it’s not like I’m lying here. Not sure why I would? The whole point of this anecdote is to show how crazy these interest rates were.
But it also means that recent buyers might have stretched and won't be able to make payments. If stocks do badly or someone gets laid off they'll need to sell and downsize or rent
It depends on a recession and how bad it is. Even if you're locked into a low mortgage, if you lose your job, can't pay, and due to rising interest rates are now underwater 500K on a mortgage, nothing good happens.
Like it or not there's a lot of chaff to cut in software engineering. How many of these SaaS businesses can survive, and how many engineers bought nice homes with massive salaries that might go poof?
it will be very small fraction of homeowners: those who bought in in last 2-3 years. All others will be significantly over water, and may take equity loans instead of selling houses to preserve low mortgage interest rates.
Eventually and all sellers and no buyers market will catch up with prices. Matter of how long it can be bridged. Every equity loan taken out against higher values will shorten that bridge.
And then homeowner will have strong incentive to move to smaller rental unit and rent his primary residence, or maybe he will be able to find job in this few years secured by equity loan.
> Eventually
Eventually maybe. FED gave 20T free money to current home owners in addition to existing tax incentives, how long it will take to chew through them? Maybe generation?
I think most people are doing fixed rate loans in this economy, right? Genuinely asking. I think I might be misunderstanding this aspect of your point here.
Leverage is much more expensive (from sub 3% mortgages, we already have 5%+ rates), which means buyers can afford less, plus significant withdrawal of “cash” buyers from the market who were really just borrowing against their (now much smaller) equity positions.
I wouldn’t want to be in a forced sale position anytime soon.
Mortgage payments set a ceiling on how high property prices can rise. However, people seem to be willing to spend more on mortgage payments than they probably should, so it’s likely that this ceiling hadn’t been reached yet.
The other factor is simple
supply and demand. A large factor in 2008 was a large inventory of housing that came on the market. As far as I’m aware, there is no current corollary in the US now.
I would like to qualify this. This is true in markets where labor is the majority purchasers. In markets like the sunbelt, where retirees are moving and buying properties with a combination of cash, previous real estate equity, and retirement assets, mortgage payments don’t restrict home prices. This crowds out anyone who does need financing to buy their home, especially as interest rates rise and inventory remains low.
It’s all a function of interest rates. We are seeing prices stabilize now after a couple years of meteoric rises. If interest rates really climb for an extended time then home values will fall.
1. We had zero percent interest rates. This causes the value of assets with cash flows out into the future (think speculative tech, Tesla) to accelerate.
2. We had massive herding in megacap tech. These valuations are high in part because for a decade you would not have beat the index without having these names in your portfolio.
3. These valuations blew up even further because of call squeezes during the 2020-2021 bull. Tesla even managed to get itself into the S&P.
5. Then in December, the megacaps we're squeezed further until the S&P 500 had a negative return relative to price!
A lot of this occured because people remained under the impression that bond yields would never normalize. Now that they have, there is a risk free alternative to stocks.
Now for the next complications: Ukraine + Russia, economic war with China, inflation, how the fed will respond, gas prices.
If inflation continues and the fed becomes aggressive with hiking, all assets are dead. Bonds will be wrecked, stocks will be wrecked, cash is wrecked, even gold (depending on how aggressively they hike) will be dead because it's actually a really good deal to buy bonds when they yield north of 10% (if we get there).
Say the fed decides not to hike as aggressively and inflation slows, then you'll be holding the S&P 500 likely for yield than growth. In the case of a recession or further inflation, that yield may be at risk depending on the sectors you're invested in.
In this context the correction in names like Target make perfect sense. The dividend was near zero at it's price before the cut. Same thing happened in a company like Newmont mining.