Since last November 8th the Russell 2000 has risen by 30% and the net Federal debt has expanded by an astounding $1.0 trillion dollars.
In a rational world operating with honest financial markets those two results would not be found in even remotely the same zip code; and especially not in month #102 of a tired economic expansion and at the inception of an epochal pivot by the Fed to QT (quantitative tightening) on a scale never before imagined.
And we do mean exactly those words. By next April the Fed will be shrinking its balance sheet at $360 billion annual rate and by $600 billion per year as of next October.
Altogether, the Fed’s balance is scheduled to contract by upwards $2 trillion by the end of 2020. And it’s apparently on a path that is so locked-in—-barring a recession—that Janet Yellen affirmed in her swan song that the Fed’s giant bond dumping program (euphemistically called “portfolio runoff”) would no longer even be mentioned in its post-meeting statements.
So the net of it is this: The Fed will sell more bonds in the next 3-4 years than had been accumulated by all of the central banks of the world in all of recorded history as of 1995!
That prospect alone might give a rational stock market at least some cause to pause. After all, the Fed’s $2 trillion bond selling campaign (likely to be joined by the ECB in 2019 when a German replaces wild-man Draghi) is on automatic pilot unless there is a recession.
So stock prices are either going to be battered by slumping profits if the business cycle hasn’t actually been abolished; or, in the alternative, rising bond yields will sharply inflate the carry cost of $12.5 trillion of US…