David White

Tuesday Outlook: Everything But the Kitchen Sink

I keep hearing people compare this crash to the1929 crash. I am embarassed that there are so many people running scared. Certainly there were the bad mortgages. Then there was the complete drying up of the commercial paper market. Everyone was scared all the banks would fail. Some have. Some were saved by buyouts. The $700 billion dollar bailout should rescue us from that fate. Apparently the U.S. government is going to invest $250 billion in U.S. banks. This should provide at least the big ones with enough capital to tide them over through this tough period. The Fed is now buying commercial paper. This is already helping the commercial paper market. The housing market even had good news last week, when the number of houses sold went up for a change (even though they sold at lower prices). The Wells Fargo buyout of Wachovia is going through. Mitsubishi is buying into Morgan Stanley. Everything is turning rosy. The market bounced off a strong support point last week. There is strong support at $82 and $85 on the SPY. After that there are no strong support points until the $42 to $45 range in the SPY. The SPY hit $83 and change last week intraday. It bounced upward. There is every indication that this is at least a near term bottom. It may turn out to be the longer term market bottom we have all been hoping for. Only time will tell that. However, it does look like a strong bounce for the moment. The immediate big bank failure fear is gone. The belief is that the government and the Fed are slowly bringing the commercial paper market back. The government has promised several actions to shore up the housing market. This is starting to be a little bit less worrisome, especially if there are further programs enacted to further shore it up. In normal market bounces, the market goes up in zig zag lines for about a month or more. It appears we should be able to expect this again. Perhaps it will be better than that. Perhaps we have hit bottom. Only time will tell that.

Still this is not another coming of the great depression. How do I know that? I look at history. Look at the changes in the laws. Look at the improvement in the Fed and the Treasury. In the 1920's the market just kept going up, unreasonably so. People were so happy with it they invested as much as they could, so they could get richer faster. This meant that many people were heavily margined. In those days the laws allowed up to 90% margin (i.e. you only had to have 10% of the stock value to buy it). When the margin calls started coming in the great crash, everyone had to sell. Those that were not as heavily margined had to sell to avoid losing all they had because a lot of people were heavily margined. The result was that almost all investment in stocks ended. With no money from the stock market to feed their expansion, etc., virtually all businesses shrank. They could do nothing else. The housing market collapsed then too. A lot of people lost everything. This is why the margin requirements law was changed. This is why many people today have no margin at all. They just own stocks through mutual funds. People like Jim Cramer did not help the situation. There was some severe panic. That should be lessening.

This is likely a bad recession. Perhaps it is comparable to the mid 1970's recession. However, there is no reason to believe it should be a great depression unless we make it into one. The way to do that is to take all of your money out of the stock market. This will mean that businesses must shrink. You may lose your job as a result. If you stop spending because you are scared, business's profits will fall drastically. People will lose there jobs. Again there will be a cascade effect. As FDR said so many years ago, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. It is this fear, this panic, that can really destroy our system. Have a little faith in the government. Have a little faith in your economic system. Spend prudently, but spend. Invest prudently, but invest. The sky is not falling. Don't make it.

My personal belief is that this is at least a rally off a near term low (which may have been an actual bottom). The big profit is to be made in the early stages of that rally. Listen to the fear mongers, and you will miss it. If you do invest, monitor the markets. If we start getting a lot more news about bank failures, or the commercial paper market drying up, or even about a lot of businesses going bankrupt, then consider selling again. However, you should not make all that a foregone conclusion by insisting on a death spiral, when it doesn't have to happen. Sometimes "fear" really is the thing we have to fear most.