Oxstones Investment Club™By Jim Kubak, MSN Money,
With the Fed and cash-rich China both pumping cheap money into the system, another global bubble looks likely. Do you play for a sudden pop or a slow deflation?
Double, double, toil and trouble.
The world’s financial markets are facing only two witches stirring the pot, but between them they’re quite capable of adding a third bubble and bust in 2011 to the run of busts that began in 2000 and continued in 2007-08.
I’d be a lot less worried about a potential financial bubble if it were just the Federal Reserve stirring the pot by setting 600 billion greenbacks loose on the global financial markets by the end of June 2011.
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But the Chinese government, with its $2.65 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, can be as much of a force — possibly more so — in the inflating of any new bubble.
China’s effort to give that cash a home, and earn a decent return on it, is pushing up the price of iron mines, oil fields, gold and the value of bonds denominated in Aussies, loonies and reals.
That makes figuring out what to do about a potential 2011 bubble and bust — following in the footsteps of the bear market of 2000 and the financial crisis and bear market of 2007-09 — so difficult. But in my Nov. 8 column on the potential for a bubble (“Oops, has the Fed done it again?”), I said I’d try.
So here’s how I’d approach the possibility of another bubble and bust.
In that column, I laid out the reasons to think that the Federal Reserve might be creating another bubble, so I’m not going to cover that ground again. But let me take a paragraph or so to explain China’s role in any potential bubble.
China’s rise pushes prices higher
China currently plays two roles in inflating asset prices around the world.
First, China’s extraordinary 10% growth rate becomes an excuse for investors to bid the price of global assets higher. Oil should sell for higher prices, for example, because China will need so much more of it in the coming decades. On Nov. 9, the International Energy Agency forecast that China’s demand for energy will jump 75% by 2035. China alone will account for 36% of the growth in global energy use during that period.
The same story is used by traders and investors and Wall Street analysts to justify ever-higher prices for copper, corn, iron ore, nickel — you name it.
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China’s economic growth is indeed stunning, but investing logic says some part of that future growth is already embedded in today’s asset prices. And economic history tells us that higher prices change consumer behavior. We can already see that in China’s drive to follow the path of Japan, Germany and even the United States in reducing the energy intensity of its economy — learning to do more while using less energy and fewer raw materials.
Those two factors set up the likelihood that at some point, China’s demand for these commodities will disappoint investors even if China continues to grow at today’s stunning rates.
Second, think about what eventually happens to all those cash surpluses that China accumulates. They don’t just sit in a vault somewhere; they get managed. That means China buys things: U.S. Treasurys, Canadian debt, gold, iron ore mines, Greek government debt. And whatever China buys trades at a higher price than it otherwise would have.
Money needs a home
In one critical way, the $600 billion let loose by the Fed’s program to buy Treasurys and China’s $2.65 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves have the same effect. All this money — from other sources — is looking for profitable homes. And as it flows to whatever assets and markets promise those homes, the total $3.5 trillion (or more than $5 trillion, if you add in the $1.75 trillion in the Federal Reserve’s first program of quantitative easing) bids up the prices of the assets in those markets.
And the biggest effect is on asset prices — whether for stocks, real estate, iron ore mines or oil fields — in developing economies. Yields are higher, growth rates are higher, recent and potential returns are higher there. Why wouldn’t money searching for a home head in that direction?
But as I noted in my Nov. 8 column, developing economies don’t present the largest and most liquid markets. India, for example, is struggling to absorb the $25 billion — the highest amount on record — that has flowed into Indian stocks from overseas equity funds in 2010.
Looking for Mr. Bubble
So $25 billion is a problem when the Federal Reserve and China are talking about trillions? Do you see the mismatch that might lead to an asset bubble in the world’s developing economies?
How close are these markets to bubble territory? They’re on their way, according to research from Morgan Stanley.
The good news is that at 22 times earnings adjusted for the economic cycle, the emerging markets traced by the MSCI Emerging Markets Index are just slightly more expensive than the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ($INX), which trades at 21 times cyclically adjusted earnings. In further good news, the MSCI index is 14% below its 2008 peak. (By the way, the exchange-traded fund that tracks this is the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index (EEM, news, msgs).)
So we’ve still got a way to run, right?
The picture isn’t quite so reassuring, however, if you take apart the index and separate the still-below-peak valuation markets from the already-above-peak valuation markets.
Morgan Stanley reports that the stock markets of Colombia, Chile, India, Indonesia, Peru and the Philippines are all trading at multiples more than 50% above the average for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index for the past five years. (The corresponding good news is that Russia, Hungary, Poland and South Korea all trade at least 25% below the emerging markets average for the period.)
Not all bubbles explode
We need to look at one more possibility and scenario before we move to a strategy for avoiding another bubble: What happens if we’re wrong and the bubble that is now inflating doesn’t burst? What happens if, instead, it gently deflates?
You see, I can think of a way out without a 2011 replay of the 2000 and 2007 busts. More than a few things have to fall in place for financial markets to avoid another bust:
* China has to slow its economy enough to slow inflation without stepping on the brakes so hard that the economy stalls. (What’s a stall in China? Anything below the 7% growth that economy needs to soak up its annual supply of new workers.)
* China has to make visible progress toward re-balancing its economy from exports to domestic growth. That would start to cut into the country’s trade surplus, increase growth in the current trade-deficit countries and produce the kind of quality-of-life improvements that China’s government needs to keep violence from rising in the country as raw growth of gross domestic product slows.
* China has to manage appreciation in the renminbi to help slow inflation and to help re-balance its economy while keeping bankruptcies at inefficient and unprofitable Chinese exporters to a manageable level.
* The Federal Reserve’s second program of quantitative easing needs to work — at least enough to get U.S. growth above the 2.5% level that’s a minimum for reducing unemployment.
* The Federal Reserve has to handle the tricky withdrawal of quantitative easing without sending the economy back into a recession.
* A combination of Federal Reserve policy, fiscal discipline in Washington (all right, stop laughing) and decent economic growth in the United States has to give the Federal Reserve room to start raising interest rates again in order to close some of the yield gap with emerging economies.
Put all that together, and you could see enough growth in the global economy to justify a good part of today’s emerging-market valuations and enough of a pull from improving growth and rising yields in the U.S. to slow the flow of hot money into emerging markets.
There’s not a lot of room for error in that scenario. But there is some. For instance, say we see a crisis in the peripheral economies of the eurozone — Ireland, Portugal and Greece — that doesn’t turn into a crisis for the euro but that does heighten fears among global investors. The lower investment returns in the United States and Japan would be overpowered by the relative safety of their financial markets, which would help drain money out of emerging markets.
Of course, it would have to be a Goldilocks crisis — not too hot and not too cold — to have a positive end.
2 options for investors
In my Oct. 25 column, “10 ways to survive a zombie economy,” I described how difficult it is to invest when you can so easily imagine everything going wrong. That’s a major challenge in devising any strategy for a potential bubble. You can’t just bury your money in your backyard and stock up on MREs (the military’s ready-to-eat meals), because there is a realistic chance that the worst won’t happen. And money buried in the backyard won’t earn enough to put the kids through college or fund a retirement anywhere you’d actually like to spend your golden years.
As I see it, you’ve got two sets of options. I suggest mixing and matching them to calibrate any strategy to your own situation and sense of the world, and to give your strategy the best chance of success.
Keep your risks manageable . . .
First, you can try to invest in less-risky assets, those that won’t take as much beating from a bubble and bust.
There’s very little that will escape all damage except gold. Gold is unique because investors regard it as a stable source of value even in the very worst of times. In fact, as long as the worst of times doesn’t include armed mobs storming the homes of anybody thought to have gold, gold actually goes up in value in risky times. Because gold has relatively few industrial uses, it doesn’t take a huge hit (although jewelry sales do decline) when the economy slows. In that way it’s a superior hedge to copper, say, which has many industrial uses. It should come as no surprise that copper prices dropped when the global economy slowed and the U.S. construction industry rolled over.
But you can construct a list of assets from less risk to more based on how close prices are to historic tops (or beyond) and the likelihood of a drop in economic demand. On this scale, copper, iron, and real estate in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Mumbai all look like risky assets that you certainly don’t want to own if a bubble bursts. Or even if a lot of investors get very nervous.
On the other end of the scale you have assets such as stocks paying healthy dividends from companies with a track record of solid cash flow even in tough times. DuPont (DD, news, msgs), for example, kept its dividend at a solid $1.64 a share through the financial crisis. That didn’t stop the stock from taking a pounding in 2009, but the shares did hold value in 2007 and the first half of 2008, giving an investor extra time to plan an exit. (For more on DuPont, a member of my Watch List, see my post “Good news in Monsanto’s troubles for DuPont.”)
You can and should make these risk judgments not just among asset sectors but inside asset sectors themselves. A company with little debt and solid cash flow is a better bet to hold its dividend than a high-yield company with lots of leverage that already pays out more than 80% of its earnings, for example.
A bank that is ready to meet the capital requirements of Basel III, the toughened international banking standards, is a better bet than a bank that’s going to be looking for capital in what could be a very difficult market.
Morgan Stanley has made that kind of discrimination among emerging markets. The company is recommending South Korea and China, because it sees those markets as relatively cheap (and very well backed by national foreign exchange reserves). It is advising that investors cut back on holdings in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines because, after huge runs, those markets are relatively expensive.
Remember, now, we’re only halfway through our strategic building blocks.
. . . or try to time the bubble
Second, you can try to time the bubble and bust — stay in while there are profits to be made and jump ship when the markets look like they’re about to turn toward disaster.
Easy to say, hard to execute.
But not impossible.
Right now, most technical indicators are still pointing up for stocks in the United States and in other global markets in the medium and long terms. I think those indicators are correct — for the moment. The fourth quarter should be good for stocks, if only because the Federal Reserve and China are flooding the asset markets with so much money.
But I don’t know that these indicators will clearly signal any shift in the trend. They weren’t so clear in either 2000 or 2007 that most investors, even those who use technical indicators regularly, were able to see the peak and the coming drop.
I’d supplement whatever you can glean from the technical indicators with some basic knowledge of economics and investor psychology. Last week, the Federal Reserve said it would buy bonds until June. That’s no guarantee, of course. The Fed could change its mind and stop the sales way short of June, especially because some Federal Reserve members think this new round of quantitative easing is a mistake. Certainly, the Federal Reserve is under political pressure from newly confident Republicans to reverse course.
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So, how long can you count on the Fed to back up your stock portfolio? Certainly through the end of 2010 and almost certainly through the end of the first quarter. But if economic growth starts to look stronger than expected, the Fed could well cut back on its buying of Treasurys after that.
Would that be good or bad for stocks? It’s very hard to tell if stronger growth would outweigh a reduction in cash. But an end to the Fed’s program would certainly add uncertainty to the markets, and that’s never good. And investors who are now buying with the idea that the Fed is a reliable backstop through June would certainly be disappointed.
China is likely to follow a roughly similar timetable. The country may raise interest rates and try other measures to slow growth and inflation in the last quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, but the steps are likely to be gradual enough to assure that China’s growth stays at the high levels that emerging market valuations now assume.
And now to action
How do I put this all together into a strategy?
I’d go with the trend in the fourth quarter and look for profits from the assets that have done well in the rally to date: emerging market stocks and ETFs, commodities and commodity stocks, machinery and materials stocks, to name a few. I’d keep an eye on gold and add some to my portfolio as insurance whenever prices dipped. (Ten percent of a portfolio seems a reasonable goal by early 2011.)
As we move deeper into the first quarter of 2011, I’d pay more attention to risk and try to move out of riskier asset classes and riskier members of asset classes. My goal is to stay invested but to gradually diminish the risk in my portfolio as the quarter progresses. How far I go to reduce risk will depend on my read of the Federal Reserve and China. Are their policies working? Are they about to adopt even-riskier policies, or will they disappoint investors by changing course?
2011 is shaping up as a tough, but not impossible, year to navigate.
Tags: Bubbles, China, emerging markets, investing strategies, Jim Kubak, MSN Money, USA