Rosie On The Fed’s Intent To Get Everyone Onboard Its All-In Bet On Stocks
by ilene - October 18th, 2010 11:30 am
Rosie On The Fed’s Intent To Get Everyone Onboard Its All-In Bet On Stocks
Courtesy of Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge
Just in case there is someone living in a cave who still doesn’t understand that the Fed’s one and only mandate (forget that crap about inflation and jobs) is to give everyone one last shove into the all inponzi before the diarrhea hits the HVAC, here is David Rosenberg explaining, for the cheap seats, what the Fed’s terminal intent is.
The Fed’s intent is not to create consumer inflation, but rather asset inflation — primarily in the equity market. By pulling longer-term bond yields lower, the Fed hopes that this will alter how investors value equities relative to the fixed-income market. Moreover, the Fed will be actively pushing up the value of bonds that exist in investor portfolios, and as such the intent is to induce these investors to rebalance their asset mix towards equities in order to maintain their current allocation. The Fed is also trying to incentivize fund flows into the equity market. This in turn would theoretically boost household wealth and as such make consumers, who now feel richer, to go out and spend more. So the theory goes — we shall see how it works in practice.
The Fed’s intent is also to lower both the debt and equity cost of capital so that companies will, at the margin, compare that to expected returns on newly invested capital and begin to spend more on new plant and equipment. The hope here is that the investment spending multiplier will kick in and that stepped-up job creation would occur in tandem with the renewed capex growth.
In essence, the Fed wants to avoid what happened in Japan over the last two decades — have a look at Japan Goes from Dynamic to Disheartened on the front page of the Sunday NYT. The comment in the article to the effect that back in 1991, the consensus was looking for the Japanese economy to begin surpassing the U.S. economy in size by 2010. Nice call. Instead, Japan’s economy has not expanded at all since that time whereas the U.S. economy, despite all its problems, has grown 65%.
That said, the U.S. has already experienced a lost decade in many respects, especially as it pertains to the labour market, while Japan has lost two decades. Also have a
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site