More Cash Invested in Stock in 2021 Than Two Decades Combined
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Gone are the days when the S&P and the GDP represented a condensed data point to enable people to evaluate the general health of the economy and companies.
This happens everywhere, as soon as a KPI start monopolizing the conversation, the optimizer/cheater in all of us decides to start finding ways to prop up the KPI instead of improving operations and let the KPI fall where it may.
But truth cannot be hidden, lies won't conceal it.
Even with stock market at all time highs, people are miserable, that's the only KPI you cannot fake.
too bad this can't really be quantified. Or can it?
> "If you imagine a ladder whose rungs are numbered zero to 10, and zero represents your worst possible life and 10 represents your best, which rung would you be on?"
https://worldhappiness.report/
Alternative measurement method based on PERMA:
The US is exciting but the median person is not living a great life here and the bottom 20 percentile is living in serious poverty on a western scale
At that point, doesn't inflation become a major concern, though?
The reason people aren't holding bonds and cash anymore is not that they are fearless or that there is no return on the money like there used to be. They're actively fearful that holding cashing or bonds is just being a chump for when the indirect money print ramps up.
There are only two ways I see this going. Rapid inflation followed by a new currency made with a real promise of backing (probably not crypto). Or a stagnation of the economy for a long time.
Maybe there is a third way. I'd love a different perspective because both of these sound pretty painful.
See. People can learn.
Cash reserves are only useful if things are allowed to fail. Then, the people with cash can buy the remnants and put the failed stuff to good use.
If, however, everyone who overextended themselves are always going to get bailed out, holding cash is for suckers--better to run up the credit just like everybody else.
the fund units/shares are simply a convienient wrapper
Not sure how significant these flows are.
The article notes that the most recent week saw a net outflow from the stock market:
> One possible sign of skittishness: investors have pulled money from stock funds only twice this year, and the second time was in the past week. Equity funds had $2.7 billion outflows in the week through Nov. 23, according to BofA.
Also important to note that this is largely a product of low interest rates, not just stimulus money as many are suggesting. The stock market becomes the investment location of choice as low interest rates make bonds and money market unattractive. Article mentions this at the very bottom:
> The amount of money moving into the stock market dwarfed anything else this year. Bond funds attracted just $496 billion and money market funds received about $260 billion.
For context, the total market cap of the companies in the S&P 500 is around $39 trillion. So this is a decent sized inflow, but not as crazy as the headline makes it sound.
It's a useful metric but it doesn't represent real fund flows
https://web.archive.org/web/20211125175105/https://www.bloom...
Of course if you expand your horizon and look only at the end vs. beginning it's fine, but you can do that well back past 2008 too. GP means 'never seen any significant drop at any point', not just that then came back up.
Pandemic? A global supply chain interruption? Democrat controlled U.S. government? Widespread protests and unrest? None of these things slowed the stock gains.
Those who bought the usual tech stocks last year and held made 20% plus.
No discussion in the article about where this money came from. My guess is that it came from the direct covid payments and extended unemployment which amounted to ~$1.4 trillion.
Of course personal expenditures went down as well due to covid, but if you look at Personal Consumption Expenditures you'll see it went from $14 bn in Feb 2020 (monthly) to $13.7bn to $12bn in March and April, but it quickly recovered. Today its 16,291, or 10% higher than the 2020-01-01 level.
date PCE MoM diff
2020-01-01 14,770
2020-02-01 14,785 0%
2020-03-01 13,762 -7%
2020-04-01 12,022 -13%
2020-05-01 13,058 9%
2020-06-01 13,889 6%
2020-07-01 14,129 2%
2020-08-01 14,271 1%
2020-09-01 14,482 1%
Interest rates are so low that money that would normally go into bonds and money market funds was diverted into the stock market.
Unemployment benefits did not prop the stock market up. People have to be unemployed to receive those benefits and the benefits are (excluding some periods of fuzzy COVID unemployment policy) less than normal wages, so unemployed people were suddenly receiving an influx of extra cash.
That's not necessarily true. A study found that 68% of unemployment workers who can receive benefits got payments greater than their lost earnings. The median replacement rate was 134% so the median unemployed person getting benefits got a 34% raise.
>> As a result, though, many people may now be eligible for substantially more money while unemployed than they made while they were working. A new analysis by Peter Ganong, Pascal Noel and Joseph Vavra, economists at the University of Chicago,1 uses government data from 2019 to estimate that 68 percent of unemployed workers who can receive benefits are eligible for payments that are greater than their lost earnings. They also found that the estimated median replacement rate — the share of a worker’s original weekly salary that is being replaced by unemployment benefits — is 134 percent, or more than one-third above their original wage. A substantial minority of those workers, particularly in low-wage professions like food service and janitorial work, may end up receiving more than 150 percent of their previous weekly salary.2
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-gett...
The reason why there is no discussion of it is that it's a category error. Money is not used up when spent, but is immediately available to the seller who can use it again as he becomes the buyer of something else. Money is a stock. Statements about the increasing sales of ETFs are statements about flows. All of those could have "come from" a single dollar. And still the dollar would remain, standing proud, undefeated, not-used-up, and waiting to be spent on something else in yet another flow.
But wait, there's more. When the government "gives money" via covid payments, that, too, is a flow. The government merely sells a bond for cash to the bond markets, and then sends a check to a household, who deposit the cash in a bank, and the bank uses that cash to buy a bond from the bond markets, thus returning the cash to the same money markets from which the government borrowed it.
All of the 6 Trillion dollars in deficit spending could, in theory, require only a small amount of cash to support, because again the dollar is a stock and the deficit spending is a flow.
So the point of all of this is to understand that money markets can be used to generate trillions in ETF flows, or to support trillions of deficit spending, with no problem at all. Thus you should never ask where money to make an investment comes from, because it always comes from the money markets.
Instead, you should ask "are these assets fairly valued"? As long as the answer is "yes", then there will be money to buy them, completely independent of how much cash there is in the economy. Never believe anyone who says "there isn't enough money" to fund some investment. That's always cope for "I can't convince the capital markets that this investment will earn a good return".
And by the same token, never believe anyone who says "the government is injecting money into the economy in order to fund more investments", because it's impossible for the government to increase or decrease the amount of money held by the non-financial sector - at least the way our financial markets are currently structured.
All the government can do is deficit spend and adjust interest rates. Money is neither an enabler nor a constraint on any investment decision, but lowering interest rates could turn previously unprofitable investments into profitable ones, which means they will be funded once the capital markets are convinced of their profitability, and this is true whether or not any stimulus spending is provided by the government.
/rant
This is false MMT midwittery.
Money is fungible, whether held in highly liquid market assets or cash. As long as the government pulls in consumption (e.g. flows) that would not be transacted absent its intervention, it is creating money.
That money may net out to zero, say via deflationary asset collapse of one party with price inflation of goods of another party does not mean money was not injected. It just means that one party stole wealth from another in a zero-sum exchange. Inflation does not happen all at once and the people receiving the injection of money are very happy to invest that in assets that will appreciate when the full impact of price inflation is realized.
Likewise, when the Fed props up risky assets as if they are riskless, and the banks holding those assets continue circulating trades as if nothing has happened, money is in a net increase. It means interest--the time-adjusted price of money--is being mispriced, and someone is eventually bound to be on the losing end of that pricing error.
Please write more clearly and less stridently because this is very difficult to parse.
As best I can tell, you are redefining money to be anything "liquid", and then pointing out that if the government insures a bond or guarantees to repo it, for example, it becomes liquid and so total money has increased.
Well, OK, you can play definition games with your own private meaning of "money", and it's true that the term is a bit ill-defined, so more precise thinkers wouldn't speak of "money" at all, they'd speak of specific assets and liabilities (e.g. reserves, currency in circulation, deposits, etc) to avoid some interlocutor bumping in with "well akshually..."
But seeing as how I was on a public forum using commonly understood terms, I stuck with that informal language. Specifically, I was responding to a post trying to trace "where the money came from" to support an increase of ETFs, and I pointed out that it doesn't come from anywhere at all, because money is a stock and can support any flow. What matters is the return offered by the investment - if there is a good return, there will be money to fund the investment. That is true regardless of how you define money. It's a basic fact about stocks and flows.
A small stock can support a large flow and a large stock may have a small flow. The flow will be whatever it needs to be based on the return provided. So trying to trace "where the money comes from" when speaking of macro-economic investment is a goofy and unproductive thing to do.
But it's not nearly as unproductive as arguing "well akshually money is anything that is liquid and the government can make anything liquid" - as that statement adds no informational content to a discussion of ETF funding.
The obvious and correct identification of the problem is too much money in the system, and you don't understand how money flows through that system.
This is why bond prices remain low, because banks are simply not lending enough/people aren't borrowing enough to allow rates to rise.
With everyone expecting rates to rise and seeing the inflationary pressure, it makes sense people choose stocks over bonds or cash equivalents.
If anything it tells me that these valuations could go a lot higher.
And ironically its self perpetuating because if it crashes, rates will just be further suppressed reinforcing the move.
The people on here are so out of touch with reality, lol.
https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/finance/average-net-worth-...
Note, the median salary of nasdaq listed company employees is probably not much higher than 60k without whom the companies wouldn’t sustain their own valuations.
Stock Buybacks (i.e. from corporate "investment") amongst other things.
Are these dollar amounts adjusted for inflation? As a percentage of disposable income? Etc.