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David Stockman gives us lots to think about as he looks over the world’s economy. First he takes on the commodity bubble fueled by the giant credit boom.
The giant credit fueled boom of the last 20 years has deformed the global economy in ways that are both visible and less visible. As to the former, it only needs be pointed out that an economy based on actual savings from real production and income and a modicum of financial market discipline would not build 65 million empty apartment units based on the theory that their price will rise forever as long as they remain unoccupied!
That’s the Red Ponzi at work in China and its replicated all across the land in similar wasteful investments in unused or under-used shopping malls, factories, coal mines, airports, highways, bridges and much, much more.
But the point here is that China is not some kind of one-off aberration. In fact, the less visible aspects of the credit ponzi exist throughout the global economy and they are becoming more visible by the day as the Great Deflation gathers force.
As we have regularly insisted, there is nothing in previous financial history like the $185 trillion of worldwide credit expansion over the last two decades. When this central bank fueled credit bubble finally reached its apogee in the past year or so, global credit had expanded by nearly 4X the gain in worldwide GDP. …
… The credit bubble, in turn, led to booming demand for commodities and CapEx. And in these unsustainable eruptions layers and layers of distortion and inefficiency cascaded into the world economy and financial system.
One of these was an explosion of CapEx in the oil patch and the mining sector in response to massive price and margin gains and the resulting windfall rents on existing assets. In the case of upstream oil and gas, for example, worldwide investment grew from $250 billion to $700 billion in less than a decade.
Needless to say, there is now so much excess supply and capacity on the world market that oil has plunged into a collapse that is likely to last for years, as old investment come on-stream while world demand falters in the face of the gathering global recession. …
… The same kind of malinvestment occurred in the mining sectors where Australia’s boom in iron ore, coal, bauxite and other industrial materials provides a good proxy. …
… Nor was the credit-fueled CapEx boom limited to energy and metals. Bloomberg carried a story today outlining a similar super-cycle in the global rubber industry. As a result of massive rubber plantation expansion in response to soaring prices and windfall profits, the industry is now facing investment and job killing surpluses as far as the eye can see. …
… The unfolding correction of the visible excesses of the credit inflation—such as overinvestment and malinvestment—— will destroy incomes and profits; the Great Unwind of the less visible effects, such as the sovereign wealth fund liquidations, are a giant pin aimed squarely at the monumental worldwide bubbles in stock, bonds and real estate.
Turning his attention to the stock market, Mr.Stockman posts on valuations pointing out that the price increase of just four stocks accounted for one half of a trillion dollars. He starts out with Amazon.
If you have forgotten your Gulliver’s Travels, recall that Jonathan Swift described the people of Brobdingnag as being as tall as church steeples and having a ten foot stride. Everything else was in proportion——with rats the size of mastiffs and the latter the size of four elephants, while flies were “as big as a Dunstable lark” and wasps were the size of partridges.
Hence the word for this fictional land has come to mean colossal, enormous, gigantic, huge, immense or, as the urban dictionary puts it, “really f*cking big”.
That would also describe the $325 billion bubble which comprises Amazon’s market cap. It is at once brobdingnagian and preposterous——a trick on the casino signifying that the crowd has once again gone stark raving mad.
When you have arrived at a condition of extreme “irrational exuberance” there is probably no insult to ordinary valuation metrics that can shock. But for want of doubt consider that AMZN earned the grand sum of $79 million last quarter and $328 million for the LTM (Last twelve months) period ending in September.
That’s right. Its conventional PE multiple is 985X! …
… we are just completing a year in which the Fabulous Four FANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) gained $500 billion of market cap while the remaining 496 companies in the S&P index went down by more than one-half trillion dollars.
In that context, AMZN’s market cap one year ago was just $145 billion, meaning that it gained a stunning $180 billion or 125 percent during the interim. …
… Indeed, Amazon’s $325 billion valuation is just plain irrational exuberance having one last fling. Spasms like this year $180 billion gain (125%) on the AMZN ticker or the $190 billion gain (55%) on the GOOG account are absolutely reminiscent of the final days before the tech wreck exactly 15 years ago.
In a recent post I demonstrated how the 12 Big Cap Techs of 2000—-led by Microsoft, Intel, Dell and Cisco——-saw their combined valuation soar from $900 billion to $3.8 trillion in the 48 months leading up to the March 2000 peak; and that they then plunged to just $875 billion a decade later.
To wit, their bubble era market cap got whacked by $3 trillion in the years ahead, even as their sales and earnings continued to grow. What got purged was irrational exuberance in a casino high on the central bank’s monetary heroin. …
… At the end of the day, AMZN’s current preposterous $325 billion market cap has nothing to do with the business prospects of Amazon or the considerable entrepreneurial prowess of Jeff Bezos and his army of disrupters.
It is more in the nature of financial rigor mortis——-the final spasm of the robo-traders and the fast money crowd chasing one of the greatest bubbles still standing in the casino. …
… So Amazon’s total $325 billion valuation is just plain irrational exuberance. It is surely a sign that the third great financial bubble of this century has narrowed down to just a handful of brobdingnagian beanstalks that are soon to come crashing down from the sky.
When the big market break comes in the period just ahead, AMZN is sure to shed as much of its excess market cap as did Cisco after March 2000. That would be hundreds of billions of evaporating bottled air. It would be the short of a lifetime.
If all of that is not enough to trouble your sleep, here’s Harry Dent.
A Yahoo Finance headline this morning reads: “Unhappy New Year: The U.S. Economy Is Stalling Out.”
We recently learned that existing home sales in November crashed 10.5% from the month before.
Guess when the last time was when we saw these levels? The housing crisis of the mid- to late-2000s!
I also recently shared a chart showing a cataclysmic 82% drop in the ratio of new home sales to the U.S. population. To put it simply, we won’t need more real estate for decades to come, with baby boomers increasingly dying to offset rising millennial home purchases.
I and a few other experts like David Stockman have continued to argue that this re-bound since 2009 has been all smoke and mirrors – artificial stimulus that has only created greater bubbles in financial assets like stocks, and financial engineering to create rising corporate profits. None of it goes toward real expansion for future jobs, productivity and growth… things like new office space and industrial capacity. …
… financial engineering does not result in real growth.
And speculation does not expand the money supply.
It is only a sign of decreasing money velocity, and a bubble that will only burst – like in 1929, 2000, and now again!
It’s a mirage.
It isn’t real.
And it isn’t sustainable.
Despite such endless financial engineering, sales for the S&P 500 have been declining for the last three quarters. And profits have declined for the first time since the 2009 expansion.
I’d be surprised if both didn’t continue down in the 4th quarter.
This will end badly… which is the only way bubbles end.
My forecast today: the stock market will start to crash by early February, if not sooner, when it gets this clear realization.