Stock market crashes happen for a reason, and generally the reason is that owning stock is seen as less profitable than owning bonds, gold, guns, or hundred-dollar bills stuffed into one’s mattress. For this essay, I thought I might explain the reasoning behind the alarm bells that virtually every economist has been sounding. For the last year and a half they’ve been sure a severe correction is imminent. The reason has to do with price and predictions of profitability.

Let’s begin with Nobel Laureate economist, Paul Krugman of the New York Times. He has been predicting severe job losses, and a permanent stock collapse since Trump’s election in November 2016. Virtually every week he announces that the end is near, and every month the economy looked better. A lesser man would give up, but he has not. Why? Mostly it’s his hatred of all things Trumpian: Krugman can not accept that Trump could avoid destroying the economy, and con not imagine that any investor would see things otherwise.

Apparently some folks felt otherwise, and caused unemployment to drop and the market to rise. but then, in September 2017, Krugman’s dire predictions were echoed by Robert Schiller, 2013 Nobel winner, and author of a textbook the majority of schools use to teach market analysis. Robert Schiller, has argued that valuations are extremely expensive. “This stock market bears striking similarities to that of 1929. “The market is about as highly priced as it was in 1929,” “In 1929 from the peak to the bottom, it was 80 percent down. And the market really wasn’t much higher than it is now in terms of my CAPE [cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings] ratio. So, you give pause when you notice that.”

What Schiller is referring to is his particular version of the price to earnings ratio, the price of the average stock share divided by the amount of the average earnings per share. Schiller’s CAPE version uses the ten-year, inflation-averaged earnings, rather than today’s earnings, and finds the ratio is high, as the graph below shows. When he made these comments, this ratio was 25, nearly as high as the 1929 peak. The ratio is now higher, 32.74, higher than it stood on “Black Tuesday.” Why this number is important is that the profitability of a stock-share is merely the inverse of the Price/ Earnings ratio. The current ratio, 32.74 suggests that the average dollar’s worth of shares will return about 3.05% (1/32.74 = 3.05%). By comparison, one could buy a five-year treasury bond and get 2.96%. That’s hardly less, and federal bonds are totally safe. More alarming yet, the Federal Reserve has indicated that it will continue to raise interest rates at planned rate of 1%/year for at least the next year. At some point, people will decide bonds are the far better bargain, and will exit stocks en-mass. And then it’s crash-city, or so the theory goes.

The Schiller Price to Earnings ratio as of July 27, 2018. It suggests a crash is past due.

Shown above is a historical plot of Schiller’s particular version of the price to earnings ratio based on the S+P 500 index, with data going back to 1880. It’s argued that his version using a ten-year, trailing average of corporate profits, is better than the non-adjusted, one year P/E ratio: the version you find in the newspapers. In the newspaper version, the peaks don’t show up until just after the crash because company profits tend to spike along with prices. In this version, profits can’t exactly spike, and  stock crashes show up as valuation peaks. The crash is seen as a consequence to high values of the Schiller P/E.  In terms of CAPE, we are at a more dangerous spot than in 1929. We are more exuberant than in 2008, or when Alan Greenspan warned of irrational exuberance. Schiller: “you give pause when you notice that.”

Schiller Price to earnings ratio plotted versus 20 year stock return. The higher the Schiller P/E, the lower the return. We are past the end of this chart suggesting we should expect a significant loss of capital value.

Stock pull-backs are sometimes gradual, as in 1968 through 1982, but more often the pullback is sudden, a crash. People typically expect a stock return in excess of bonds of 2% or so. They sometimes accept less, and sometimes demand more. Schiller calls the cause “animal spirits.” The fear is that investors will suddenly go back to the historical norm and demand of stocks 2% more return than the 3.05% they get from bonds. If they’d suddenly demand a 5.05% return on stocks to balance, the stock prices would fall by 40%. If the crash happened now, it would take a 40% drop in stock prices to raise the earnings ratio to 5.05%. But if they wait a year, until after the Fed raised the interest rate to 3.5%, we’d expect a greater pull-back 50% or so, a major crash. As early as last year, Schiller has advised moving out of US stock into foreign stocks, particularly European, noting that the US market was  the most expensive in the world. I don’t agree that Europe is a safe haven, but agree that a crash is likely given current return rates, snd the treasury plan to raise interests by 1% over the next year.

Schiller claims that the reason the recession has not hit so far is that people trust Trump. I would not have expected a comment like that from a Yale economist, especially given the constant carping from the TV news. Still Schiller may be on to something. The stock market went up dramatically after the Trump election. There are some advantages to a narcissist president. It also seems Trump’s tariffs are helping to provide jobs, as I predicted. In this quarter, the GDP rose at an impressive 4.1% rate. Gains came even where you’d expect otherwise. US soybean exports rose by 9600% despite a boycott from China. If the economy keeps going like this it might be as much as a year before the correction. A likely scenario is that the Fed raises interest rates, growth slows to 2.5% or less, and with bond interest rates at 3.5% people will get out of stocks in a big way. My expectation is that China will suffer too, and with it Europe. With luck, the Fed will then lower interest rates to 2%, or so. In my opinion interest rates should matches the inflation rate, more or less. I don’t know why the Federal Reserve does not do this, but instead swings its interest rates from very high to low, now aiming for a far excess of inflation rate. I suspect it’s mistake, one that we will pay for soon.

Robert Buxbaum, July 29, 2018. My only other stock analysis post was on bitcoin, In December 2017 I thought it had gone about as far as it would go. Shortly there-after bitcoin value crashed. I hope I don’t cause a crash