I found your idea interesting so I was really only brainstorming. Velocity ought to have something to do with perceived risk in the system, i.e., if banks are lending more or less relative to the amount of liquidity they have, then it might have something to do with their perception of risk, which in turn might be correlated to the perceptions that equity investors have. If you want to delve into R2s, using coincident data, I get an R2 of .11. On the lagged data I get .22. On pre-87, with a negative co-efficient I get .4, but post 87 with a postive coefficient, I get .33. It does not make any sense to me that there would be a causal negative relationship. The problem is that you are measuring different risks as perceived by different groups and the only real connection is the time and place. What accounts for the fact that the market is currently so high relative to velocity? A reversal of the previous regime change? I eagerly await your hypotheses.
If you lag the Velocity data by 5 years, you get a slightly better fit for all years and an indication that the multiples are headed down. It's not a great fit, but I don't know why it should be (nor do I know why it should be lagged 5 years). Growth in M2 has to count for something and that has certainly not been a constant. Also, the profits leave out financials, which are a much larger part of the S&P earnings volatility in some years than in others.
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Thank you for the very thoughtful analysis and logical conclusions, but I would suggest one caveate: if you look at your scatter plot comparing CPI to M2, you will notice that although the most-likely outcome of 8% growth in M2 is 4% inflation, the R2 is actually not very tight, and the range of possible outcomes is somewhere between 0% and 8% inflation. Interestingly, this is about the same range as it would be for growth in M2 of anywhere between 4% and 8%. This is not very precise, and therefore, unlikely to be the only tool used in policy decisions.
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There are many legitimate reasons to restate GAAP earnings. Stock compensation has never been one of them unless you think that your employees work for free. There's no difficulty in getting your head around this; compensation is an expense, whether you pay in cash, or options, or bowls of rice. There are people with common sense who understand this, and there are idiots who don't, and to the extent that idiots are allowed to drive the price of a stock because smart money is too timid to step in and exercise control over these morons, then the market becomes dysfunctional and allocates assets to the wrong companies and screws up the entire economy by giving poorly run companies the ability to disrupt the business of well run companies. We divert money from talented business managers to talented grifters.
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Looking for the next Boeing or Disney is a good starting point, but was the time to buy Boeing after the 40% decline in 2001, or just before it? Why buy any of these stocks now?
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I stand corrected about the Russel 3x ETFs. The decay of either the 2x or 3x ETF is extraordinary. Part of the problem is that over-night moves in the russel have been positive while day-trade returns have been negative since the TZA was introduced, so it is not just the decay. At any rate, I need to change the way I execute the trade. This is so sad actually because many people are not allowed to go short or buy options.
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There is decay, but it is not always so prohibitive. For example, SSO is supposed to deliver 2x the SPY return. If you held it for the past 860 days, i.e., from the trough in 2009, the return was 1.92x that of SPY. Granted, it is indeed better to short the inverse ETF in a bull market than to buy the geared ETF so that the decay is on your side. Likewise you make more shorting the geared fund in a bear market than buying the inverse, but you also take more risk and tie up more capital.
Interesting. I cancelled my subscription to Shadowstats because its forecasts were just too wrong for too long, but I take your argument seriously. No one, least I, argues that the CPI is flawless. Let's say we use the Shadowstats version of the data. Then what should the real price of gold be? None of the other arguments change.
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I'm not aware of any evidence that increases in technology have ever had any ability to eliminate economic cycles. I have of course plotted the ratio on a linear basis and there is some evidence of a gently sloping trend - one that since 1969 has brought the mean from 3.5% to 4% - but I don't know what causes this or if it is sustainable, or for that matter, if it is even real, since it is largely caused by the outsized profits in 97. Excluding that one very brief instance, we have an extremely stable ratio with an extremely stable range. At any rate, the slope does not have any effect on cyclicality nor does it effect the accuracy of the model.
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Incidentally, what is your source for figure 5. That data does not fit with anything else I know, but I'll keep an open mind if you can identify the source.
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Although I am no fan of equities given present-circumstances, Gross's arguments seem remarkably ignorant to me. Equities out-perform the economy over time because they are leveraged. It's that simple. This doesn't mean you should always buy them. There have been many times when equities made an absolutely horrible investment even in the long-run.
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The issue of foreign earnings is important, but as US companies have increased their earnigns from overseas, so too have they increased their imports. According to the National income accounts, the net foreign impact on earnings has been negative since the early 80s and has grown increasingly so. Also, despite my aggresive headline, I do not argue that an earnings collapse is immanent or even for that matter inevitable - just extremely likey.
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How do you get comfortable with all the fraud in the US? The answer is that you never get comfortable. You always hedge your bets, and never be surprised if any of them turn out to be wrong.
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