By: GZ on Lunedì 29 Ottobre 2007 13:32
il Financial Times oggi ha questo editoriale un attimo sarcastico che però predice seriamente un altro anno al rialzo e che la "bolla" finale parabolica stile Nasdaq 2000 arriva nei prossimi mesi
dice in sostanza che
a) le banche centrali come negli anni '90 taglieranno i tassi all'osso fino a quando il reddito fisso non si spaventa, cosa che per ora non sembra proprio. Ovviamente tagliare i tassi fa apparire attraenti le azioni rispetto alle obbligazioni e da una boccata di ossigeno a chi paga i mutui
b) stanno entrando ORA sulle azioni i famosi Fondi Statali (Sovereign Fund) di Arabia, Emirati, Russia, Cina, Hong Kong, Singapore, Norvegia i quali grazie al petrolio e al boom dell export dell'Asia accumulano miliardi e non ne spendono in patria per motivi vari (contano sugli europei ed americani per spendere)
--------------
Elements in place for equity bull-run
By John Dizard, Financial Times
Oct 29, 2007
Surrounded, as many of you are, by marked-up and torn-up drafts of work-out plans for various credit structures, it may seem to be the wrong time to suggest a new bubble.
Some of us, though, are visionary, or venal, enough to see beyond the horizon, to reflect on the overvaluations and follies of the future, not just those of the recent past.
Anyway, waiting around for credit to correct far enough to be of interest to a self-respecting vulture is like watching very wet paint dry in a chill room.
What we haven't really had yet, outside China, is a traditional end-of-cycle rally in equity that takes us beyond the atmosphere to the edge of space. I believe we will manage that within the next 18 months, before most people in Wall Street and the City have to move on to organic farming, bartending, or their parents' spare room.
There are a few prerequisites to be taken care of first. The last bonus cheques and general partners' distributions for the speculative credit world have to go out at the end of the year, after which the real write-offs can be taken. The Fed and its sister central banks then have to put aside their delusional dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and cut policy interest rates to the point where we get even more of a bull steepening in the rate curve. That will put a slightly better gloss on still anaemic earnings. Deeply pessimistic, end-of-life-as-weknow-it stories and columns in the financial press will help accelerate the depressive part of the investment world's bipolar cycle.
The last element for an equity bull market is already in place: a source of new cash. I refer to the sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), already much commented on in these and other pages.
One traditional sign of a decade-plus top in a market is the entry of well financed, but less well informed punters.
Foreign institutions are usually the ones who come in to any market at the end to pay for the last round. So far, in the western equity markets, the buying has been done by other corporations or leveraged private equity.
That's because the main source of marginal savings in this cycle, the current account surpluses of the emerging markets, has been channeled through the central banks and central bank-dominated institutions.
The absurd overbuilding of the structured credit market was done to accommodate the demand of the central bankers and their minions for "risk-free" or "low-risk" paper.
That made possible the consumer spending to prop up earnings, and the capitalisation of those earnings through private equity buy-outs.
The US Treasury's data showing the August slowdown in securities sales to foreigners mark the end of that phase of the deployment of the exporters' current account surpluses.
The exporting countries were taking risk without even getting some call options on long-term profits. So now they're going to shift from central bank investing to SWF investing.
As Michael Pochna of Dexter Capital in New York, who has been advising a couple of SWFs on investment strategy, puts it: "Why should a sovereign nation exchange a barrel of oil for $80 of fixed income paper?
"Instead, they're going to look to the Singapore model for government investment structures, and the US university endowments for investment philosophy." That means buying a lot more equities.
How rational is this? Let's assume that the SWFs come in at the very end of a long equity cycle. Take an investor who bought his entire equity position in September 1929, at the needle peak of the equity boom. How would he have done compared to a "central banker" low-risk strategy? I went to Ibbotson Associates, the securities returns statisticians in Chicago, for a comparative data series.
By 1939, 10 years after the crash, an investor in the S&P 500 would have an inflation-adjusted total return of negative 24.5 per cent, compared to an inflation-adjusted return of positive 34.5 per cent in T-bills.
But by 20 years out, the inflation-adjusted S&P return would be nearly 6 per cent, while the comparable "risk-free" T-Bill return would be worse than negative 18 per cent. By 30 years out, a near horizon for real "inter-generational" investing, and comparable to many home mortgages, the T-bill inflation-adjusted total return would be a negative 21 per cent, while the S&P 500 would have clocked over 464 per cent. And that's with the worst possible timing.
Another point. I spent parents' weekend at my daughter's boarding school in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, where I was struck by the proportion of students from Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Their parents are making a multi-decade bet on US society, just as some of their neighbours are making a similar bet on UK and European society.
The SWF's equity positions would help ensure the children's future access to work in foreign institutions, both for their own advancement and for technology transfer to the home country. Of course not every equity issue will benefit.
The producers of internationally traded goods and services would be favoured, even more than they have been lately.
But that would be enough for one last round of commissions and fees. johndizard@hotmail.com