The Federal Reserve’s Insidious Role in the Stock Market Slide

Wednesday, January 20, 2016
By Paul Martin

By Mike Whitney
Global Research
January 20, 2016

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and S&P peaked in May 2015, investors were still confident that the Fed “had their back” and that any steep or prolonged downturn in stocks would be met with additional liquidity and a firm commitment to maintain zero rates as long as necessary. But now that the Fed has started its long-awaited rate-hike cycle, investors aren’t sure what to expect.

This growing uncertainty coupled with flagging earnings reports have factored heavily in Wall Street’s recent selloff. Unless the Fed is able to restore confidence by promising to take steps that support the markets, stocks are going to continue get hammered by economic data that’s bound to deteriorate as 2016 drags on.

For the last few years, investors have relied on the so called “Bernanke Put” to prevent significant stock losses while the real economy continued to sputter and underperform. The moniker refers to the way the Fed adds liquidity to the markets during periods of stress to put a floor under stocks. Investors have been so confident in this safety-net system that they’ve dumped trillions of dollars into equities even though underlying fundamentals have remained weak and the economy has sputtered along at an anemic 2 percent per year. Investors believed the Central Bank could move stocks higher, and they were right.

The Dow Jones has more than doubled since it touched bottom on March 9, 2009 while the S&P soared to a new-high (2,130 points) on May 21, 2015, tripling its value at the fastest pace on record. These extraordinary gains are the direct result of the Fed’s not-so-invisible hand in the financial markets. Betting on the Fed’s ability to move markets higher has clearly been a winning strategy.

So why are stocks crashing now?

Because everything has changed. Up to now, “bad news has been good news and good news has been bad news”. In other words, for the last few years, every time the economic data worsened and the media reported flagging retail sales, bulging business inventories, shrinking industrial production, anemic consumer credit, droopy GDP or even trouble in China–stocks would rally as investors assumed the Fed would intensify its easy money policies.

Conversely, when reports showed the economy was gradually gaining momentum, stocks would drop in anticipation of an early end to the zero rates and QE. This is how the Fed reversed traditional investor behavior and turned the market on its head. Stock prices no longer had anything to do with earnings potential or prospects for future growth; they were entirely determined by the availability of cheap money and infinite liquidity. In other words, the market system which, in essence, is a pricing mechanism that adjusts according to normal supply-demand dynamics–ceased to exist.

This topsy-turvy “good is bad, bad is good” system lasted for the better part of six years buoying stocks to new highs while bubbles emerged everywhere across the financial spectrum and while corporate bosses engaged in all manner of risky behavior like stock buybacks which presently exceed $4 trillion.

The Rest…HERE

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