The Herd Can Be Blind

Although the employment reports continue to bathe the economy in the diffuse light of recovery, many of the less followed economic indicators have further diverged from expectations in the opening months of 2015. Many economists initially believed that GDP in the 4th quarter 2014 would come in at an annualized pace north of 3.0%. But, in January the actual number came in at 2.6% (which was revised down to 2.2%). Recent data in such categories as consumer spending (which after falling in December, declined again in January – the first consecutive monthly declines since 2009), factory orders, trade, manufacturing, and business investment have missed on the downside. But these lesser reports are often explained away and have not made much of a dent on overall optimism.

In the six years since the Great Recession began in 2008, the economy has been boosted by both monetary and fiscal stimuli. The Federal Reserve has held its overnight rate at 0% while expanding its balance sheet by almost $4 trillion, and the Federal government had run four consecutive $1 trillion plus budget deficits (before pulling back to less than half a trillion annually more recently). But despite these unprecedented levels of stimulus, real GDP growth in the U.S. averaged just 2.2% from 2010 through 2014, which compares with an average of almost 3.5% in the post-WWII period. If this substandard growth is all we could achieve with the floodgates wide open, why should we expect that the economy will improve in 2015 if the stimulus doesn’t return, as few expect it will?

Despite the records being set almost daily on Wall Street, (today the NASDAQ eclipsed 5,000 for the first time in almost 15 years), optimists claim that the market is not overvalued because the current S&P 500 price-to-earnings ratio, of about 19 times trailing 12 months earnings, is not too far above the historical norm of about 14. But most investors have not considered the extraordinary factors that helped push up earnings, artificially we believe, in 2014.

According to Bloomberg, in 2014 S&P 500 companies spent an estimated $565 billion (or 58% of corporate earnings) on share buybacks, a figure that is extremely high by historical standards. Money spent on buybacks is not available to purchase new plant and equipment, to fund research and development, or to spend on marketing and logistics. In that sense, buyback spending generates current earnings at the expense of future earnings. Corporate results have also been boosted by zero percent interest rates, which have allowed businesses to borrow cheaply.

To factor out these short-term earnings distortions, we suggest that investors should look past current P/E ratios and instead look at Cyclically-Adjusted-Price-to-Earnings (CAPE), which is also known as the Shiller Ratio, a metric that looks at earnings over a 10-year period thereby smoothing out cyclical and economic anomalies. Looked through a lens of CAPE ratios, the U.S. markets begin to look very expensive in comparison to other global markets. The graph below tells the tale:

Best Selling author Peter Schiff is the CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital. His podcasts are available on The Peter Schiff Channel on Youtube

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