The Fed’s “Mutant, Broken Market”

Jon Alternative Media, Blogosphere, Economy, Fiscal Policies, Government, Market Commentary

Undermining the Integrity of Financial Markets
Introduction
Financial markets are broken. Fundamental analysis and Modern Portfolio Theory are relics of the past. Investors used to care about maximizing a portfolio’s expected return for a given amount of targeted risk. The goal used to be that prudent diversification through the analysis of security correlations could move the Efficient Frontier Line ‘up and to the left’. In other words, improve returns per unit of risk.
Today, Fed policies have commandeered investor thinking and altered investor behavior. The powerful driver of moral hazard has fueled greed, and imbued more fear of underperforming peers and benchmarks, than fear of downside risks. Some investors are buying the riskiest assets simply because prices have been rising. Some investors say they are buying equities instead of Treasuries because ‘equities have upside, while bonds yields are puny and their prices are capped at par’.
Fed policies have led to (investor) herd behavior that has plunged market volatilities and manipulated asset prices and correlations to lofty levels. The rallying cry has simply become ‘don’t fight the Fed’. Relative return – without regard for risk – is all that matters. As a result, future return expectations have fallen with ever-rising prices; correspondingly, risk levels have risen in parallel. The allure of the Fed’s magic spell has lapsed investors into a soporific state of cognitive dissonance, with them focusing more on trying to justify valuations, rather than on the Upside Downside Capture Ratio.
Markets have thus mutated into one of two possible combustible states. Either financial assets have all transcended into prodigious bubbles, or stocks and bonds are signifying two completely separate outcomes. Either possibility will have dangerous repercussions for the economy, and for portfolios and investors. At the moment, I believe that the Treasury market has it right, signifying concerns about disinflation and future growth.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 08/28/2014.