Stockman Slams “Bubble Finance And The Era of No-See-Um Recessions”
by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
ZeroHedge.com
Dec 14, 2017
Today’s single most dangerous Wall Street meme is that there is no risk of a stock market crash because there is no recession in sight. But that proposition is dead wrong because it’s a relic of your grandfather’s economy. That is, a reasonably functioning capitalist order in which the stock market priced-out company earnings and the underlying macroeconomic substrate from which they arose.
Back then, Economy drove Finance: You therefore needed a main street contraction to trigger tumbling profits, which, in turn, caused Wall Street to mark-down the NPV (net present value) of future company earnings streams and the stock prices which embodied them.
No longer. After three decades of monetary central planning and heavy-handed falsification of financial asset prices, causation has been reversed.
Finance now drives Economy: Recessions happen when central bank fostered financial bubbles reach an asymptotic peak and then crash under their own weight, triggering desperate restructuring actions in the corporate C-suites designed to prop up stock prices and preserve the collapsing value of executive stock options.
Accordingly, you can’t see a recession coming on Janet Yellen’s dashboard of 19 labor market indicators or any of the other “incoming” macroeconomic data—industrial production, retail sales, housing starts, business investment—- so assiduously tracked by Wall Street economists.
Instead, recessions gestate in the Wall Street gambling parlors and become latent in carry trades, yield curve and credit arbitrages and momentum driven excesses. Eventually, these latencies—central bank fostered bubbles—–erupt suddenly and violently. So doing, they spew intense, unexpected contractionary impulses into the main street economy via the transmission channel of C-suite “restructuring” actions.
The Rest…HERE
