A major bull trap has been set.The current level of euphoria and speculation on Wall Street is likely to go down in history in the same way that the misplaced optimism of speculators in 1929 was immortalized by the tremendous crash and ensuing depression. The current dynamics at play are more similar to that period than most realize.
Many potential catalysts for the Global Financial Crisis 2.0 are beginning to rear their heads, including things such as:
-The auto loan bubble
-The residential & commercial real estate bubble
-The private equity and venture capital bubble
-The largest losses in the total bond market in generations
-Highest level of Federal Debt to GDP in US history and extremely high level of consumer & corporate debt in US history
-The most overvalued market based on forward earnings in history (Based on my expectations of S&P 2023 earnings will fall below 140). Peak margins above -13% coming back under 10% will also help to drive this.
-The fastest pace of interest rate hikes since Paul Volcker and $90 billion of quantitative tightening per month.
-The crypto bubble implosion where many exchanges are likely to fail due to their ponzi-like staking dynamics and unprofitable nature of exchanges like Coinbase. We are starting to see the beginnings of the financial contagion from FTX into other exchanges and coins. This is happening in an industry valued at over $3 trillion at its peak.
-The Chinese real estate crisis and recession
-The energy crisis which has curtailed over 20% of EU industrial capacity and is sending Europe into a recession. This is leading to increased energy costs around the world.
-Looming sovereign debt crises & currency crises for emerging and certain developed economies.
- Monetary growth is contracting at the highest pace since the Great Depression.
The $1.6 trillion auto loan bubble is reminiscent of the subprime lending bubble. There were incredibly loose lending standards in this auto loan bubble, where people that received federal stimulus checks were able to claim these as income. This entitled them to larger sized loans than they would have otherwise had access too. Many of these loans were made at over 130% loan to value ratio. These loans have been packaged up as bonds and sold off to investors hungry in search for yield in a world of artificially low interest rates, suppressed by the Fed for the better part of 14 years since the Global Financial Crisis. The amount of delinquent auto loans has continued to increase, and the looming crisis represents a huge threat to financial stability. As real wages and employment continue to fall, the amount of delinquent loans will continue to rise.
Earnings for the S&P 500 in Q3 have already started to contract more than 5% year over year (excluding energy) and yet many analysts still expect some, to no growth of earnings in 2023. Earnings are likely to collapse over 40% in 2023, pressured by falling consumer demand and falling operating margins. Consumer sentiment registered the worst sentiment among US consumers since the great depression.
All of the Fed manufacturing and service data components show comparable data now to data being released in mid 2008 to the spring of 2009, all with continuously negative trends. Capital expenditures have begun decreasing and mass layoffs are just beginning. 37% of US small businesses could not pay their rent in full in October. Many companies will be forced to close their doors permanently and layoff their entire staff. Consumption began to fall rapidly after the Fed began quantitative tightening and ended quantitative easing. The effects finally began hitting company earnings largely in Q3, with much more pain to follow. Meanwhile, many companies continued to hire large amounts of people unaware that consumption would continue to collapse. As asset prices fall further and inflation stays elevated, real wages will continue falling.
Student loan payments begin again at the start of 2023, further harming consumer sentiment.
Money supply growth began stagnating early in the year in 1929 and the federal government began to tighten spending with the New Deal programs in 1936 before the crash happened in 1937. Bank balance sheets have been flat for 2022 while the central bank balance sheet has been contracting leading to a slight contraction in the money supply. The contracting growth of monetary supply and fast paced increases in interest rates will lead to a large-scale downturn in GDP. On a technical basis, the current market setup looks very similar to 1929, 1937, 1973-1974, 1987, and 2008. All of which had major rallies that topped in late summer / fall before crashing over 30%. All of these crashes took place over the span of less than 3 months, with the majority of the percentage decline occurring over a period of 2-3 weeks.
There are dozens of companies that are virtually guaranteed to go bust in this downturn based on an overview of their financials. There have never been so many listed companies that reached valuations in the billions at their peak with no earnings . Many companies at the time of this writing still have valuations of over 6 times sales and many companies such as Coinbase, Uber, and Rivian are still valued at over $10 billion market caps whilst losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter. The dozens of zombie companies in the S&P 500 are being forced into rolling their debts at higher interest rates while their earnings fall. This will be the largest debt deleveraging cycle in the US economy since the great depression, because this is the largest accumulation of bad debts since the roaring twenties.
It is not long until the credit risk is truly realized by market participants, and interest rates spike throughout the economy. This would include the inter-bank lending rate and junk rated bonds which would lead to a financial crisis. The longer the Fed’s quantitative tightening runs, the more inevitable the financial crisis becomes. The Fed ran the balance sheet down around $600 billion over the course of 2018 into late summer of 2019 before inter-bank lending rates started to spike. This time, the Fed has run the balance sheet down close to $300 billion so far with a plan of reaching over a $600 billion runoff in Q1 of 2023.
The hopes for a Fed pivot are misplaced. A Fed pivot on interest rate hikes and even a reversal of the rate hikes cannot re-incentivize people to borrow . In a contracting credit cycle and business cycle downturn, debt begins to be paid off and defaulted on rather than excessively accumulated. The demand to borrow collapses even if interest rates were lowered by the Fed. Therefore, bear markets and recessions usually don’t end until many months after the Fed has already begun cutting interest rates. This was seen in the Great Recession and the dot com bubble of 2000; where the market didn’t bottom until over 18 months after the Fed began cutting rates.
