2013-03-07 07:49:55
Mar 6th 2013, 18:17 by P.C.
ONE more milestone has been passed on the road to recovery. On March 5th the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 14,253.77, a new high, finally surpassing the level reached in October 2007, just as the subprime-mortgage crisis really took hold. (The S&P 500, a more broadly based and soundly constructed index, stayed just shy of its record high.)
Wall Street is not alone. Stockmarkets in the developed world have been in fairly buoyant mood since the start of the year with the MSCI World Index rising by 5% in the first two months of 2013, and the Japanese market gaining 13.5%. Emerging markets, in contrast, have been flat.
It is tempting to attribute the strength of the Dow to optimism about the American economy. Tempting, but wrong. Studies have shown almost no correlation between GDP growth and equity returns. Indeed, the Shanghai stockmarket trades at less than half its 2007 peak, even though the Chinese economy has performed much more strongly than that of America since then. This rally in the Dow has been accompanied by the weakest GDP growth of all the bull markets since the second world war.
The main factors behind the current surge seem to be twofold. The first is a degree of confidence that some tail risks have been avoided, at least for now. The euro zone has not broken up and politicians in Washington, DC have not brought the entire economy to a halt over tax-and-spending policies. Hurdles remain (such as raising the debt ceiling) but investors assume a deal will be done.
The second factor is that equities look better than the alternatives. Cash yields are puny and central banks have made it clear that interest rates will not rise for a while. Ten-year government bonds outside the euro-area periphery yield 2% or less. Although there is no sign of the much-heralded great rotation out of bonds and into equities, there are signs that investors are putting cash in both asset classes following a long period in which equity funds suffered withdrawals.
Some think the bull market is bound to continue as long as the central banks of America, Britain and Japan keep buying assets. There are three guys with cheque books which matter in the world, and they will all have hand cramps in the coming quarters and years as they furiously accumulate trillions in securities, was the verdict of David Zervos, a strategist at Jefferies, an investment bank. The only safe asset, as these fiat cash and reserve liabilities explode higher, is the one that has at least a chance of generating positive real returns equity capital.
Can cheap money prop up share prices in the long run? Research by the London Business School shows that low real interest rates have historically been associated with low, not high, equity returns. Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of PIMCO, a fund-management group, said recently that: For the rally in equity markets to continue, the current phase of assisted growth, as anaemic as the outcome is, needs to give way to genuine growth.
The stockmarket fundamentals are not that encouraging, however. Profit growth has been slowing. In the fourth quarter of last year, earnings per share of companies in the S&P 500 grew at an annual rate of 6%, according to Soci t G n rale. The growth rate is expected to be just 1.2% in the first quarter of this year, and 0.1% if financial companies are excluded. Analysts are more optimistic about the second half of the year, but they usually are upbeat at this point in the calendar; reality kicks in later.
The best long-term measure of value, the cyclically-adjusted price-earnings ratio (which averages profits over ten years), is at 22.9, around 39% above its long-term average, according to Robert Shiller of Yale University. An alternative measure, the Q ratio, which compares shares to the replacement cost of net assets, shows the American market as 50% overvalued, according to Smithers & Co, a consultancy. The dividend yield on the market is 2.6%, compared with the historical average of 4.1% (although share buy-backs partly compensate for this shortfall).
Valuation does not often drive the market in the short term. During the dotcom bubble investors were happy to buy shares on stratospheric multiples: the cyclically-adjusted p/e reached 44 in late 1999. But the aftermath of that bubble illustrated an old rule. When investors buy assets at above-average valuations, they will suffer below-average future returns.
Given the current combination of low bond yields and high equity valuations, Antti Ilmanen of AQR, a fund-management group, calculates that the prospective return from a balanced American portfolio is the lowest it has been for a century. That is not good news for American corporate-pension funds, which still have a $479 billion deficit even after the latest rally, according to Mercer, an actuarial group. For the moment, though, the bulls are happy to leave that worry for another day.