John Hussman is one of the smartest stock market analyst out there who actually manages money.
He is an impressive writer and investor and that is rare in these modern times.
In his latest report he says stock markets are overvalued and could crash fast and at anytime and he is ready to sell at any moment.
If you can print it out and read it many times to get the gist of how bad it could really get.
He talks about exponential curves. He explains how they work and why they are bad now.
The stock markets have gone up so much and more money has piled into the markets including pension funds and reinvestments that the slightest selling could really crash the stock markets.
To keep markets from crashing the Fed may have to step in to rescue the stock markets from crashing again like in 2019. At some point the Fed will not be able to control the crash and will have to throw in the towel and let markets fall ruining the retirement dreams of millions, the political ramifications from that will be astounding.
Here he describes a bubble{
The defining feature of a bubble is inconsistency between expected returns based on price behavior and expected returns based on valuations. If investors pay $150 today for a security that will deliver a single $100 payment a decade from now, but they also fully understand that they’ll lose 4% annually on the deal, without extrapolating past gains into the future, then we might say the security is overvalued, and we might question why investors would accept that trade, but we can’t call it a bubble.
But if investors pay $150 today for that security, because they look back in the rear-view mirror, decide that it “always goes up” over time, and convince themselves that expected future returns are always positive, then you’ve got a bubble. Discounting the future $100 cash flow of the security using any positive expected return would produce a price less than $100. So the positive returns expected by investors are inconsistent with the returns that would equate price with discounted cash flows. The size of the bubble is the fraction of the market price that represents expectational “hot air.”
Likewise, the willingness of investors to embrace “passive investments” like ETFs and asset-backed securities based on past performance, with little concern about the valuations, yields, or credit risk of the securities inside, is a the very soap from which bubbles repeatedly emerge. Amid the current enthusiasm for special purpose acquisition companies (SPACS), investors might recall the bubble in “incubators” at the 2000 peak, the “conglomerates” of the late-1960’s Go-Go bubble, and even the South Sea Company in the early 1700’s, along with similar companies formed at the time “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
If investors price the S&P 500 at levels that are highly likely to produce negative returns for a decade, as they did in 1929 and 2000, and as I believe they are doing at present, yet investors continue to press stock prices higher on the expectation that they will provide historically normal levels of future return regardless of valuations, then you have the sort of inconsistency that defines a bubble.
Likewise, if the expected return of a conventional passive investment mix is negative on a 10-12 year horizon (based on reliable valuation measures strongly correlated with actual subsequent returns over a century of market history), yet pension return assumptions remain locked near 7% annually, you’ve got a bubble, and most likely a future pension funding crisis, on your hands.
He thinks the next ten years we will see negative rate of returns, he makes a good case on why this will happen and is inevitable.
Check out this cool chart, its scary
Again he says we are in a bubble.
Margin debt, people who borrow money to buy stocks.
What the losses will be.
Sticking with 4% nominal growth, and adding a 1.5% dividend yield, a “permanently high plateau” in market valuations would imply S&P 500 total returns of about 5.5% annually. Again, this assumes that valuations never retreat from levels that presently stand at about 3.6 times their historical norms. Simply allow them to retreat to 2.4 times their historical norms a decade from now – which would still keep valuations among the highest 10% in U.S. history – and the resulting 10-year total return would drop to about 1.3%. I think this would actually be the best-case scenario even in a permanently overvalued world.
At elevated valuations, even very small changes in expected return imply enormous changes in prices. So it’s unlikely that a period of much higher average valuations will escape the prospect of relatively high volatility. Rather than a 70% market decline, which would presently be required for the S&P 500 to simply touch historically run-of-the-mill valuation norms, investors could expect rather frequent market losses in the 20-35% range, which is essentially what we’ve seen even over the past few years.
All of that would be fine with us. We’ve adapted our discipline sufficiently (especially in late-2017) to tolerate the possibility of permanently sustained overvaluation. My impression is that the impact of those adaptations has become more evident as we’ve had greater opportunities to live into them. I can’t say that I believe for a second that investors will actually be spared from a 50-70% loss in the S&P 500 in the coming years, but again, it will be fine with us if the market never approaches historical valuation norms again. With the adaptations we introduced in late-2017, our discipline is flexible enough to navigate a bubble even without embracing its premise.
People may lose 70% of there pension's in this upcoming stock market crash.
President Biden and Fed chair Powell aren't prepared for this. It will get ugly, hopefully your cashed up and own a little gold.
