Counter Argument 3: The market reflects changes in how markets and economies work
The concentration of market gains in the hands of a few companies, at least at first sight, is troublesome but it is not new. There have been very few bull markets, where companies have shared equally in the gains, and it is more common than not for market gains to be concentrated in a small percentage of companies. That said, the degree of concentration is perhaps greater in this last bull run (from 2009 to 2019), but that concentration represents forces that are reshaping economies and markets. Each of the companies in the FAANG has disrupted existing businesses and grabbed market share from long-standing players in these businesses, and the nature of their offerings has given them networking benefits, i.e., the capacity to use their rising market share to grow even faster, rather than slower.
It is this trend that has drawn the attention of regulators and governments, and it is possible, maybe even likely, that we will see anti-trust laws rewritten to restrain these companies from growing more or even breaking them up. While that would be bad news for investors in these companies, those rules are also likely to enrich some of the competition and push up their earnings and value. In short, a pullback in the FAANG stocks, driven by regulatory restrictions, is likely to have unpredictable effects on overall stock prices.
Bubble Argument 4: Central banks, around the world, have conspired to keep interest rates low and push up the price of financial assets (artificially)
As you can see in the earlier graph comparing earnings to price rates to treasury bond rates, interest rates on government bonds have dropped to historic lows in the last decade. That is true not just in the US, but across developed markets, with 10-year Euro, Swiss franc and Japanese Yen bond rates crossing the zero threshold to become negative.
If you buy into the proposition that central banks set these rates, it is easy to then continue down this road and argue that what we have seen in the last decade is a central banking conspiracy to keep rates low, partly to bring moribund economies back to life, but more to prop up stock and bond prices. The end game in this story is that central banks eventually will be forced to face reality, interest rates will rise to normal levels and stock prices will collapse.
Counter Argument 4: Interest rates are low, but central bankers have had only a secondary role
Conspiracy theories are always difficult to confront, but at the heart of this one is the belief that central banks set interest rates, not just influence them at the margin. But is that true? To answer that question, I will fall back on a simple measure of what I call an intrinsic risk free rate, constructed by adding the inflation rate to the real growth rate, drawing on the belief that interest rates should reflect expected inflation (rising with inflation) and real interest rates (related directly to real growth).
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| Download raw data on interest rates, inflation and growth |
Looking back over the last decade, it is low inflation and anemic economic growth that have been driving interest rates lower, not a central banking cabal. It is true that at the start of October 2019, the gap between the ten-year treasury bond rate and the intrinsic risk free rate is higher than it has been in a long time, suggesting that either Jerome Powell is a more powerful central banker than his predecessors or, more likely, that the bond market is building in expectations of lower inflation and growth.
