The warning flags for US equities are now flying

A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street analysts expect even higher profit margins this year, a sign of over-optimism. The Federal Reserve will have to reduce the central bank's excess reserves before rapid economic growth can resume once financial deleveraging is finalised. Photo: Reuters

A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street analysts expect even higher profit margins this year, a sign of over-optimism. The Federal Reserve will have to reduce the central bank's excess reserves before rapid economic growth can resume once financial deleveraging is finalised. Photo: Reuters

Published Oct 3, 2014

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AT THE beginning of this year, investors hoped that the stock market rally, which pushed up the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 index 30 percent last year and 173 percent from its March 2009 low, would continue apace. So they seized on any optimistic data and forecasts to justify their hopes.

Their enthusiasm waned in mid-January because of emerging market woes, but soon returned, taking major indexes to all-time highs. Nevertheless, a number of warning flags are flying. Among them: high price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios. These aren’t at record levels, but they are elevated.

Yale professor Robert Shiller’s CAPE (cyclically adjusted P/E ratio), based on the last 10 years of inflation-adjusted earnings to iron out cyclical variations, was 26.5 in mid-September, 61 percent above the long-term average of 16.5.

Stocks would need to drop by more than half to reach the long-run average. Also, because this ratio has been above average for most of the last two decades, it will probably spend many future years below 16.5 – if the long-term average is still valid.

It is now in the top 10 percent of its range, and when this occurred in the past, the real S&P 500 fell 1.4 percent a year over the next decade.

The Shiller P/E isn’t a precise forecasting tool, but its elevated level for so many years is a warning sign – slow economic and corporate revenue growth. Real gross domestic product (GDP) growth since the mid-2009 expansion began has been the slowest in the post-World War II era.

I expect tepid growth to persist at about 2 5 percent annually until financial deleveraging is completed in four more years or so. With inflation running at about 1 percent and deflation looming, annual increases in nominal GDP of 3 percent or less are in the offing. In the long run, corporate profits will grow in step with nominal GDP. Furthermore, the risks to economic growth are on the downside.

Consequently, growth in corporate sales will probably continue to be minimal and pricing power almost non-existent, resulting in further minimal rises in S&P 500 sales per share.

Both consumers and businesses are forcing corporations to slash prices, and many households are again switching from national brand products to cheaper house brands. Earnings depend on profit margins in the absence of meaningful sales volume and price increases.

Profit margins are at an all-time high and have been on a plateau for a few years, as measured for the total economy by profits’ share of national income.

Margin improvement, which is based on unsustainable cost-cutting and lower borrowing costs, isn’t as solid a foundation for profit growth as sales volume increases and pricing power are.

Costs can always be cut further, but the low-hanging fruit has been picked, as seen by the slower productivity growth since the burst in 2009 when US businesses took a meat axe to costs. Furthermore, corporate interest payments can’t decline indefinitely. They have fallen along with interest rates, even though the amount of corporate debt has risen in recent years.

Since bottoming out in the fourth quarter of 2008, corporate profits as a percentage of corporate gross value-added – a proxy for corporate revenue minus inter-company sales – have leaped.

They rose from 8.5 percent to 17.2 percent in the second quarter as pretax profits climbed by $877 billion (R9.9 trillion).

Net corporate interest expense dropped from 2.8 percent of gross value-added to 1.9 percent as interest costs fell $31bn. Other costs rose by $1 trillion but their share of gross value-added fell from 88.7 percent to 80.9 percent as a result of cost-cutting and productivity improvements. Consequently, of the 8.7 percentage-point rise in the overall profit margin, 0.9 points, or 10 percent, has been due to lower interest costs and 90 percent from cost-cutting.

The data presented here are pretax profits, but lower taxes have also contributed to higher after-tax profit margins as corporations offset recent tax payments with earlier losses suffered during the 2007/09 recession.

The effective tax rate for S&P 500 firms in 2012, including state and local taxes, is estimated at 29 percent compared with 32 percent in 2007. As noted earlier, further substantial gains from cost cutting may be difficult. And although I believe interest rates may fall further as financial deleveraging persists and deflation looms, the bulk of the decline in corporate interest payments is no doubt over.

Further, profits’ share of national income is cyclical and has been at the post-World War II pinnacle longer than ever. Also, profits and employee compensation’s shares are mirror images, and neither capital nor labour gets the upper hand indefinitely.

Nevertheless, Wall Street analysts expect even higher profit margins this year, a sign of over-optimism – Federal Reserve tapering. The Fed hasn’t started to reduce the $2.7 trillion in excess reserves that member banks have on deposit with the central bank, and it will need to do so before rapid economic growth can resume once financial deleveraging is completed.

Otherwise, reserves above the required level will get lent, turn into money in circulation and risk driving the economy through full employment and into serious inflation. Nevertheless, the Fed has been reducing the additions to these reserves as it cuts its monthly purchases of securities from $85bn last year to zero next month.

So the Fed has been adding less and less fuel to the fire that was the principal driver of stocks since August 2008.

In part two of this series, I’ll examine five other warning flags that could threaten equities.

A. Gary Shilling is a Bloomberg columnist.

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