John Hussman: Yes, This Is An Equity Bubble

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John Husman: Yes, This Is An Equity Bubble

After the 2000-2002 recession, the Federal Reserve remained fixed on holding down short-term interest rates in efforts to stimulate demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy. Corporations – particularly those with low quality balance sheets – were quick to take advantage of the low interest rates, swapping long-term debt for shorter-term debt. By late-2003 it was already obvious that this process was becoming a threat to longer-term economic stability, prompting me to ask: “the real question is this: why is anybody willing to hold this low interest rate paper if the borrowers issuing it are so vulnerable to default risk? That’s the secret. The borrowers don’t actually issue it directly. Instead, much of the worst credit risk in the U.S. financial system is actually swapped into instruments that end up being partially backed by the U.S. government. These are held by investors precisely because they piggyback on the good faith and credit of Uncle Sam.” Needless to say, this turned out badly.

Meanwhile, deprived of a meaningful return on safe investments, investors looked for alternatives that might offer them a higher rate of return. They found that alternative in mortgage securities. Historically, home prices had never experienced a major and sustained decline, and mortgage securities were AAA credits. On that basis, investors chased mortgage securities in search of higher yield, and hedge funds sought to leverage the “spread” by purchasing massive volumes of higher yielding mortgage securities and financing those purchases using debt that was available a lower interest rate.

The key here is that when the demand for securities of a particular type is high, Wall Street and the banking system have the incentive to create more “product” to be sold. So create it they did. In order to satisfy the yield-seeking demand for new mortgage debt that resulted from the Fed’s policy of suppressing the yield of safe alternatives, trillions of dollars of new mortgage securities were created. But how do you create a mortgage security? If you take the money of the investor, you actually have to lend it to someone to buy a home. In order to create enough supply, banks and Wall Street institutions began to lend to anyone with a pulse, creating a housing bubble, an increasing volume of subprime debt, and ultimately, the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression.

One would think the Federal Reserve would have learned from that catastrophe. Instead, the Fed has spent the past several years intentionally trying to revive the precise dynamic that produced it. As a consequence, speculative yield-seeking has now driven the most historically reliable measures of equity valuation to more than double their pre-bubble norms. Meanwhile, as investors reach for yield in lower-quality but higher-yielding debt securities, leveraged loan volume (loans to already highly indebted borrowers) has reached record highs, with the majority of that debt as “covenant lite” issuance that lacks traditional protections in the event of default. Junk bond issuance is also at a record high. Moreover, all of this issuance is interconnected, as one of the primary uses of new debt issuance is to finance the purchase of equities.

Now, as we observed in periods like 1973-74, 1987, and 2000-2002, severe equity market losses do not necessarily produce credit crises in themselves. The holder of the security takes the loss, and that’s about it. There may be some economic effects from reduced spending and investment, but there is no need for systemic consequences. In contrast, the 2007-2009 episode turned into a profound credit crisis because the owners of the vulnerable securities – banks and Wall Street institutions – had highly leveraged exposure to them, so losing even a moderate percentage of their total assets was enough to wipe out their capital and make those institutions insolvent or nearly-so.

Husman Funds: Yes, This Is An Equity Bubble via Husman Funds

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