Quote of the Day: The Apex of Market Stupidity

In the last week, we have reached what is surely the apex of this stupidity. A bunch of algo traders programmed their computers expecting “Derivative Draghi” to be extremely dovish, as any proper Italian central banker should be. I am not sure I understand why, but some traders obviously decided that he had not been dovish enough. European stock markets plunged by -4%, while the euro went up by roughly the same amount in the space of a few minutes. What that means is simple: value in the financial markets is no longer a function of the discounted cash flow of future income, but instead is determined by the amount of money the central bank is printing, and especially by how much it intends to print in the coming months. So we are in a world where I can postulate the following economic and financial law: variations in the value of assets are a function of the expected changes in the quantity of money printed by the central bank. To put it in a format that today’s economists understand:

Delta (VA) = Delta * (M),

where VA is the value of assets and M is the monetary increase.

What we are seeing is in fact in one of the stupidest possible applications of the Cantillon effect, whereby those who are closest to the money-printing, i.e. the financial markets, are the biggest beneficiaries of that printing. This is exactly what happened in 1720 in France during the Mississippi Bubble inflated by John Law. The end results were not pretty.

What I find most hilarious is that some serious commentators have been pontificating at considerable length about what the market’s participants think. These days, some 70% of market orders are generated by computers, and many of the rest by indexers. And computers do not think. They simply calculate at light speed, which allows them to react to short term movements in market prices as they were programmed to do. And since they are all programmed the same way, the result is some big short term market moves. In essence, these computers act as machines that allow market participants to stop thinking. As a result, I cannot remember a time when less thinking has ever been done in the financial markets, which is why I find today’s financial markets infinitely boring.

We are swimming in an ocean of ignorance, just like France in 1720. It seems all the painful economics lessons learned over the last 300 years have been forgotten. I suppose that means we will just have to wait for another Adam Smith to appear. La vie est un éternel recommencement...

This excerpt is from an article written by Gavekal's Charles Gave published at ZeroHedge