Forget economics, politics rules today’s markets
Are the Greeks bust, or can the euro struggle through this crisis? Will the United States ever get its budget deficit under control?
Will central bankers around the world launch another round of quantitative easing to refloat the markets or will they instead wake up to the threat of inflation and start raising interest rates?
Are the Chinese going to revalue their currency and finally start closing the massive trade imbalances between the developed and the developing world?
Those are probably the most pressing questions facing investors right now. And they are the issues which, depending on how you view them, will determine whether you conclude the markets look fairly valued right now, or undervalued, or are perched on the edge of a cliff ready for a full-scale collapse.And yet, the interesting theme that unites all of them is that they are all political rather than economic issues.
Anyone deciding where and how much to invest is used to studying issues such as corporate profits, trade flows, medium-term economic growth, and technological advances. They are the factors that traditionally determine how the markets move in the medium-term.
But right now, none of those matter nearly as much as the big political questions. Investors need to catch on to that. And they need to learn a whole new set of principles to steer them through how the markets will develop in the year ahead.
In the past, economics usually determined where the markets were going. You needed to figure out how much the economy was likely to expand, which sectors within it were likely to grow the fastest, and how the spoils of that growth were going to be split between wages and profits. You probably needed a fair idea as well of what technologies were developing quickly, and how they were going to impact companies. And you needed to get a sense of how different countries and continents were growing against one another. Once you’d figured out all that, then you could start to take a view on where you wanted to put your money to work.
That’s changed. Politics is now firmly in the driver’s seat. There are two big reasons for that.
First, governments and central banks between them have become the driving forces in the economy.
When deficits are running at 5% to 10% of GDP as they are in most of the developed world; when banking systems have become entwined with government, either directly or indirectly; and when central banks have embarked on massive programs of printing money, then the decisions made by politicians become crucial to the markets.
Next, we are going through a period of massive change in the currency markets.
The euro was an ambitious attempt at merging 17 national currencies into a single one. It now looks to have failed, and its gradual unraveling is going to be very messy. And the dollar is in long-term decline as the global reserve currency. Sooner or later, a new currency system will emerge. But while that is happening, the decisions made by politicians will be crucial to how the markets develop.
It may be good or bad — and in the opinion of this columnist it is certainly the latter rather than the former — but that is a debate for another day. That is the way it is. And given that, you need to steer your portfolio accordingly.