Baptists and bootleggers explains lofty stock market

Jason Zweig, who writes the Intelligent Investor column for the Wall Street Journal, posted recently about “Disturbing New Facts about American Capitalism.” He wrote:

“Modern capitalism is built on the idea that as companies get big, they become fat and happy, opening themselves up to lean and hungry competitors who can underprice and overtake them. That cycle of creative destruction may be changing in ways that help explain the seemingly unstoppable rise of the stock market."

Zweig cites new research by academics that claims the US is moving to a “a winner-take-all system in which giants get stronger, not weaker, as they grow.” The evidence consists of higher concentrations of market share among just a handful of companies. For example, the top four grocery chains hold 89% of the market. The top four real-estate service companies command 78%. In intro to economics those are called oligopolies.

The idol of randomness wants to steal your wealth

If you’re reading this post, I assume you have built some wealth and are wondering how to keep it and possibly make it grow. You should know that many people claim you have no right to that wealth because you didn’t earn it. You got it by luck, like a lottery winner.

Alexander Green, Chief Investment Strategist at the Oxford Club, wrote a great post recently on the topic, “Is Business and investment success due to skill...or luck?” The post issued from a debate he had with a New York Times columnist, Robert Frank, author of the book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.

Frank wrote in his book that “If you have been so economically successful that your income and net worth put you in the top 1% or 2% in the country, the deciding factor was not talent, education, hard work, risk-taking, persistence, resilience or all of the above...It was luck, plain and simple.” Frank is clever to assault only the top 2% of wealthy. They have no friends and attacking them will excite envy in the rest. 

Trump channels Hoover’s economic strategies

President Trump has saved dozens of US jobs from moving to other countries, mostly Mexico, by employing the shock and awe of a personal phone call to CEOs. Had he made the same visits before he became president he likely would have failed. And let’s not discuss the numbers of jobs his policies will cost the US that go unreported.

Another Republican president used a similar style to “encourage” business to comply – Herbert Hoover. Before he scaled the political mountain to the presidency, Hoover had become famous as an organizer of humanitarian efforts. He led 500 volunteers in distributing food, clothing, steamship tickets and cash to Americans in Europe to help them get home after war broke out in Europe in 1914. Later he worked to feed starving Belgians. The Belgian city of Leuven named a prominent square after him – Hooverplein.

Couch potato investing: better that betting on a horse race

In Financial Bull Riding I wrote that annual percentage returns is the wrong measure of investment performance. The better metric is absolute dollar return. Naive investors, and most financial journalists, assume the two will produce the same results, but they don't. 

Josh Peters, Director of Equity Income Strategy for Morningstar and the author of The Ultimate Dividend Playbook, calls chasing percentage returns a horse race: 

Almost all of Wall Street is geared around this idea of a horserace. That it’s all about trying to beat your benchmark, beat the S&P 500 — to do it every quarter regardless of whether that quarter is up or down. That’s not what most people are looking to do. That’s only how money managers evaluate each other, maybe. But that’s not necessarily what’s going to serve the actual financial requirements or financial needs of people who are out there. The biggest demand out there is for income and it’s not just because interest rates are low, it’s because baby-boomers are retiring and most of them don’t have those defined benefit pension plans to count on.

Interest rates have fallen and can’t get up!

Some of us suffer from Fed head: we have allowed anger at the Fed to infect our brains to the point that we blame it for everything from flat tires to broken bed springs. George Selgin, an Austrian friendly economist at the Cato Institute, says take two aspirin and read his blog in the morning:

The view that the Fed might have raised interest rates long ago, had it only wanted to, became notorious during the presidential campaign, when Donald Trump publicly accused Janet Yellen’s Fed of keeping rates low for political reasons. But Trump was merely embroidering a belief common among many (mostly conservative) Fed critics...

The unvarnished truth, I hope to persuade you, is that interest rates have been low since the last months of 2008, not because the Fed has deliberately kept them so, but in large part owing to its misguided attempt, back in 2008, to keep them from falling in the first place.

Why the Fed can't drive

One of Milton Friedman’s favorite analogies about monetary policy was driving a car. He compared money creation by the Fed to pushing on the gas pedal. On flat ground giving the engine more gas makes the car speed up, so giving the economy more gas should cause it to accelerate as well. But giving the engine more gas by pushing on the pedal may allow the car to slow down when climbing a hill if the engine doesn’t get enough gas to overcome the gravity involved in climbing the hill.

Friedman’s point: interest rates tell us nothing about whether Fed policy is too tight or too loose. Only the speed of economic growth can tell us that. Low interest rates may be too high if the economy is climbing a steep hill, like a recession. On the other hand, high rates may be too low if the economy is speeding up, as it does near the end of an expansion. The grandchildren of Friedman use that analogy to argue for nominal GDP targeting by the Fed instead of price targets. The problem with the Fed’s driving strategy is that it never knows if it is climbing or descending a hill or how fast the economy is growing at the time it makes its policy decisions because of long lag times from policy decision to its impact.

Bank of England: mainstream econ is broken

It seems that the Bank of England has been feeling the heat from its forecast that Brexit would plunge the UK into a depression. Added to the failure of mainstream economists to predict the Great Recession, the public is losing confidence in its gurus, according to a story in the Guardian,

Haldane described the collapse of Lehman Brothers as the economics profession’s “Michael Fish moment” (a reference to when the BBC weather forecaster predicted in 1987 that the UK would avoid a hurricane that went on to devastate large parts of southern England). Speaking at the Institute for Government in central London, Haldane [Bank of England Chief Economist] said meteorological forecasting had improved markedly following that embarrassing mistake and that the economics profession could follow in its footsteps.

The bank has come under intense criticism for predicting a dramatic slowdown in the UK’s fortunes in the event of a vote for Brexit only for the economy to bounce back strongly and remain one of the best performing in the developed world.

Before the referendum on divorcing the EU, Bank of England governor Mark Carney had warned that that the split would cause a recession in the second half of 2016. Instead, the UK economy grew at an annual rate of 2.4% in the third quarter with no signs of a slowdown in the fourth.