December 2017 – ffwiley.com

Q1 Stock Market Outlook: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Slide

December 30, 2017ffwbear markets, Ben Bernanke, credit spreads, fed funds rate, Federal Reserve, FOMC, inflation, Janet Yellen, Kennedy Slide, lending standards, market corrections, market indicators, market risks, market valuation, monetary policy, real returns, Trump rally, VCURVE, virtuous loop8 Comments

If 2018 rings in a bear market, it could look something like the Kennedy Slide of 1962.

That was my conclusion in “Riding the Slide,” published in early September, where I showed that the Kennedy Slide was unique among bear markets of the last eighty years. It was the only bear that wasn’t obviously provoked by rising inflation, tightening monetary policy, deteriorating credit markets or, less commonly, world war or depression.

Moreover, market conditions leading up to the Slide should be familiar—they’re not too far from market conditions since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In the first year after Kennedy’s election, as in the first year after Trump’s election, inflation seemed under control, interest rates were low, credit spreads were tight, and the economy was growing. And, in both cases, the stock market was booming.

Here’s an updated look at Trump’s stock rally versus the Kennedy rally and subsequent Slide:

As you can see, we’ve now reached the chart’s critical juncture—at this time of the calendar in 1962, the post-election rally was ending, and the Slide was about to begin. Our chart begs the question: Will the similarities continue and lead us into a Trump Slide in early 2018?

Or, with less drama, you might like to hear my Q1 stock market outlook.

Never Mind Tea Leaves, Here’s a Strong Signal from the Economic Dashboard

December 17, 2017ffwasset holding gains, business cycles, Citi Research, economic forecasting, Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, lending standards, monetary policy, virtuous loops, yield curve, ZeroHedge27 Comments

We’ve been seeing more and more commentaries discussing bad stuff that can happen when the Fed tightens policy and, as a result, the yield curve flattens. (See, for example, this piece from Citi Research and ZeroHedge.) No doubt, the Fed’s rate hikes will lead to mishaps as they usually do—in both markets and the economy. But most forecasters expect the economy to expand through next year, believing that the Fed and the yield curve aren’t yet restrictive enough to trigger a recession.

We won’t make a full-year 2018 forecast here, but we’ll share one of our “dashboard” charts that supports the consensus view for at least the first half of the year. With one methodological change to a chart we published in August, we’ll look at the following indicators, which together have an excellent track record predicting the business cycle:

2 Charts That Might Define the Fed’s Jerome Powell Era

December 13, 2017ffwasset price cycles, Ben Bernanke, business cycles, Federal Reserve, financial flows, financial imbalances, FOMC, Janet Yellen, Jerome Powell, portfolio balance channel20 Comments

In September, we proposed a theory of the Fed and suggested the FOMC will soon worry mostly about financial imbalances without much concern for recession risks. We reached that conclusion by weighing the reputational pitfalls faced by the economists on the committee, but now we’ll add more meat to our argument, using financial flows data released last week.

We’ve created two charts, beginning with a look at cumulative, inflation-adjusted asset gains during the last seven business cycles: