Economist Steen Jakobsen, Chief Investment Officer of Saxo Bank, believes 2015 will be another "lost year" for the economy. And he predicts the Federal Reserve will indeed start to raise rates later this year, surprising the market and taking the wind of out asset prices.
He recommends building cash and waiting to see how the coming storm — which he calls the "greatest margin call in history" — plays out:
0% interest rates at $0 down has not created the additional momentum to the economy The Fed was hoping for. The trickle down effect, the wealth effect, has instead made for bigger inequality in society. So I think we’re set for a rate hike in either in June or in September. I think this will be the biggest margin call in history on the asset inflation created by the Fed .
That’s where I differ from most Fed watchers. Everyone else is looking at employment, inflation targeting. I don’t think Fed is at all looking at those. They are saying “Listen, the 0% interest rate is getting us absolutely nowhere, we think it’s very, very important for us to move to a more neutral place”. At the same time we will communicate that we are open-minded to additional programs or whatever needs to be done to secure the long term growth of the economy. But that will be on the down side, not on the up side. And as year has progressed, and I’ve said this publicly, I think 2015 is already lost in terms of recovery here. And that will take the market by surprise.
The market will ask in September when the Fed hikes: “Why are you hiking interest rate when growth is below target, inflation below target”? Well, the Fed's response will be “Because this is the biggest asset inflation we’ve seen in human history and we need to address it”.
…..
What the Fed is saying is that we have unintended consequences of low interest rates. Money is chasing yield: it's going to real estate making it over-valued, and flowing into the equity markets making them over-valued. And then the Fed says “Well. we have two choices. We can allow the market to run into a bubble, or we can burst the bubble and start all over again”. But they wrongly, in my opinion, believe they can actually micro manage that, even macro manage this. So what they would rather do is "lean up against the market". To take some of the excess out of prices by going in and telling in the market “We are concerned, we don’t want you to have more leverage. We want you to have less. And we certainly would like to see that market become flat-lined for a while in terms of return." Which by all metrics of measurements is actually also the expected return of the stock market. Don’t forget three, five and seven years expected return at the present multiples is exactly 0%.
Given this, at a bare minimum, I recommend taking the leverage out of your own portfolio so you sit with a nice pot of cash if the market does correct. If it doesn’t, you’re not really losing out much because again, they expect a return is 0% for the next couple of years.
Some time the best advice to anybody is to do nothing. And of course being, part of an online bank I’m not exactly popular with management for putting this advice out there. But I have to give the advice I believe in and share what I do myself; and I’m certainly reducing whatever equity I have in my portfolio to a minimum. So I’m scaling back to where I was in January last year.
I'll put it another way. I’m advising a hedge fund in London, analyzing 10,500 stocks from the bottom up. How many do you think of these 10,500 world stocks are cheap? Only 23. Which means 98% of all stocks are either fairly-priced or expensive.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Steen Jakobsen (40m:27s)
by treebeard