Feb

22

Liquidity, from Bill Rafter

February 22, 2007 |

The current popular explanation for the market's persistent strength is "worldwide excess liquidity" (a la Sam Zell's singing Christmas card).

Under this view,

1) Where is all the excess liquidity coming from?

2) And why is there more liquidity being created now than in normal other good economic times?

Dan Grossman writes:

Maybe the world is awash in liquidity and maybe it isn't. But the central banks of the number 1 and number 2 economies are restrictive and have been that way for some time:

www.mathinvestdecisions.com/us_japan_monetary_bases.gif

Jim Sogi writes:

I am sure everyone has noticed that the market refuses to go down. Every time the bid pauses, after a small airdrop, buyers come back to bid it back in force. The liquidity is a tectonic event, like the movement of plates. Once put into motion by years of pump priming in the US, in Japan, in China, it is hard to hold back.

While the monetary authority is restrictive in its pronouncements, it is not necessarily so in practice, with low rates below short-term rates, which would cause liquidity to flow to equities under the Fed model. Typically, as with any political movement or group situation, once a consensus is created it is hard to change the direction and the momentum tends to overshoot the changing circumstances. It is a typical group dynamic caused by the difficulty of getting people to agree. And as with the gambler's being more certain once the bet is made, decisions become etched in stone and are hard to change. When currencies move, they tend to overshoot their mark. When risk is deemed to be low, the consensus continues even beyond the time and circumstances justify. Remember 1995? It seemed the market was really high then. But it shot up like crazy over the next five years.

Old metrics of liquidity such as M3 don't work. George and Phil mentioned the role of derivatives. Is there a way to measure the derivative market? What are the indicators? Currencies measure the relative strength of flows of capital, goods, and fiscal and monetary balances between nations, and are important measure to consider in a multivariate way similar to gold and commodities that reflect and predict equities.

Japan's new equity highs and yen lows reflect a political and economic dynamic of a growing economy with its monetary gear in reverse. Very odd. Both the US and Japan benefit from weak currencies against the Euroland, and despite the jawboning and posturing, the currencies stay low. The fiscal power is exercised by the Executive but the power, in theory, is in Congress. This is separate from the monetary power of the central banks. The two are related, but are not formally coordinated. The size of the currency markets surpasses equity and debt and is subject to intervention in scope beyond both.

As the floating fiat currencies mature, the competition between nations may become more intense. While liquidity is good, now, there is not much of a squeeze. Reading some of the old books, there were some tense moments when bars of gold had to be shipped from England to New York to keep things afloat. Benjamin Franklin argued for printing money to stimulate commerce. All nations have incentive to inflate their currencies to keep growth from falling back into recession. What happens when the confidence, rather than gold, that keeps the currencies afloat turns dark?

It's a very difficult issue to understand. Thanks all for your help.

Bud Conrad writes:

Nice charts. I appreciated your sharing them. I agree with your base point, and want to see if I understand the importance of this analysis.

A little more explanation would help me apply the observations. The red curve fit looks like it is at a higher rate for the Japanese. Can you give me your fit percentage annual growth for each? The size is hard to read on my small screen.

Do you have an explanation of the big drop in Japanese monetary base? I think there were shifts in the policy of the BOJ in May 2006, around going off the Zero Interest rate policy but I can't recall the actions taken. Would they fit though the Japanese end point were higher or lower than the US? Is the monetary base an important measure now that there is so much credit created outside the banking system that is not regulated, and for which there is no reserve requirement, and now people prefer paper money to credit cards?

From Bill Rafter:

U. S. Monetary Base is the combination of currency in circulation and deposits in Federal Reserve Banks. It is released bi-weekly in seasonally adjusted form by the St. Louis Fed. It is also released weekly in non-seasonally adjusted form. I can seasonally adjust the weekly data myself, but then I would be the only one with that data. Since much of market action is sentiment-based, it's best to see what everyone else is watching, so I use the default.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE  

The Base must grow at the rate of the population growth and economic growth or risk causing deflation. Thus in the long run the Base growth will be exponential with some positive and negative feedback influences. The best way to fit it would be with a parabola. That's what the red line represents. The software that I use (our own*) does that easily and produces the formula giving the growth rate. Off list, I will send you a text file with the base and parabolic fit numbers. What is absolutely amazing is that the fit is so perfect from inception. To me this means that there is a "natural" target for the Base. Whether the Fed admits to a target or not is inconsequential. One exists. Once you have acknowledged that, then it is a small step to say that growth in excess of the target is accommodative, and less than it is restrictive. The two spikes (Y2K and 9-11) prove that the Fed has control.

The Japanese Monetary Base numbers are available monthly. They consist of currency and deposits and are available raw and ARIMA adjusted. I used the latter in my chart. The Bank of Japan did have an inflation epiphany last May, when the numbers showed a huge contraction. Some have attributed the sell-off in our equities markets at that time to the BOJ action. Yes, the growth rate in the Japanese Base is considerably greater than that of the US. Please don't flame me for saying so, but I attribute that to (a) inexperience and (b) BOJ having less independence from the government than our own Fed does.

www.boj.or.jp/en/type/stat/dlong/fin_stat/boj/cdab0150.csv

Credit is created outside the central bank infrastructure, but sooner or later, that money hits the banking system where it is recorded in the Base.

Note to members: I would be happy to produce additional information based on monetary numbers from other countries. Send me links. Europe would be particularly useful. Australia and Russia are probably just warts on the elephant's butt. China is a question mark. I assume that even the rural areas are somewhat dollar-influenced. I don't know how China's banking system works, but assume it is run by benign neglect. Therefore, a lot of what goes on there shows up in the U.S. numbers.

* To all: I have previously offered the software free to list users. That offer still holds. Just send me an email if you want a serial number.

 


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