Il denaro NON compera la felicità

In questo ottobre del 2021, è utile ed opportuno farsi delle domande.

In particolare, per tutti gli investitori, è arrivato il momento di chiedersi che cosa non ha funzionato. E se c’è mai stata, davvero, la possibilità ragionevole che potesse funzionare. Oppure se abbiamo assistito ad una ubriacatura collettiva, come accade la notte del Capodanno.

In questo ottobre 2021, un mese nel quale tutti voi lettori leggete sul quotidiano di preferenza che l’economia rallenta, l’inflazione aumenta, e siamo destinati alla stagflazione, è diventato inevitabile chiedersi che cosa non ha funzionato, di una manovra di politica economica (fiscale e monetaria) che solo qualche mese fa prometteva “boom della crescita” e benessere economico per un tempo illimitato.

Ricordiamolo: negli Stati Uniti, le nuove risorse messe a disposizione dalla politica monetaria (Federal Reserve) e politica fiscale hanno raggiunto, sommate, il 25% del PIL annuale di quella economia. A pochi mesi di distanza, siamo tutti qui a ragionare di una crescita al 2%. Se va tutto bene.

Qualcosa non è andato come previsto. Almeno, come era stato previsto dalle banche globali di investimento e dalla totalità dei promotori finanziari, dei wealth managers, dei private bankers, dei consulenti addetti alla vendita.

Recce’d, al contrario, nell’agosto 2020 aveva illustrato, anche in questo Blog, le ragioni per le quali si andava già allora verso uno scenario di stagflazione.

Noi restiamo del parere che sia questa, l’essenza del nostro lavoro: gestire il portafoglio dei Clienti sulla base di quello che, di lì a poco, succederà nella realtà dei fatti: senza lasciarsi trascinare dalle mode che prevalgono in quel momento sui mercati finanziari.

L’illusione di ricchezza per tutti ed a costo zero, creata da politiche economiche poco ragionate e mal calcolate, che si stanno manifestando per quelle che sono, ovvero dannose per l’economia, mettono in pericolo la stabilità dei mercati finanziari ed anche il benessere finanziario di ogni singola famiglia.

La ricchezza ed il benessere, infatti, non possono essere “creati per decreto”, ed i valori sui mercati finanziari non possono essere fatti “salire per legge”. Siamo, e saremo forse in futuro, tutti più ricchi unicamente nel caso in cui i soldi che noi andiamo ad investire produrranno nel futuro un miglioramento della situazione sottostante, della realtà dell’economia.

In questo specifico caso, del post-pandemia, non è andata così e non andrà così: tutta la ricchezza che è stata “creata dal Parlamento” verrà inevitabilmente cancellata dalla realtà dei fatti: tutto quello che resta, già oggi, è una ricchezza di carta, come quella dello Zio Paperone.

La consapevolezza di questo stato di cose ormai la trovate in prima pagina su tutti i quotidiani, e ne sentite parlare in televisione al TG Economia.

Un esempio ve lo forniamo qui sotto, dove leggete un titolo di un articolo pubblicato la settimana scorsa dal quotidiano Wall Street Journal, che parla di “ripresa economica messa in pericolo dai problemi nella catena di produzione globale”.

Il fatto notevole, per noi investitori, è che si possa legittimamente affermate che “la ripresa economica viene messa in pericolo” a pochi mesi di distanza dai titoli sul “boom economico”, che anche il quotidiano in questione, come ogni altro quotidiano, aveva ripetutamente utilizzato fino a poche settimane fa.

A voi, amici lettori ed amici investitori, risulta credibile il fatto che nssuno, al mondo, ci avesse pensato in agosto? Luglio? Giugno? Maggio? O anche prima?

Nessuno, con l’eccezione di noi di Recce’d: vi pare credibile?

Cosa è, che non è andato come previsto? Come venivano fatte, le previsioni solo qualche settimana fa? E soprattutto: quali interessi andavano ad alimentare, quelle previsioni di “felicità eterna” che dominavano sui mercati finanziari fino a qualche settimana fa?

Questa, detta in estrema sintesi, è la ragione per la quale ogni investitore dovrebbe chiedersi “che cosa non ha funzionato”. Comprendere le ragioni che ci hanno portato a questa situazione è essenziale, se vi interessa (e dovrebbe interessarvi) di comprendere come la situazione potrà evolversi, da oggi in poi.

Il suggerimento di Recce’d è il seguente: andate a cercarvi l’articolo del Wall Street Journal, che vedete citato nell’immagine più in alto, e che qui noi no riportiamo per ragioni di spazio in questo Post.

Leggete con attenzione quell’articolo, e poi leggete subito dopo l’articolo che segue, che noi abbiamo trovato nel settimanale The Economist. Il settimana ha scelto di etichettare lo stato attuale dell’economia come “shortage economy”, l’economia del razionamento. sarà proprio questo, il futuro che ci attende?

La lettura combinata dei due articoli vi sarà utile per comprendere in che modo la situazione delle economia si modificherà e si evolverà nei prossimi mesi.

Una volta completata questa lettura, avrete le idee molto più chiare: noi di Recce’d più in basso riprendiamo l’analisi delle implicazioni di questa “shortage economy” per gli investimenti e per la gestione del portafoglio titoli.

For a decade after the financial crisis the world economy’s problem was a lack of spending. Worried households paid down their debts, governments imposed austerity and wary firms held back investment, especially in physical capacity, while hiring from a seemingly infinite pool of workers. Now spending has come roaring back, as governments have stimulated the economy and consumers let rip. The surge in demand is so powerful that supply is struggling to keep up. Lorry drivers are getting signing bonuses, an armada of container ships is anchored off California waiting for ports to clear and energy prices are spiralling upwards. As rising inflation spooks investors, the gluts of the 2010s have given way to a shortage economy.

The immediate cause is covid-19. Some $10.4trn of global stimulus has unleashed a furious but lopsided rebound in which consumers are spending more on goods than normal, stretching global supply chains that have been starved of investment. Demand for electronic goods has boomed during the pandemic but a shortage of the microchips inside them has struck industrial production in some exporting economies, such as Taiwan. The spread of the Delta variant has shut down clothing factories in parts of Asia. In the rich world migration is down, stimulus has filled bank accounts and not enough workers fancy shifting from out-of-favour jobs like selling sandwiches in cities to in-demand ones such as warehousing. From Brooklyn to Brisbane, employers are in a mad scramble for extra hands.

Yet the shortage economy is also the product of two deeper forces. First, decarbonisation. The switch from coal to renewable energy has left Europe, and especially Britain, vulnerable to a natural-gas supply panic that at one point this week had sent spot prices up by over 60%. A rising carbon price in the European Union’s emissions-trading scheme has made it hard to switch to other dirty forms of energy. Swathes of China have faced power cuts as some of its provinces scramble to meet strict environmental targets. High prices for shipping and tech components are now triggering increased capital expenditure to expand capacity. But when the world is trying to wean itself off dirty forms of energy, the incentive to make long-lived investments in the fossil-fuel industry is weak.

The second force is protectionism. As our special report explains, trade policy is no longer written with economic efficiency in mind, but in the pursuit of an array of goals, from imposing labour and environmental standards abroad to punishing geopolitical opponents.

This week Joe Biden’s administration confirmed that it would keep Donald Trump’s tariffs on China, which average 19%, promising only that firms could apply for exemptions (good luck battling the federal bureaucracy). Around the world, economic nationalism is contributing to the shortage economy. Britain’s lack of lorry drivers has been exacerbated by Brexit. India has a coal shortage in part because of a misguided attempt to cut imports of fuel. After years of trade tensions, the flow of cross-border investment by companies has fallen by more than half relative to world gdp since 2015.

All this might seem eerily reminiscent of the 1970s, when many places faced petrol-pump queues, double-digit price rises and sluggish growth. But the comparison gets you only so far. Half a century ago politicians got economic policy badly wrong, fighting inflation with futile measures like price controls and Gerald Ford’s “whip inflation now” campaign, which urged people to grow their own vegetables. Today the Federal Reserve is debating how to forecast inflation, but there is a consensus that central banks have the power and the duty to keep it in check.

For now, out-of-control inflation seems unlikely. Energy prices should ease after the winter. In the next year the spread of vaccines and new treatments for covid-19 should reduce disruptions. Consumers may spend more on services. Fiscal stimulus will wind down in 2022: Mr Biden is struggling to get his jumbo spending bills through Congress and Britain plans to raise taxes. The risk of a housing bust in China means that demand could even fall, restoring the sluggish conditions of the 2010s. And an investment boost in some industries will eventually translate into more capacity and higher productivity.

But make no mistake, the deeper forces behind the shortage economy are not going away and politicians could easily end up with dangerously wrong-headed policies. One day, technologies such as hydrogen should help make green power more reliable. But that will not plug shortages right now. As fuel and electricity costs rise, there could be a backlash. If governments do not ensure that there are adequate green alternatives to fossil fuels, they may have to meet shortages by relaxing emissions targets and lurching back to dirtier sources of energy. Governments will therefore have to plan carefully to cope with the higher energy costs and slower growth that will result from eliminating emissions. Pretending that decarbonisation will result in a miraculous economic boom is bound to lead to disappointment.

The shortage economy could also reinforce the appeal of protectionism and state intervention. Many voters blame empty shelves and energy crises on the government. Politicians can escape responsibility by excoriating fickle foreigners and fragile supply chains, and by talking up the false promise of boosting self-reliance. Britain has already bailed out a fertiliser plant to maintain the supply of carbon dioxide, an input for the food industry. The government is trying to claim that labour shortages are good, because they will raise economy-wide wages and productivity. In reality, putting up barriers to migration and trade will, on average, cause both to fall.

The wrong lessons at the wrong time

Disruptions often lead people to question economic orthodoxies. The trauma of the 1970s led to a welcome rejection of big government and crude Keynesianism. The risk now is that strains in the economy lead to a repudiation of decarbonisation and globalisation, with devastating long-term consequences. That is the real threat posed by the shortage economy. 

Ritorniamo adesso alla domanda che apriva il nostro Post: che cosa è, che non ha funzionato? Semplicemente, non ha funzionato la politica economica adottata in risposta alla pandemia.

Ci sono almeno due millenni di storia, a dimostrare che mettere in circolazione più moneta NON fa stare meglio l’economia e NON rende più ricchi tutti quanti a costo zero.

Non esiste, un modo di rendere più ricchi tutti quanti a costo zero: l’intera storia dell’economia insegna che la ricchezza dei popoli è aumentata grazie alla scoperta di nuove risorse naturali ed all’aumento della produttività.

La quantità di moneta in circolazione non ha mai cambiato, né mai cambierà, la realtà dei fatti.

Lo spiega in modo perfetto la lettura che chiude il nostro Post: in questo articolo si parla, a nostro giudizio correttamente, di “uno shock strutturale e secolare” che ha nulla a che vedere con il ciclo economico e che non sarà risolto da politiche del tipo “regaliamo più soldi a tutti”.

Recce’d aveva scritto, come abbiamo ricordato in più occasioni, già nell’agosto 2020: chi allora decise di seguire le nostre indicazioni oggi può guardare al futuro con serenità, ottimismo e prospettive di guadagno molto sostanziose.

Ma soprattutto ha ben compreso la fondamentale differenza tra i “guadagni di carta” ed i “guadagni che restano” nella gestione del proprio portafoglio di investimenti.

Per tutti gli altri, che tra gennaio e giugno si sono fatti attirare come le falene dalla luce di una candela, adesso è probabilmente troppo tardi.

Perché siamo già oltre: tutto ciò che leggete in questo Post è il presente, ed il passato. Ma un buon investitore deve sapere guardare sempre al futuro. Alla prossima fase, quella che sta per iniziare.

Coming out of the 2008 global financial crisis, it took too many too long to recognize that the economic shock was more structural and secular rather than cyclical. The result was a policy response that, while effective in dealing with the immediate emergency, proved insufficient for longer-term economic well-being.

Covid-19 has amplified the vulnerabilities of the disappointing recovery that followed, particularly when it comes to socioeconomic inequalities, co-opted institutions and distorted financial markets. Meanwhile, what took too long to happen a decade ago — recognition that the world faced a structural deficiency of aggregate demand — is now hindering timely responses to the latest challenges.

While demand is much less of a hindrance today because of the historic levels of fiscal transfers and liquidity injections by central banks, Covid-related factors have upended the supply side. The multifaceted efficiency of a just-in-time global economy has become a source of cascading fragilities and disruptions that haven’t yet sufficiently altered mindsets, let alone produced strong policy reactions. Meanwhile, the risks of continuing with pedal-to-the-metal monetary policy outweigh the benefits.

The need to address the content and mix of policies is urgent, both at the national and multilateral levels. Failure to do so could turn stagflationary winds — that disruptive mix of declining growth and higher inflation— into a much more disruptive phenomenon with economic, financial, institutional, political and social implications.

Among its many teachings, the 2008 crisis exposed the dangers of an economy over-reliant on finance. While in the run-up to the crisis policy makers were captivated by innovations that lowered the barriers to debt and leverage, including securitization and other risk-tranching techniques, an unconstrained and unencumbered financial sector went from funding genuine economic opportunities to fueling rampant speculation, most visibly in housing. Balance sheets ballooned as banks also sold a seemingly infinite range of leverage-heavy products to one another.

When it came to dealing with the inevitable consequences — the simultaneous popping of several financial bubbles — policy makers acted quickly to counter the disruptive spillback to the real economy and to rein in excessive risk-taking among banks. The presumption was that a “timely, targeted and temporary” policy intervention would restore conditions for durable socioeconomic prosperity.

Yet what ailed the global economy went deeper than just excessive and irresponsible finance. The “financialization” of the economy itself had sidelined pro-growth initiatives.

Genuine productivity-enhancing activities, such as infrastructure modernization and agile labor enabling and retooling, became boring and old-fashioned compared with what sophisticated financial engineering seemed to unleash. As such, it did not take long for economies to suffer a new normal of disappointing growth, significant inequalities and endless rounds of exceptional central bank interventions to maintain financial stability, albeit of the artificial variety.

With growth repeatedly falling short of what was expected and needed, the initial over-cyclical mindset of many economists and policy makers transitioned to being laser focused on addressing deficient aggregate demand. Unfortunately, Covid has turned this into a weakness given that supply side issues now dominate.

An early economic lesson of Covid is that its drivers of structural fluidity have transformed the efficiency of a just-in-time global economy from a strength into a notable fragility. Tightly woven cross-border supply chains suddenly fell victim to Covid-related closings in one or more ports. Shipping and container disruptions turned cost-effective value chains into loss-makers. Seeking greater resilience, companies have started to rewire their supply chains, amplifying short-term vulnerabilities. It’s hard to quickly build and bring a new production facility on line. It’s even harder when many try to do the same thing at once.

Labor supply has also become an issue. The greater sensitivity of workers to health risks and lifestyle choices alter the propensity to work. Labor force participation has become less secure, fueling record increases in job vacancies. Labor costs inevitably start increasing across-the-board as companies’ efforts to attract new workers force them to also raise pay to retain those they already have.

While the on-the-ground evidence of supply disruptions is multiplying, the dominant macroeconomic mindset is still overly fixated on insufficient aggregate demand. Several of the recent policy remarks by the Federal Reserve serve, once again, as an example.

This will come as no surprise to behavioral scientists. Cognitive traps (rear-view framing, confirmation bias, blind spots, etc.) can slow the shift of policy makers’ focus to supply disruptions, which have become the main cause of the economic malaise of today and tomorrow. Instead, they reinforce some approaches, particularly in monetary policy, that inadvertently amplify the stagflationary winds that are starting to blow across a growing number of countries.

Cognitive biases are particularly problematic at a time of big changes in the operating environment. This was clear in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis with the overly cyclical economic mindset that delayed policy responses to what constituted a structural and secular shock several years in the making. We are seeing it today with one that is evolving too slowly from demand to supply.

The longer it takes for national and multilateral policy mindsets to adjust, the more likely we are to repeat the disappointment of the global financial crisis: Winning the war against the immediate enemy but failing to establish the peace of durable and inclusive socioeconomic prosperity, a platform for addressing dangerous secular challenges such as climate change, and anchoring genuine financial stability