Time cover a "buy" signal?
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
If you put faith in magazine covers as contrary indicators, you'll love the latest issue of Time magazine. (Hat tip: The Big Picture.) The headline? "The New Hard Times." The picture? A vintage shot of a lineup at a soup kitchen. Could the market bottom be close?
As indicators of important turns in the market, the[amp]nbsp;track record of magazine covers is impressive. BusinessWeek put “Death of Equities” on its cover in 1979, an excellent time to buy stocks, in turned out.
More recently, The Economist, plastered a barrel of oil on its May 29 issue, with the headline “Recoil.” Then, the price of crude oil was closing in on $130 (U.S.) a barrel but the bull market in energy was a mere six weeks away from its peak. In other words, this was ideal time to dump energy stocks.
The indicator even has academics weighing in. The New York Times ran a story in 2007 that discussed the research of Thomas Arnold, John Earl and David North, all finance professors at the University of Richmond. They asked, “Are cover stories effective contrarian indictors?” and concluded that, yes, they are.
“As one might expect, positive feature stories headlined on business magazine covers follow extremely positive company performance and negative headlines follow extremely negative performance. In both cases, however, the appearance on a cover of Business Week, Fortune, or Forbes tends to signal the end of the extreme performance,” the professors wrote.
Conversely, “if an investor is short the stock of a company that is the subject of a negative cover story, the publication of the story indicates it is time to cover the short position because the stock has hit bottom.”
[amp]nbsp;
© Copyright The Globe and Mail
HEATHER SCOFFIELD
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
OTTAWA — Central banks around the world have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into gummed-up credit markets over the past two weeks. On Tuesday alone, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board said it would find the financing to actually buy up commercial paper, a move that could cost up to $1-trillion (U.S.) more.
What the central banks are doing is a modern version of the old-fashioned role of monetary authorities, one that dates back to the 18th century, says David Laidler, a retired economics professor at the University of Western Ontario who has advised the Bank of Canada. They're printing money.
“When the banking system gets nervous, they tend to hold their cash. The classic response of central banks is to provide more,” Mr. Laidler said in an interview from London, Ont. “Simply put, they print it.”
An extreme example is the famous image of Germans pushing around wheelbarrows full of banknotes in the 1920s, trying to deal with hyperinflation. That's not the case this time around, economists say.
This credit crunch, in fact, is mainly deflationary. When companies and households can't borrow as they wish, and spend accordingly, economic activity contracts and prices can fall. So the central banks' money machines are trying to counteract that deflationary force.
If the global economy were running smoothly, and money were easy to get, the liquidity operations of central banks would indeed be inflationary, economists say.
But now, the supply of readily available money is insufficient to meet demand. So central banks are not indulging in oversupplying markets with money. Rather, they're trying to increase the supply merely to a point where it can meet demand.
“Concern about inflation can be put aside for the moment,” said Edwin Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, and long-time senior Fed official for international affairs.
Plus, the central banks are not dishing money out for free. In most cases, they are lending the money out, and taking collateral in return. Their balance sheets are holding up.
“I think the central banks, as I understand it in general, are being reasonably careful,” said Mr. Truman. “The risk of a substantial loss at a central bank is minimal.”
When central banks issue extra cash for money markets, they keep their balance sheets in good shape by taking collateral from borrowers in return. The collateral is marked down by a prescribed “haircut” decided upon by the central bank.
The central bank does not normally just hang on to the collateral. It holds it for only a short time – long enough to help the markets fund their daily operations.
It is possible, but unlikely, that the central bank could actually lose money if the value of the collateral collapses while the central bank is holding it, Mr. Truman said.
Not everyone agrees. Some fear that the financial crisis is so out of control that the Fed and other central banks don't have a hope of counteracting it with their own funds alone.
“The Federal Reserve balance sheet is about $1.2-trillion,” David Shulman, senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast, told the Washington Post this week. “But we have an $11-trillion mortgage market, a $5-trillion credit-default-swaps market. The central banks are nowhere near large enough to handle this problem right now.”
Concerns about fiscal health weigh heavily, as well.
It's hard to know how much of the $700-billion rescue plan passed last week by the U.S. Congress will have to be funded by U.S. taxpayers. But pressure is growing in the United States and in Europe for governments to pledge their own money to back up banks and their troubled customers.
On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund urged governments to inject capital, buttress troubled assets, and use their funds to prevent a “fire sale” of problem banks and their holdings.
At their meeting last weekend in Paris, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Britain agreed that European rules limiting government deficits and state aid should be applied flexibly given the exceptional circumstances.
And in Canada, former tough talk about deficits from political leaders has softened in the past couple of days.
But most economists say that even if Ottawa needs to come to the economy's rescue just as its revenues are diminishing because of falling commodity prices, the country can afford to run a small deficit.
“There is ample room to run deficits … and Canada has lots of room for lender-of-last-resort liquidity operations,” Mr. Laidler said.
The U.S. fiscal situation is another question, however. Already carrying a large debt, more stimulus packages and bailouts will take a toll, he said.
“The U.S. is extraordinarily vulnerable.”
© Copyright The Globe and Mail
Posts
