It Was Never About Oil

The link between stock prices and oil has been especially high of late, and that has left quite a few traders and experts stumped. For a good long while any impact from oil was denied as only “transitory” or even helpful to consumers through some sort of “tax cut” effect. In January 2016, however, liquidations appeared regularly in one alongside the other. This is/was not supposed to occur. From last month:

“Absent an economic recession, stocks have fallen too far in my mind as a long-term investor,” says John Buckingham, who manages about $600 million as chief investment officer of Al Frank Asset Management…

“It’s a big move, and the sentiment in crude is driving pretty much all asset classes right now,” said Brett Mock, managing director at brokerage JonesTrading Institutional Services LLC.

Again today, stocks sold precipitously (in the morning) while oil crashed, as if there might be some common monetary theme behind all the liquidation efforts. It has left even the most veteran stock watchers as reluctant petroleum analysts still wondering why so much crude supply could be so devastating.

“It’s the oil tail wagging the market dog ,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities.

That has left the “market” seemingly in desperation for the Fed to come back and save stocks as so many believed had happened before.

“There could be some growing optimism ahead of Janet Yellen’s testimony. She has in the past had the ability to push markets higher, although that’s diminished in recent years,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab.

It’s a nice fairy tale, but the very fact that stocks and oil are where they are suggests the Fed hasn’t been effective at all; particularly since all anyone will talk about is a looming recession contradicting everything monetary policy has described or promised. In fact, the entire idea of the “Greenspan” put, updated from Bernanke to Yellen, never materialized. When needed, when the market was most pressed, the Fed failed – spectacularly. And 2008 was not the first as this century has already witnessed just 15 years in two 60% declines in stocks (for the S&P 500; worse in other segments/indices).

What clouds the issue of monetarism is the difference between them. The dot-com bust was just as severe and in many ways more painful (the Chinese torture of slow erosion of the first versus the much faster and immediately violent crash of the most recent) but there was no great recession with it, only mild economic discomfort. Alan Greenspan and his committee of the orthodox faithful had been given a lot of credit for “guiding” the economy through that period with minimal damage. The fact that it was “achieved” via a massive housing bubble was only later appended to the narrative as if still a backhanded acknowledgement of monetary power and authority.

Even that still gives the Federal Reserve and monetary policy too much credit. We know this for sure because both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke told us; and contemporarily. In Greenspan’s words it was a “conundrum” while Bernanke posited a “global savings glut.” Both are the same interpretation of a monetary system far out of alignment with not just economics but even central bank policy. The context of both those ridiculous theories holds the dispostive interpretation – the FOMC was attempting to “tighten” monetary policy but the “conundrum” and “global savings glut” showed that the true monetary system was having none of it.