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In general, higher and more volatile inflation has negative effects on all financial assets, from stocks to corporate bonds to treasury bonds, and neutral to positive effects on gold, collectibles and real assets. The former is short hand for the small cap premium and the latter is the proxy for the value factor in returns.
Put simply, no central bank, no matter how powerful, can force market interest rates down, if inflation expectations stay low, or up, if investor are anticipating high inflation. For those who track the slope of the yield curve, and I am not one of those who believes that it has much predictive power, it was a confusing year.
In my third post at the start of 2023, I looked at US treasuries, the long-touted haven of safety for investors. In 2022, they were in the eye on the storm, with the ten-year US treasury bond depreciating in price by more than 19% during the year, the worst year for US treasury returns in a century.
The table below summarizes the market cap change, by region of the world: It is no surprise that Eastern Europe and Russia, which are in the eye of the hurricane, have seen the most damage to equities, but other than the Middle East, every other equity market in the world is down, with the US, EU and China shedding significant marketcapitalization.
In a post at the start of 2021 , I argued that while stocks entered the year at elevated levels, especially on historic metrics (such as PE ratios), they were priced to deliver reasonable returns, relative to very low risk free rates (with the treasury bond rate at 0.93% at the start of 2021). from its level at the start of the year.
The first quarter of 2021 has been, for the most part, a good time for equity markets, but there have been surprises. The first has been the steep rise in treasury rates in the last twelve weeks, as investors reassess expected economic growth over the rest of the year and worry about inflation.
Consider, for instance, an investor who picks stocks based upon price to book ratios, who finds a stock trading at a price to book ratio of 1.5. While some of the companies in this data trace their existence back decades, there is a healthy proportion of younger companies, many in emerging markets and new industries.
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