Inflazione? NO! Normalizzazione (parte 2)
La settimana della prima Audizione di Jay Powell al Congresso USA ha movimentato in modo molto ampio tutti i mercati finanziari.
Attraverso il nostro The Morning Brief, abbiamo illustrato ai nostri Clienti quale è il punto centrale di questa Audizione: abbiamo, poi, ritrovato questa nostra lettura delle parole di Powell in molte altre sedi, ed anche sul Financial Times.
Per dirla in modo estremamente sintetico: l'inflazione NON c'entra. Non è, oggi, il problema centrale dei mercati finanziari.
Si tratta di una opinione che trova sempre più spazio: vi proponiamo ad esempio di leggere due frasi di ieri di Alan Greenspan, che era intervistato dalla TV CNBC. Notate bene l'enfasi di Greenspan sui tassi reali: ovvero, sui tassi di interesse al NETTO dell'inflazione.
Con poche frasi, Alan Greenspan è capaci di anticiparvi molto di ciò che vedrete nel 2018.
(...) well I would say we are in a bond market bubble. And a bond market bubble really means that prices are too high and when they move down, long-term interest rates move up. And if you take a look at the structure of not price earnings ratios, but earnings price ratios in the stock market, you find that the critical issue of what engendered some of the strength in the recent period is essentially the decline in real long-term interest rates, as is factored into the market. That is in the process of changing. And I think that the bond market bubble is now beginning to unwind, and that is going to bring us ultimately into a state of stagflation. And beyond that it's very difficult to tell. This is not an easy economic outlook because there are too many variables, which we haven't seen in recent decades.
Notate l'accenno alla stagflazione, uno scenario che Recce'd ha più e più volte esaminato.
E leggete poi qui sotto le implicazioni per la Borsa e la crescita economica (di cui parlano anche le frasi di Larry Summers che riproponiamo invece più in basso, e di seguito a questo secondo passaggio dell'intervista ad Alan Greenspan, intuizioni che sono state confermate dai dati pubblicati proprio durante questa settimana).
Well, of course. If the real long-term interest rates go up and you're in the process of having - it's inevitable that the effect on stock prices is negative. In fact, that's one of the really major factors determining equity price ratios, and therefore, as real long-term interest rates rise, stock prices fall. And I'm not saying what we're looking at in the last few weeks is meaningless - meaningful, but remember, the last few weeks I think are responding to the good part of the tax cut. You know, before I got into government, I was on a lot of corporate boards in which I had to sit through preparations of capital investment expenditure processes. And what struck me all the time is when they got down to the issue, the very end of it, you had what's the pretax rate of return on this investment and what is the after-tax return. And the after-tax return is a clean cut. So when you're going down from a 35% marginal rate to 21%, that's impact on perspective investments, which is exceptionally high in a marginal sense. So I, on the one hand, in the short-term, think the capital goods markets will be okay, but longer term productivity is in for serious diminution.
