Longform’d. I prossimi dieci anni (parte 1)
L’attualità dei mercati giorno-per-giorno, in questa parte del 2022, è particolarmente poco interessante. Tutto si svolge come noi vi avevamo anticipato, i mercati sono (evidentemente) tutti in una posizione di allerta, come in attesa che succeda quel “qualcosa” che tutti temono e nessuno per ora nomina.
Chi vince e chi perde, in una situazione come questa?
Chi perde è chiarissimo: perdono tutti quelli che si sono affidati alla cosiddetta “asset allocation” tradizionale che viene proposta (imposta) da chi vende polizze UCITS e Fondi Comuni di investimento (i numeri li trovate su tutti i quotidiani, ma pure nella pagina HOME del nostro sito, oppure nel grafico che apre questo Post, che vi racconta gli ultimi SETTE anni dei VOSTRI investimenti in Fondi Comuni, quello che si dice “un bell’affare”).
Chi vince? Chi sa fare bene il mestiere della gestione di portafoglio, sia nelle varie forme “riservate” sia nelle forme innovative, come ad esempio i portafogli modello.
Fare bene oppure fare male, in questo ambito professionale, è funzione dei risultati, pesati per il rischio. Il resto, sono solo chiacchiere.
C’è quindi un numero, molto ristretto purtroppo, di investitori che si è salvato dall’attuale disastro, grazie al fatto di avere saputo scegliere strategie di investimento ed interlocutori diversi (molto diversi) da quelli scelti dalla massa degli investitori, ed imposti da un assetto del settore del risparmio che indirizza (forzatamente) gli investitori verso soluzioni che fanno comodo solo agli Istituti che hanno ottenuto una normativa di settore che protegge gli interessi del cartello che domina il settore.
Chi oggi sta guadagnando, in qualche caso molto bene, guadagna grazie al fatto di avere anticipato i fatti che oggi tutti leggono sui quotidiani, autonomamente oppure grazie a consulenti professionali, competenti, e trasparenti (nel senso che operano senza conflitto di interesse).
Da oggi in avanti, però, che cosa sarà necessario fare, del proprio portafoglio titoli?
In questo particolare momento dei mercati, delle economie e delle società, l’investitore ha prima di tutto l’obbligo di alzare la sguardo: è infatti una gravissima ingenuità, in questo momento, perdere il proprio tempo e la propria attenzione dietro a cause perse, del tipo “quando arriva il rimbalzo”.
l contrario, è necessario alzare lo sguardo, come dicevamo: intercettare subito i cambiamenti che investono ed investiranno le Istituzioni e le società, e proprio su quella base capire (in anticipo) che cosa sta per accadere sui mercati finanziari. E quindi ai vostri e nostri soldi investiti sui mercati (ma pure nell’immobiliare: fate bene attenzione!).
Noi come sempre forniremo ai lettori un aiuto concreto, che negli ultimi anni ha dimostrato a tutto il pubblico, in forma pubblica, i suoi benefici, sia come performance sia come protezione del patrimonio dagli eventi avversi.
Tutto è, come detto, pubblico, e quindi documentato e documentabile: fate bene attenzione anche a questo aspetto, è qualificante rispetto a tutta la concorrenza delle Reti di promotori finanziari e delle banche.
Un esempio: volete rivedere quello che noi avevamo scritto più due anni fa, avvisandovi (del tutto gratuitamente) a proposito di chi era ed è anche oggi il peggiore nemico del vostro risparmio?
Vi suggeriamo, poi, di rileggere anche ciò che scrivevamo venti mesi fa.
E ciò che poi abbiamo scritto nel 2021.
Come potete facilmente riscontrare, questo è proprio ciò che oggi leggete aprendo un quotidiano: un primo esempio ve lo forniamo qui sotto, e ci è arrivato questa settimana, dal Financial Times. Altri esempi li leggerete di seguito.
A French leader once called the dollar America’s “exorbitant privilege”. Today’s world might go for blunter language. Vector of pain, anyone? Green monster? Whatever we call it, the strong dollar’s victims have one culprit in mind — the Federal Reserve. Even Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is joining in.
This week he warned that the Fed was exporting recession in the same way the euro crisis was imposed by Germany’s post-2008 dictates. Much of the world is now in danger of becoming Greece. Such finger-pointing is mostly unfair to the Fed. The US central bank clung for too long to its “team transitory” dismissal of inflation and is thus tightening at speed to restore its credibility. But it is only following the rules. It is hard enough to achieve full US employment with low inflation. Adding foreigners’ wellbeing to its mandate would make the job paralysingly complex. The Fed is nevertheless the engine of global contraction. Monetary pain is America’s fastest growing export. The big unknown is, who will pick up the pieces. Here, as the world’s leading power, the US has often been prone to neglect. In today’s so-called polycrisis world it also risks missing a chance to restore America’s brand. The Fed has one tool — monetary policy. Higher US interest rates are spreading at pandemic speed.
As a whole, the US has many options. One such lever is the Bretton Woods institutions — the IMF and the World Bank, which are holding their annual meetings in Washington this week. The question is whether the US wants to cushion the blow to the developing world as its debt servicing costs go through the roof? History tells President Joe Biden which road not to take. The Fed’s last period of steep tightening started under Paul Volcker in the late 1970s. Higher US rates helped trigger far deeper recessions in the global south. Africa and Latin America both suffered a lost decade of growth that was deepened by the IMF’s punitive bailout conditions. Structural adjustment was a cure worse than the disease. The 1970s had been awash with recycled Opec capital that made dollar borrowing hard to resist. The Fed’s quantitative easing has had the same effect over the past decade. It is little consolation that inflation today looks less rampant than 40 years ago. In some respects emerging markets have it worse this time. Africa was neither responsible for the pandemic nor the war in Ukraine. The first is undoing years of human development gains. The second has unleashed a wave of food and energy inflation. Now the Fed is adding a potential debt-servicing crisis to the cocktail.
These upheavals did not originate in the global south but the costs will chiefly be borne there. That is without mentioning climate change, which is also harshest in those parts of the world least responsible for creating it. Biden has so far found little bandwidth to confront these challenges. He had a chance to make US vaccine technology available to the developing world. Indeed, he initially vowed to suspend Covid vaccine patents. That now looks like an empty gesture since his administration did not follow up. As a result, a third of the world’s population has not yet had one vaccine while most westerners have had at least two — some as many as five. Had the US taken a stronger lead, the world’s inflation-inducing supply bottlenecks would not have been as chronic.
Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus — the American Rescue Plan — threw fuel on an inflationary fire that is coming back to haunt Democrats. If they lose control of Congress next month, that bill will partly be to blame. The same applies to the roughly half a trillion dollars of student loan forgiveness he announced in August. Again, though, the brunt is felt by the rest of the world through imported austerity. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Not for the first time, progressive-minded steps to help disadvantaged Americans are regressive for the world’s disadvantaged.
The Fed has earned some of the resentment it is getting. It should have reacted earlier to inflation, which would have meant a less punitive response. It is not as if inflation was hard to spot. On that count, Jay Powell, the Fed chair, deserves some blame. But America’s big shortcoming is political not technocratic. The global face of the problem is the mighty dollar but its causes lie deeper. The US can be oblivious at big moments to the spillover effects of what it does at home, which often come back to bite it. Call it exorbitant indifference.
edward.luce@ft.com
Non stiamo a tradurre questo articolo, e neppure i successivi: utilizzando un traduttore online, si può risolvere in pochi secondi, ma in ogni caso i contenuti possono essere intuiti da tutti. Il messaggio è chiarissimo: i quotidiani più autorevoli oggi dicono tutti: “Fight the Fed”.
Lo abbiamo scritto, in lingua italiana, nei nostri Post del 2020 e 2021 (tre link poco più in alto), che dicevano con largo anticipo proprio le stesse cose che leggete oggi, nell’articolo sopra del Financial Times qui sopra, e anche sotto nell’articolo del Wall Street Journal.
Politicians may debate whether big-government socialism or free-market capitalism leads to better economic outcomes. Their constituents may worry about rising prices and declining prospects for retirement. But neither group has the power to create money with no questions asked, manipulate the cost of capital, or counteract movements in financial markets. The central bankers are in charge—and perhaps that should change.
Even if duly elected leaders try to make good on campaign promises, they face hurdles if monetary authorities, domestic and global, disagree. What happened in Britain is a cautionary tale for nations that have relinquished to central banks the keys to economic performance. British Prime Minister Liz Truss, together with her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, last month announced plans to spur investment and economic expansion by cutting taxes for individuals and businesses. Days later, they were verbally lashed by Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, for “working at some cross-purposes” with the nation’s central bank.
Mr. Carney, who is now United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance, lamented that the new U.K. government was trying to stimulate short-term growth just as the Bank of England was trying to restrain it to control inflation. While the approach championed by Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng aims to expand economic output by providing incentives to increase supply, the Bank of England is committed to fighting inflation by reducing demand—which requires raising interest rates to choke off growth. When the budgetary plans were poorly received by market investors, the central bank had to buy long-term government bonds to rescue the pound in foreign-exchange markets—causing interest rates to fall.
Then there’s the audacity of the International Monetary Fund, which publicly rebuked the U.K. government’s budget and urged it to “re-evaluate the tax measures, especially those that benefit high income earners.”
Since when did unelected monetary officials gain the authority to tell political leaders what to do? It’s unseemly, but perhaps not surprising: When government organizations are imbued with breathtaking powers to determine financial conditions, it magnifies their clout—and elevates their status.
The coterie of major central banks that manage the global economy are leery of spurring demand through excessive fiscal stimulus. But there is a difference between government overspending, which borrows from the future to pay for current consumption, and tax-cutting incentives now to spur more production down the road. Government borrowing to finance socialist redistribution isn’t the same as government borrowing to invest in entrepreneurial capitalism.
But central banks, led by the U.S. Federal Reserve, have embraced the notion that curbing demand is the road to monetary redemption. That same Fed not long ago failed to anticipate the pervasive inflationary pressures unleashed through the extraordinary fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the economic consequences of the Covid-19 shutdown.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell insists that “price stability is the responsibility of the Federal Reserve,” but this is posturing rather than accountability. The central bank doesn’t compensate Americans for expropriating some of their wealth by diminishing the dollar’s purchasing power. And the 58% of Americans invested in the stock market won’t be comforted by former New York Fed President William Dudley’s warning this year that the Fed will “have to inflict more losses on stock and bond investors” to contract economic activity through tightened financial conditions. Citizens harmed by such moves have little recourse.
While Mr. Powell championed “supportive” monetary policy to foster economic growth and “as strong a labor market as possible for the benefit of all Americans” in announcing the Fed’s revised monetary policy framework in August 2020, he now seeks to raise interest rates to “restrictive” levels and believes “we need to have softer labor market conditions.” So much for maximizing employment.
Beyond the Fed’s dual mandate, our central bank is responsible for providing a stable monetary and financial system. But for all its powers to set interest rates, it’s not clear that supply-and-demand forces wouldn’t have set rates more appropriately and achieved better results. Is credit allocated more efficiently through central planning or free-market price signaling?
The hair-trigger reaction of financial markets to the latest utterances of monetary authorities is unsettling. Government bond yields and currency values are vulnerable to the interplay of derivative financial instruments structured on underlying assets that world-wide total about $600 trillion, according to the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements. Contracts based on interest rates or foreign-exchange instruments account for 96% of that total.
It is time to question whether central banks have become too powerful, too prominent and too political. In the name of preserving central bank independence, lawmakers have ceded huge swaths of their own responsibility for ensuring the welfare of citizens through sound economic policies. By doing so, elected representatives have granted influence to unelected officials that is inconsistent with democratic norms and limited powers.
It will require a Copernican revolution to shift the field of monetary theory from an understanding of economic performance that doesn’t put central banks at its core. But it’s a change that must be made if we are to prevent further demoralization of free markets and free people.
Ms. Shelton, a monetary economist, is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of “Money Meltdown.”
Nell’articolo del Wall Street Journal, che nessuno al Mondo potrà accusare di essere “contrarian”, si chiede “un cambiamento del ruolo della Federal Reserve”, e si parla poi di “Rivoluzione Copernicana nella politica monetaria”.
Ai lettori, Recce’d suggerisce di NON perdere tempo con la classica domanda del private banker (“quando arriva il rimbalzo”) e concentrare invece la propria attenzione su questi due punti appena citati, e sollevati nell’articolo del WSJ.
Il Mondo, quello vero, intorno a voi viene ripensato e ridisegnato in questi mesi: quindi smettete subito, se state ancora pensando ad un futuro simile al recente passato.
Chiedetevi invece:
perché 24 mesi fa chi suggeriva “difendetevi dalla Federal Reserve” veniva etichettato come “contrarian”, ed oggi invece lo scrivono il Financial Times ed il Wall Street Journal?
Per aiutarvi a trovare le risposte giuste, potete utilizzare i tre link che vi abbiamo proposto più in alto.
E poi, potete rileggere con grande attenzione i due articoli qui sopra, ed anche il terzo articolo che trovate qui sotto di seguito, di fonte Bloomberg, dal titolo più che esplicito.
By
10 ottobre 2022 11:00 CEST
Bill Dudley, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and senior adviser to Bloomberg Economics, is a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Economic Policy Studies. He served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2009 to 2018, and as vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. He was previously chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs.
Federal Reserve officials have been getting an earful about the economic threat that the US central bank’s rapid monetary tightening presents to the rest of the world — complaints that will no doubt be amplified at this week’s meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The Fed must focus on what’s best for the US, so there’s little it can do to mitigate the global repercussions of its actions. That said, it should at least do a better job of explaining itself.
The complaints are amply founded: The Fed’s aggressive monetary tightening is undoubtedly imposing stress on the rest of the world, in large part by boosting the exchange rate of the dollar to other currencies. In developed countries, this drives up prices of imports such as crude oil, stoking inflation and forcing central banks to respond with matching rate hikes — even in economies where inflation pressures are relatively mild and growth is weaker. The effects are even harsher in developing countries. Aside from more expensive food and energy imports, they face reversals of foreign capital inflows (which makes financing imports harder) and increasing difficulty servicing their already burdensome dollar-denominated debts.
Yet the Fed will almost certainly stay the course, for two reasons. First, it’s the only way to get US inflation under control. Excessive fiscal and monetary stimulus stoked the demand for goods, services and labor, so the central bank must now tighten and push up unemployment enough to slow wage and price increases. If it fails to act aggressively enough, inflation will become more embedded, forcing the Fed to act even more forcefully later with even harsher consequences for the US and global economy.
Second, the Fed’s congressional mandate is to achieve maximum sustainable employment consistent with price stability for the US economy. Congress made no mention of what’s best for the rest of the world. Of course, the Fed pays attention to global developments such as the war in Ukraine, but only to the extent that they have implications for the US economic outlook. Fed officials explain their policies to their foreign counterparts, but no adjustments are made just because the latter are unhappy. This is standard operating procedure for central banks everywhere. What’s different is how much US monetary policy affects everyone else.
Still, the Fed could do more on the communication side. Specifically, officials would do well to be more forthcoming about what went wrong, and why they now must raise short-term rates by more than 400 basis points in just nine months. A couple talking points:
The way the Fed implemented its new monetary policy framework, which from 2020 sought to target a longer-term average of 2% inflation, proved particularly ill-suited to the economic environment. The Fed’s self-imposed constraints were too extreme and inflexible: “Liftoff” from zero rates couldn’t happen until the economy had reached full employment and inflation had climbed above 2% and was expected to stay there for some time. Also, the Fed had to make “substantial” progress toward these goals before even beginning to taper the asset purchases known as quantitative easing, which had to be fully wound down before rate increases could begin. As a result, the federal funds rate was still at zero in early March, even though the economy had clearly overheated.
The Fed made two important forecasting mistakes. Inflation pressures were much broader and more persistent than anticipated, and the labor market became much tighter much faster than expected.
Humility is always valuable when you have inadvertently made life more difficult for others. Also, by recognizing its mistakes, the Fed might provide some reassurance that it won’t repeat them. It’s not much to offer countries struggling to cope with the consequences, but it’s better than the alternative of saying nothing at all.
Come avete appena letto qui sopra, adesso persino chi per un decennio è stato al governo della Federal Reserve in pubblico parla male di quello che ha fatto la Federal Reserve e dice che “la Federal Reserve deve al Mondo un mea culpa”: ma potrebbe iniziare proprio lui, Bill Dudley, Governatore della Fed di New York fino a pochi anni fa.
Peccato, per lui e per noi, che non abbia avuto la lucidità e/o il coraggio di fare considerazioni come queste quando lui era al governo di quella Istituzione.
Noi di Recce’d invece lo abbiamo fatto quando ancora era utile, e questo ha portato i nostri portafogli modello a performances eccezionali, di caratura internazionale.
Oggi però, e lo ripetiamo ancora una volta, la Federal Reserve non è più il protagonista del futuro dei mercati finanziari. Gli investitori debbono sì guardare alla Fed, ma soltanto per comprendere quali saranno le conseguenze della sua (drammatica) uscita dalla scena principale, insieme con la BCE e la Banca del Giappone.
L’investitore deve quindi, essere consapevole di ciò che accade, ma deve anche sapere anticipare i futuri protagonisti, i fattori che nel futuro prossimo e lontano daranno la direzione ai mercati finanziari.
Gli investitori, oggi, non debbono perdere tempo cn “il prossimo rimbalzo dei mercati” e devono invece occuparsi del prossimo decennio.
Noi come sempre del tutto gratuitamente attraverso questo Post mettiamo a disposizione dei lettori elementi concreti di valutazione: ad esempio con l’articolo che segue e chiude il Post.
Provate a immaginare quanti danni avreste evitato al vostro patrimonio, seguendo nel corso degli anni i nostri suggerimenti, che Recce’d vi ha offerto gratuitamente, chiedendovi di leggere con grande attenzione proprio articoli come questo.
E se oggi volete approfondire, siamo sempre stati disponibili, e lo siamo anche oggi stesso.
Rana Foroohar October 9 2022
Over 40 years ago, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was born. Taxes were slashed. Unions were quashed. Markets were deregulated and global capital unleashed. But economic pendulums swing.
And over the last couple of weeks, it’s become quite clear that anything remotely related to trickle-down theory is now political Kryptonite. The most obvious example is, of course, the backlash against UK prime minister Liz Truss’s bizarre plan to lower taxes on the rich after announcing major spending on energy subsidies. Trussonomics is now off the table, and the prime minister’s own leadership is in jeopardy. But it’s not only the UK that is facing the downhill slope of neoliberalism. I recently met a senior Biden administration official who told me that many chief executives are now coming to Washington and asking for “a signal from government — where should we invest? Should we be in Vietnam or Mexico? Which sectors do you want us in?”
While the government isn’t yet in the business of picking winners and losers, the White House has already made the shift to a post-neoliberal era — and many in the business community are preparing for it as well. CEOs may not like the idea of a deglobalising world with more regulation, greater state control and growing labour power. But they can usually find a way to make money as long as they understand the rules of the market. So what are the new rules?
The Biden administration recently put out a clear blueprint of the economy it wants, which included five key elements. One is empowering workers, which it has endeavoured to do by using federal budgets to support unionised labour. Another is leveraging as much fiscal policy as is possible in a polarised Congress to bolster working families in areas such as healthcare and childcare, which are increasingly unaffordable for many Americans. But as commerce secretary Gina Raimondo put it to me a few months ago, government should be about more than just cutting taxes and redistributing wealth.
This administration wants to play a bigger role in directing the supply side of the private sector. In particular, it wants to encourage the making of things, not just via the push to “Buy American”, but through a more fundamental shift in policy focus from distribution to production. That means industrial policy. And while there isn’t yet a fully articulated strategy in Washington, there are clear signs that laissez-faire economics is over.
One of these is the fact that many companies will soon have to choose between the US and China. Formal decoupling between the two countries is gaining steam — there are a record number of American jobs being reshored from China, and calls for stricter rules on technology transfers. Another is that resilience and redundancy in crucial supply chains is becoming ever more important. Just a few days ago, Micron became the second big business (after Intel) to announce a major semiconductor investment in the US, putting $100bn into a new foundry in upstate New York. Federal investment in electric vehicles is also bringing new jobs to beleaguered parts of the South and Midwest. While the strong dollar may become a headwind to the administration’s hopes of growing a larger manufacturing and export economy, the lower cost of energy inputs in the US relative to Europe at the moment is a tailwind.
Support for economic “patriotism” is now the operating principle on both sides of the political divide in Washington. Robert Lighthizer, former US trade representative under Donald Trump, was famously a fan of getting rid of America’s trade deficit. But recently, Democratic California congressman Ro Khanna — a rising figure in progressive circles — called for the same thing, advocating that the US achieve a trade surplus with the rest of the world by 2035. As Khanna put it, “Trade deficits some years are fine, when balanced by trade surpluses in other years. But the country has been in constant trade deficit since 1975”. He believes that the government should help rectify this by offering zero-interest loans for factories, and increased use of federal purchasing to underwrite markets. I heard Khanna speak last week at the launch of “Reimagining the Economy”, a Harvard Kennedy School initiative led by economists Dani Rodrik and Gordon Hanson. It aims to replace neoliberal policy paradigms with something new and is one of several such programmes at major universities around the US. Many of these institutions are vying to become the epicentre of fresh economic thinking, just as the University of Chicago was the epicentre of neoliberalism. Khanna summed up the challenge of the moment: “If we can’t get the economy right, we won’t have a multiracial democracy.”
That phrasing itself represents something new — in the past, the conversations between racial equity and class inequality in the US have been separated. But Democrats are increasingly trying to link the two together, as they work to find the contours of a post-neoliberal economics. That was the topic of another big shindig last week, sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute, in which progressive politicos (many from within the administration) gathered to discuss the details of America’s industrial policy. While these aren’t completely clear yet, one thing is — all of this is the opposite of trickle-down.
rana.foroohar@ft.com