Four Factors Behind Rising Volatility And How To Deal With Them

No one could have predicted the sheer scope of global monetary policy bolstering the private banking and trading system. Yet, here we were - ensconced in the seventh year of capital markets being buoyed by coordinated government and central bank strategies. It’s Keynesianism for Wall Street. The unprecedented nature of this international effort has provided an illusion of stability, albeit reliant on artificial stimulus to the private sector in the form of cheap money, tempered currency rates (except the dollar - so far) and multi-trillion dollar bond buying programs. It is the most expensive, blatant aid for major financial players ever conceived and executed. But the facade is fading. Even those sustaining this madness, like the IMF, are issuing warnings about increasing volatility.

We are repeatedly told these tactics benefit broader populations and economies. Yet by design, they encourage hoarding, or more crafty speculative behavior, on the part of big financial firms (in the guise of obeying slightly adjusted capital rules) and their corporate clients (that largely use cheap funds to buy their own stock.) While politicians, central banks and multinational government-funded entities opine on “remaining” structural weaknesses of certain individual countries, they congratulate themselves on having staved off more acute crises.  All without exhibiting the slightest bit of irony. 

When cheap funds stop flowing, and “hot” money shifts its attentions, as it invariably and inevitably does, volatility escalates as it is doing now. This usually signals a downturn, but not before nail-biting ups and downs in the process.

These four risk factors individually, or collectively, drive rapid price fluctuations. Individually, they fuel market volatility. Concurrently, they can wreak far greater havoc:

1. Central Bank Policies
2. Credit Default Risk
3. Geo-Political Maneuvering
4. Financial Industry Manipulation And Crime

Events that in isolation don’t impact markets severely can coalesce with more negative results. This is important to understand when prioritizing personal investment decisions. In this two-part report, I will outline driving forces behind today’s volatility and provide suggestions as to what you can do to protect yourself, and even thrive, going forward.

Take Central Banks First

Two weeks ago, stock and bond markets dipped when Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen announced, “equity market valuations at this point generally are quite high."  She admitted,  “There are potential dangers." She saw no bubble. The Fed continues to claim its policies have fostered sustainable - if slow – growth for the mainstream economy.

This wasn’t the first time Yellen has said as much. It won’t be the last. In November 2013, she saw no equity or real estate bubble, either. In July 2014, at an IMF lecture, she said the Fed wouldn’t raise rates just to burst bubbles, rather when the US has a healthy job market with stable prices.  She has assumed Ben Bernanke’s mantras in this regard.

Each time she speaks, the media enters interpretation overdrive and markets react similarly. They drop initially, then rebound to slightly lower levels than before. The pattern is becoming increasingly pronounced, though, as is the associated volatility.

Recent volatility spikes underscore the fragility of markets inhaling cheap money due to the global central bank policies that began with the US Federal Reserve, and spread to the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the People’s Bank of China.  The IMF has recently stated that, despite rising volatility, a dose of “QE-Plus” may be needed.

Since the beginning of 2015, the stock market has fluctuated between new highs and turning negative for the year. Movements are mostly linked to the rate hike timing guessing game, amidst a roster of other commonly circulated “threats” from Grexit to erratic oil price behavior. Associated speculation is marked by lengthy media debates about what the word ‘patience’ means regarding Fed talk on rate hikes and smatterings of the realization that artificially stimulated markets don’t promote real long-term growth.

Growing Credit Risk

Yellen also mentioned "compression of spreads on high-yield debt, which certainly looks like a reach for yield type of behavior.” Obviously.  When high-grade debt interest rates are low, the only place to grab yield is in riskier securities. A credit bubble develops. This awareness has not been met with deterrent policy though, leaving the propensity of compressed spreads (and credit default spreads) to blow out (widen) from these levels.

The Fed’s goalposts on rate hikes keep changing. Globalization of low to negative interest rates and dampening of currency exchange rates relative to the dollar has helped keep US rate policy where it is, though the Fed doesn’t say this. The Fed’s zero-interest-rate and QE policy has propped markets, encouraged corporate share buybacks, caused yield seekers to buy riskier securities, and provided banks incentives to leverage it all.

Yellen isn’t wrong in her diagnosis; she’s just ignoring the Fed’s role in it. So is every other central bank and multinational entity. They offer liquidity crack and then wonder why junkies multiply. The Fed missed the last bubble and is missing this one. Meanwhile, the rate-hike guessing game increases market volatility.

From Geo-Politics to Manipulation

Excessive speculation also provokes volatility, especially as enacted by the major market players that control the narrative and the trading volume. This occurs with stocks, bonds, and commodities.  Often such moves rely on geo-political tensions as a cover.

When the US and its Euro-friends slapped economic sanctions on Russia over its actions in the Ukraine, the fallout was used to explain weaker market days.  Oil price drops were partially attributed to Middle East tensions, ostensibly because OPEC didn't agree to withhold production. They were also used to explain Russian economic weakness, allowing the Obama administration to gloat about the success of its sanctions.

Energy volatility, widely reported as oil price movements, can impair household budgets and the overall economy. When oil prices are elevated, associated household costs rise. When they drop, media stories about resultant layoffs can dampen markets and household investments in them. To the extent that prices are manipulated in either direction by financial players and not end-producers or users, they cause excessive volatility.

Big banks don’t care about any of this. They have the capital and global agility to leverage whatever situation arises. If Russia is weak, head to Latin America. If US hedge funds force Argentina into technical default, press Obama to lift sanctions and head to Cuba. It’s a merry-go-round of institutional speculation followed by volatility and decline.

Financial firms, including banks, hedge funds and less regulated players, exert tremendous power through leveraging capital, trading positions and public predictions. They can hype up prices to attract money into their market of choice and quickly reverse course, aided by a media eager to follow the story-du-jour for page-views or ratings.

The power of the large trading players to move prices remains vast. The Big Six US banks control 97% of all trading assets in the US banking system and 95% of all derivatives. Thirty Globally Systemically Important Banks (GSIB’s) control 40% of lending and 52% of assets worldwide. As volatility rises, ongoing concentration in these still-too-big-to-fail entities that can manipulate financial markets, produces triple digit stock market swings that capture headlines and stoke people’s fears.

Subsidization for the elite banking class can’t last forever. But it has already overstayed its welcome many times over, so predicting a specific end date is not easy (though I’m going with mid-2016, when the ECB will be done with this round of bond-buying.) In the interim, rising volatility signals an unraveling of current polices that can’t be ignored.

The uncertainty surrounding the inevitability, if not the exact timing, of multiple and possibly overlapping volatility drivers is itself a source of volatility. For the average person, these signs can be scary. Taking steps to avoid the circus as much as possible, such as extracting money from the markets, securing personal assets, and waiting out the swings, can be a source of emotional comfort and future financial stability.

(This Piece was Part 1 of a two-part piece marking the inauguration of my partnership on such topics with Peak Prosperity)

The Volatility / Quantitative Easing Dance of Doom

The battle between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of global financial policy is escalating to the point where the ‘haves’ might start to sweat – a tiny little. This phase of heightened volatility in the markets is a harbinger of the inevitable meltdown that will follow the grand plastering-over of a systemically fraudulent global financial system. It’s like a sputtering gas tank signaling an approach to ‘empty’.

Obscene amounts of central bank liquidity applauded by government leaders that have protected the political-financial establishment with failed oversight and lack of foresight, have coalesced to form one of the most unequal, unstable economic environments in modern history. The ongoing availability of cheap capital for big bank solvency, growth and leverage purposes, as well as stock and bond market propulsion has fostered a false sense of economic security that bears little resemblance to most personal realities.

We are entering the seventh year of US initiated zero-interest-rate policy. Biblically, Joseph only gathered wheat for seven years before seven years of famine. Quantitative easing, or central bank bond buying from banks and the governments that sustain them, has enjoyed its longest period of existence ever. If these policies were about fortifying economic conditions from the ground up, fostering equality as a force for future stability, they would have worked by now. We would have moved on from them sooner.

But they aren’t. Never were. Never will be. They were designed to aid big banks and capital markets, to provide cover to feeble leadership. They are policies of capital creation, dispersion and global reallocation.  The markets have acted accordingly. 

What began with the US Federal Reserve became a global phenomenon of subsidizing the financial system and its largest players.  Most real people - that don’t run hedge funds or big banks or leverage other peoples’ money in esoteric derivatives trades - have their own meager fortunes at risk. They don’t have the power of ECB head, Mario Draghi to issue the 'buy' order from atop the ECB mountain. Nor do they reap the benefits.

Retail sales are down because people have no extra money and can’t take on excess debt through credit cards forever. They aren’t governments or central banks that can print when they want to, or big private banks that can summon such assistance at will.

Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen recently chastised these bankers. This, while the Fed has become their largest client and the world’s biggest hedge fund.  While she wags her finger, the Fed is paying JPM Chase to manage the $1.7 trillion portfolio of mortgage related assets that it purchased from the largest banks. In other words, somewhere along the line, the public is both paying to buy nefarious assets from the big banks at full value, thereby supporting an artificially higher price and demand for these and similar assets, and paying the nation’s largest bank for managing them on behalf of the Fed. Yellen says things like “poor values may undermine bank safety” and all of a sudden she’s on an anti-bank rampage?  What about the fact that just six banks control 97% of all trading assets in the US banking system and 95% of derivatives? Or that 30 banks control 40% of lending and 52% of assets worldwide?

Think about the twilight zone squared logic of this. Yellen’s predecessors, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, enabled the path of the US banking system to become more concentrated in the hands the Big Six banks, which have legacy connections to the Big Six banks that drove the country to disaster during the 1929 Crash, and have been at the forefront of the nexus of political-financial power policies for more than a century. Yellen had a seat at the Clinton administration banking deregulation table when Glass-Steagall was summarily dismantled thereby enabling big banks to become bigger and more complex and risky. Those commercial banks that didn’t hook up with investment banks back then, got their chance in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. They also concocted 75% of the toxic assets that were spread globally and the associated leverage behind them in the lead up to 2008.

Rather than show meaningful initiative to engender safety in the financial system (which if she had, or wanted to, would have rendered her a non-viable candidate for her position), she reprimanded the banks while providing them cheap capital. That’s like egging people with a tendency toward excess on as they gorge on multi-course gourmet dinners, making disparaging comments about their girth, and being dubbed their coach for The Biggest Loser while serving them the next course. Political theatre is its own end.

This latest rise of market volatility, however, is foreshadowing the real end of global QE as a proxy bond investor packaged for political purposes as necessary to combat deflation, increase liquidity, or whatever the reason-du-jour providing the QE program legitimacy beyond its true function of providing cheap capital to the private banking system, is.

The reason that the artificial resuscitation of the entire global financial system has worked as long as it has is due to the collaboration of major governments, central banks, and powerful private banks behind it. These three pillars of power have been mutually reinforcing.  Since early 2009, the bond and stock market have soared on the back of external capital from the central banks supported by the elite government leaders of the countries with the largest banks.

Just this year, 23 central banks have cut rates due to ‘sluggish growth’ – as if this cheap money has helped main populations anywhere. In the process their currencies will weaken. The US may have a strong dollar on the back of having had the largest and first QE / ZIRP program which is why  (behind the banks’ need) there’s no particular reason – yet - for the Fed to raise rates. Plus, the labor situation is barely improving even if the headline unemployment figures based on low job-market participation and poorly paying jobs appears better. Also, the ‘lower demand’ for oil amidst higher production (and some big commodity trading desks slamming oil prices and blaming Saudi Arabia) has made inflation (outside of the cost of living and the stock market) look tame enough to make rates hikes unnecessary.  But the big market players think (or say, anyway) that rate hikes could happen soon. This uncertainty begets higher volatility.

Meanwhile, the Euro is tanking against the dollar because Mario Draghi's ECB is on a QE roll, buying covered bonds from the likes of Deutschebank, ING, and BNP while pummeling Greece for not wanting to further crucify its population in order to repay funds that had egregious terms to begin with. Their ‘bailout’ had nothing to do with helping Greece attain a stronger economy and everything to do with validating speculators and the banks that sold them bonds. The IMF even sort of admitted this. But the Troika has made plutocratic finance a blood sport.

All this is fodder for triple digit market swings. Somewhere in the madness, lies the notion that this particular policy of speculation subsidization for the upper banking class can’t last forever. There are only so many entities that can buy so many bonds and filter so much cheap capital into the system for so long. At some point the ECB program will run its stated course. Rates around the world will head to zero or somewhat negative. And then what?  There will be no more powder in the QE / ZIRP global keg. That’s when it gets really bad.

Meanwhile, the rising volatility we will face this year (to the downside) in the financial markets, will signal this unraveling. The best course for mere individuals is to reduce their exposure to the insanity.  “Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away” as the lyrics to the old gambling song go. Because rest assured, the big boys are going to be on the financial life rafts first…economic Titanic style. That volatility – it’s the iceberg finally looming.