Nov

9

"The stock market leads the economy, not the other way round"

Are we sure of this old bromide?

anonymous writes: 

Yes, the data support the conclusion. Even more so because we know the results of the stock market immediately, and we get the GDP number only each quarter, and then after a delay of months that is then revised three times.

Andrew Goodwin writes:

A statistical method for testing this theory with precise equations is given here for those who would care to update the work:

"The Stock Market as a Leading Indicator: An Application of Granger Causality"

To summarize the conclusion reached using this "Granger causality" method:

Our results indicated a "causal" relationship between the stock market and the economy. We found that while stock prices Granger-caused economic activity, no reverse causality was observed. Furthermore, we found that statistically significant lag lengths between fluctuations in the stock market and changes in the real economy are relatively short. The longest significant lag length observed from the results was three quarters.

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

"Is the causality relationship more consistent with the wealth effect or with the forward-looking nature of the stock market? The results from this project are consistent with both the wealth effect and the forward-looking nature of the stock market, but do not prove either. Another possibility for future research is to further evaluate where expectations about the future economy are coming from. Our results reveal that expectations for future economic activity are not simply formed by looking at the past trend in the economy as the adaptive expectations model would suggest. Expectations are being formed in other ways, but how?"

The argument for the "wealth effect": rich people's spending is the Keynesian pump that gets its money flows from the drift towards higher stock prices. The argument for the forward-looking nature of the stock market: the same one that applies to all asset and credit pricing, even those for "true" bills. The argument for "adaptive expectations" models: straight lines are easier to draw.

Stock prices go down because enough rich people think they will go down. God only know what makes them decide to think that, even though they have all the lessons of the past to tell them otherwise.

As Eddy and her Mom and others remind me, my sarcasm can be a bit heavy-handed, obscure and unfunny.

Let me try again, now that Big Al (who has saved me from gold standard oops moments and other follies) has come to my rescue.

The Chair's drift is a fact of enterprise itself; people get richer because they figure out how to do things better, faster and cheaper, and the price for that know-how rises steadily because it is the means of producing more wealth.  (Marx was not wrong to focus on the means of production; he just left our distribution and exchange as the other necessary parts of the deal.)

The people the Chair left behind at Harvard, Berkeley and elsewhere share their own kind of Marxist illusion; they think that people can manipulate the way we all keep track of wealth - the unit of account, the interest rate on government debt - and have the manipulations produce further drift which will, in turn, somehow produce greater wealth.

This all reminds me of what a WW II veteran once told me about sharing a bivouac with the Russians while Truman, Churchill and Stalin carved up the world at Potsdam.  The Americans, with their wonderful energy, had set up tents and installed GI showers and faucets after running lines to the nearest pond with clean water.  After seeing the GI walk over to a faucet and turn it on to fill a pail of water to feed the radiator in his Deuce and a Half, a Russian soldier yanked off the faucet, walked over to the Russian side and defiantly banged it into a post.  He was enraged when he turned the tap and nothing came out.

Fat thumb correction:  stock prices go up and down because enough rich people take one side of the trade or the other that they change the price of wealth expectations for that particular company. There is no way of knowing what their particular "reasons" are; markets are part of Heisenberg's universe.

Bill Rafter writes: 

Allow me to come into this party late and probably tick everybody off. What drives markets most of the time (i.e. 90+ pct.) are two things: momentum and sentiment. If you have a handle on those you can make money. Probably the same two things drive the economy, but you cannot make money trading the economy, as the data coming out of the economy is more lagged than the data coming out of the markets. Hone your skills where they can count.
 


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