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The S&P 500 nears its all-time high. Here’s why stockmarkets are defying economic reality

Stockmarkets are setting records as the global economy struggles. Here's why shares are going against the grain.

Stockmarkets are setting records as the global economy struggles. Here's why shares are going against the grain. Photo: Getty

The stockmarket is not the economy.

This old and playful maxim is typically not true: Often the stockmarket is a good proxy for the economy and a very good indication of what will happen to it.

But it aptly captures the current divergence between stockmarkets and the worst economic crisis in a century.

In the United States the NASDAQ (which include tech stocks such as Amazon, Apple, eBay, Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc) is now 10 per cent higher than before COVID-19 fears crashed global markets between late February and late March.

The benchmark S&P 500 index is now on the verge of an all-time high.

Last week it closed at 3349 points, just 1 per cent lower than its February 19 high of 3386.



Compare this reversal of fortune to the S&P 500’s trajectory after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. Then it took about five years for the index to claw back its losses.

And this despite the US economy now being in a much worse position than during the GFC, with an unemployment rate of more than 10 per cent, a muddled federal government response and Congress unable to agree on a new economic stimulus package.

Other national stockmarkets have had similar if less exuberant rebounds.

From their pre-COVID highs, Britain’s FTSE 100 is still down about 20 per cent, Japan’s Nikkei 225 about 6.5 per cent and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 index about 15 per cent. Nonetheless their recoveries are still remarkable.



The least-worst bet

Normally stockmarkets tell us a lot about the economy. Buying and selling shares is a near-instant response to new information.

The aggregation of those best guesses is generally an accurate indicator of the way things are going.

This time there might be a structural reason why the markets appear divorced from reality.

Investors could be bidding up stock prices because they have to put their money somewhere, and stocks are the least-worst bet.

Broadly speaking, investors can put money to work in five places: Stocks; property; commodities; bonds or money in the bank.

Property investment has become extremely risky. Values remain high due to temporary support schemes, and significant falls are likely.

Commodities are generic tradeable items, such as oil, wheat and coffee beans.

Like all tradeable items, their prices rise and fall, and the pandemic has been driving them down. In April the World Bank’s Commodity Markets Outlook warned the risks to forecasts were “large in both directions”.

Bonds are paying less and less

What about bonds – the ultra-safe investment offered by governments?

Their attractiveness depends on the interest they pay, and that depends on expectations about interest rates and inflation.

Both were going downhill before the pandemic, and COVID-19 has pushed them down further.

In March the US Federal Reserve cut its interest-rate target range to 0-0.25 per cent.

The Reserve Bank of Australia cut its target to 0.25 per cent but has in practice been prepared to accept a cash rate closer to zero.

The interest rates that influence bonds also affect returns on bank deposits.

That leaves stocks.

A notable feature of the stockmarket’s buoyancy has been the influx of retail (at the expense of professional or institutional) investors.

Since the market peaked in late February they have become net buyers of stocks, while professional institutional investors have become net sellers.


Cumulative net buying (A$ billion)

S&P/ASX 300, January to mid-May 2020. Author’s calculations

Researchers Carole Comerton-Forde and Zhou Zhong suggest this might be due to people having fewer other spending opportunities, and more time on their hands – the so-called boredom markets hypothesis.

Governments have helped with programs to prop up businesses, among them the $US659 billion ($919 billion) Paycheck Protection Program and Australia’s $86 billion JobKeeper and $40 billion Coronavirus Small and Medium Enterprises Guarantee programs.

In April and May this year Australian government spending jumped 11 per cent on the same months last year.

In April, May and June US government spending more than doubled.

It’s likely some of that money has flowed thorough to people who have used it to play the stockmarket.

Detached from reality

In the past the stockmarkets have fallen just before unemployment rose, heralding what was to come.

This happened in the US recession at the start of the 2000s and the Great Recession during in the Global Financial Crisis, as the following graph shows.


US unemployment rate and S&P 500


What’s notable is that the stockmarket didn’t fall just before unemployment rate climbed this time.

Now, more than ever before, the stockmarket tells us little about where the economy is heading.The Conversation

James Doran, Associate professor/Deputy head of school, UNSW

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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