Submitted by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,
I’d like to share an update that throws some chilly water on the post-election stock market rally.
My friends Van Hoisington and Lacy Hunt of Hoisington Investment Management usually write only quarterly letters. They send interim updates only when something of major consequence happens. The fact they wrote this one is significant… and what they say is definitely important.
One. Big. Squeeze...
Everything must be awesome...
"Riskless" US Treasury bonds are at their riskiest relative to "risky" stocks since the summer of 2013's Taper Tantrum... and at the same time, bonds are 'cheapest' to stocks in over a year...
US Treasury bond risk is at its highest in 9 months as US equity risk hovers back near 2-month lows pushing the relative risk to its highest since Aug 2013...
In June 2011, July 2013, and July 2015, we saw the same spikes in bond risk vs equity risk... and each time, stocks collapse and stock vol surged very soon after.
A few months ago we wrote that the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund was on the verge of collapse after a series of shady real estate investments resulted in massive markdowns of pension assets, the ouster of the fund's CIO and an FBI raid of it's largest real estate investment manager (see "Dallas Cops' Pension Fund Nears Insolvency In Wake Of Shady Real Estate Deals, FBI Raid"). We summed up the fund's dilemma as follows:
Mario Draghi just dropped the c-word. In his address to the EU Parliament, the ECB President explained that financial-stability risks are "for the time being, contained." Having admitted that Deutsche Bank is correct that negative rates certainly hurt bank profits, Draghi remains "committed to accomodative policy." But it was ECB executive board member Benoit Coeure that spoiled the party by rejecting the narrative of ECB stock buying.