Sunday, October 12, 2014

Hussman On The Impending Crash

Today

"Fed easing is effective provided that risk-free cash is considered an inferior holding. Fed easing is useless if investors actually prefer to hold risk-free cash as a safe haven.

There’s certainly a feedback circle to this: the purely psychological belief that Fed liquidity is a magical risk-removing fairy dust can certainly support increased risk tolerance, but that tolerance should still be read directly out of market internals and trend uniformity. When investor preferences shift toward risk aversion, more liquidity doesn’t support stock prices. Yield-seeking speculation fails to emerge because low or zero interest rates on cash are preferred to the prospect of steeply negative returns. As the market collapses of 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 demonstrate, aggressive Fed easing does not prevent extraordinary market losses once investors have the risk-aversion bit in their teeth."

No comments: