Speaking of absurd, how out of line were the valuations of stocks just a few months ago?
The answer is, historically speaking, VERY. Stocks were valued as if nothing negative would ever happen ever again in the world. US unemployment would forever be under four percent. GDP would always be above three percent. Politicians would never, ever lie again. Democrats and Republicans would make peace and compromise in support of the American people, and ordinary citizens in France would just accept the uber-liberal policies that are taxing them out of existence and stop their silly protesting.
Yeah, sure. Throw in some unicorns that barf up rainbows and poop gold and you'd be close to the kind of valuations the stock market was assigning to banks (bailed out in 2008), tech companies (many which have never experienced a severe recession) and plenty of other stocks. The distorted valuations of the past ten years exist because of easy money policies and corrupt corporate executives who used stock buybacks to reduce the number of shares outstanding, thus boosting the value of their stocks via higher earnings per share.
Let's put the past behind us, where it belongs. The Fed is trying, despite serious criticism from the president (he's wrong about the Fed being the real problem... the Fed can be a solution, and should be, since they created the problem originally) to right the global financial ship. The Fed and other central banks extended too much credit prior to the sub-prime debacle, and did it again in its aftermath, bailing out the banks who loaned money to people who could not make the payments.
Now, the Fed is drawing back on the easy money. Nobody likes it, but it must be done. Interest rates of two to three percent are an anomaly, unlike any time in history. The 10-year treasury note should ideally be in a range of 4-6 percent, which would make borrowers think twice about borrowing, and lenders would scrutinize their potential loans with much more dedication and diligence than to standards with which they've become comfortable.
Bad debts, many of them left over from the GFC, need to clear.
Policies are changing, and, with that, valuations will adjust, so here comes the math part of today's monologue.
Using the CAPE ratio for the S&P, stocks closed out today - another disaster, by the way - at 26.02. The mean CAPE ratio for the S&P is 15.69. If reversion to the mean occurs, at some point in the near future (3-12 months), the S&P will decline from it's current value of 2,357.54, to 1,552.20, because it is 65.84% above the mean. That would wipe out the gains of the past six years, sending the S&P back to where it peaked in 2007.
That actually would be a good outcome, since the 2007 levels were later found out to be a bubble, and they went south from there. So, it's very likely that the S&P will overshoot the mean, sending the index down to maybe 1400 or even 1300. Some people with good memories will recall that the S&P bottomed out BELOW 800 at the depths of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09, so 1300 or 1400 would be a pretty good outcome.
The same can be applied to the Dow, NASDAQ, NYSE Composite, Dow Transports, the Russell, or whatever US index one chooses. Take the current level, multiply by 65, divide by 100, and you'll have a good estimate of the mean valuation, and maybe even the actual bottom, but, chances are good that the bottom will be quite a bit lower than the mean, that is, if fundamentals matter once again, and we are done with the Fed backstopping every decline via asset purchases, the PPT, QE, ZIRP, NIRP, bailouts, fancy derivatives and generally speaking, voodoo economics (a favorite term of George HW Bush, BTW, in reference to Reaganomics or trickle-down theory).
Just because Money Daily likes to focus on the Dow, the mean is probably somewhere around 14,164.93. You may notice that is a further decline of more than 7000 points, but that should not be out of the equation since the Dow has already lost more than 5000 points just since October 3 (26,828.39, the all-time high) and it's down more than 3700 points just this month.
As has been the theme here for some time now, this is only the beginning of a long decline in stocks.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made calls to six major banks and the Plunge Protection Team, and announced that he did so to the press and the general public. Talk about transparency! These kinds of inside baseball moves were, in former times, kept very, very quiet. Mnuchin's up-front attitude about this was meant to panic markets, not calm them. In that regard, he did the bidding of the Fed and his Wall Street friends. Remember, Mnuchin is a Goldman Sachs alum. Surely, his buddies at GS and JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citi, and Wells Fargo aren't losing money nor sleep over these most recent declines in the stock market. Their clients may be losing massive amounts, but, hey, they're just the little people, muppets, right?
Unless you've got a million or more for these guys to manage, you're not worth their precious time.
Merry Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho.
Dow Jones Industrial Average December Scorecard:
| Date | Close | Gain/Loss | Cum. G/L |
| 12/3/18 | 25,826.43 | +287.97 | +287.97 |
| 12/4/18 | 25,027.07 | -799.36 | -511.39 |
| 12/6/18 | 24,947.67 | -79.40 | -590.79 |
| 12/7/18 | 24,388.95 | -558.72 | -1149.51 |
| 12/10/18 | 24,423.26 | +34.31 | -1115.20 |
| 12/11/18 | 24,370.24 | -53.02 | -1168.22 |
| 12/12/18 | 24,527.27 | +157.03 | -1011.19 |
| 12/13/18 | 24,597.38 | +70.11 | -941.08 |
| 12/14/18 | 24,100.51 | -496.87 | -1437.95 |
| 12/17/18 | 23,592.98 | -507.53 | -1945.58 |
| 12/18/18 | 23,675.64 | +82.66 | -1862.92 |
| 12/19/18 | 23,323.66 | -351.98 | -2214.90 |
| 12/20/18 | 22,859.60 | -464.06 | -2678.96 |
| 12/21/18 | 22,445.37 | -414.23 | -3093.19 |
| 12/24/18 | 21,792.20 | -653.17 | -3746.36 |
At the Close, Monday, December 24, 2018:
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 21,792.20, -653.17 (-2.91%)
NASDAQ: 6,192.92, -140.08 (-2.21%)
S&P 500: 2,351.10, -65.52 (-2.71%)
NYSE Composite: 10,769.83, -267.01 (-2.42%)
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