munKNEE.com Your Key to Making Money
Janet Yellen and her merry band of money printers are oblivious to the dangerous speculation and
valuation excesses that their policies have implanted throughout the financial system. No wonder the Trump voters want to throw the bums out. It is none too soon.
The comments above and below are excerpts from an article by David Stockman (davidstockmanscontracorner.com) which may have been enhanced – edited ([ ]) and abridged (…) – by munKNEE.com (Your Key to Making Money!)
to provide you with a faster & easier read. Register to receive our bi-weekly Market Intelligence Report newsletter (see sample here , sign up in top right hand corner)
[As illustrated in the chart below,] relative to disposable income, the value of household financial assets now far exceeds the last two bubble peaks – and that has happened in an economic environment which suggests just the opposite. To wit, valuation multiples and cap rates should be falling, owing to the fact that the productivity and growth capacity of the U.S. economy has been heading south ever since the turn of the century.
What is even more striking about the above chart is what’s hidden behind the denominator. Since the eve of the financial crisis in 2007, a rapidly increasing share of DPI (disposable personal income) has been accounted for by the explosive growth of transfer payments. Needless to say, transfer payments do not represent newly produced income that can be capitalized into the value of aggregate societal wealth.
“Like” this article on Facebook
By definition, transfer payments are extracted via taxation from the incomes of current producers or via taxation of future incomes, if they are funded with increased government debt. Either way, the true extent of the bubble excess…is even more extreme than pictured above. Between 2007 and 2016, in fact, the value of household financial assets soared from $53 trillion to $72 trillion at a time when real personal income excluding transfer payments rose by only 1.2% annually – and that’s crediting the BLS’ deeply understated inflation indices. In the real world of Flyover America, inflation-adjusted earned income hardly grew at all.
The Fed’s…estimate of 3.7% growth in 2011 and nearly 4.0% growth in 2012, actually came in at 1.7% and 1.8%, respectively, yet that wasn’t some kind of temporary aberration. During 2013 and 2014, the shortfall between initial estimates and actual was also nearly 50%; and then, even as the Fed lowered its estimates for 2015 and 2016, the actual rate of growth slowed still more.
The tepid and weakening recovery conveyed in the table below helps explain why S&P 500 profits peaked six quarters ago in the September 2014 LTM period at $106 per share. Since they came in 19% lower at $87 per share in the June 2016 LTM, the actual market multiple at 24.7X is anything but normal, and that’s hardly a temporary condition, either…The most recent earnings outlook for Q3 has turned negative on a Y/Y basis – just in time for the next earnings season, and also precisely as needed for another round of Wall Street’s phony earnings “beat” game. In short, in the context of declining earnings, P/E multiples are not even in line with historical norms. Contrary to Yellen’s press conference blather, they are at the very top of the charts.
Have your say on Twitter
Worse still, the Fed continues to project that interest rates will “normalize” back to 3% on the Federal Funds rate and 4.2% on the 10-year Treasury note. In point of fact, sooner or later that must happen or the entire monetary system will be destroyed so with a future outlook characterized by slowing growth, weakened earnings and rising interest rates, how in the world can it be said that current valuations are nothing to worry about?
At the same time, even the Fed’s new dissenter, the formerly dovish Eric Rosengren, remains lost in the Fed’s Keynesian puzzle palace. Rosengren voted to raise interest rates because he thinks the U.S. is nearing full employment and could drop below 4.5% by 2019 which, he believes, would not be unsustainable in the long run thereby creating inflationary risks. Well, that’s some kind of “full employment”. There are 5 million more prime working age persons in the U.S. today than there were in January 2000, but the number with “jobs”, including part-time gigs a few hours per week and self-employed e-Bay traders, is nearly 1.0 million lower!
As for inflation, here is another newsflash. [As the chart below so clearly shows,] it’s already here.
Here’s the danger. The denizens of the Eccles Building:
- see no bubbles in a financial system that is rampant with asset inflation…
- see full employment when the U.S. economy has more labor slack than at any time in modern history and
- keeps the Wall Street gamblers in free carry trade funding because it wants even more inflation than what is already ravaging the real incomes of Flyover America.
No wonder the Trump voters want to throw the bums out. It is none too soon.
Follow the munKNEE – Your Key to Making Money!