This Time IS Different

The bulls (not the bears) would have you believe that this time is different.

The root of this view in anchored in the dogma that the cyclical recovery cures all ills as follows:

The cyclical recovery evolves as increased corporate spending on wages and new hires which, along with an increase in emerging economies’ consumer spending, result in a consumer led demand driven sustainable cyclical expansion. Corporate profits rise further enabling the virtuous circle to become engaged.

The sustainable cyclical expansion then helps to alleviate the structural risks to the global economy – e.g. current account imbalances – thereby enabling the financial sector to recover further and move the global economy off government life support.

The financial markets respond with a move more toward normality as rates rise, the dollar stabilizes, gold loses its luster, and equity valuation levels return to above average (>15 times). The combination of higher corporate profits and above average P/E levels drives stock prices back to record highs, which for the S&P 500 means 1548 (18 x $86).

An era of growth and prosperity returns thereby proving that this time is not different; that there will be no new normal (i.e. below average growth and profitability).

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Even plausible, provided one thing – conventional thinking in unconventional times requires a belief that this time IS different.

The Burden of Proof

The bulls would have everyone believe that the burden of proof that this time is different falls on those who say what was no longer works (the old normal) and that the future is a place of great uncertainty (the new normal) with the road ahead a most bumpy one. There’s one problem with this thinking – evolutionary processes to new normals are normal. A purging of the old always occurs and it always leads to a new normal, whatever that new normal may be.

Extrapolating the recent past into the future often becomes a substitute for first order thinking. Be it fighting the last war or blindly accepting corporate earnings guidance, embedded interests conspire to preserve the status quo, which facilitates a blindness to change. And it is change that is normal, not what-worked-before-will-work-again-indefinitely thinking, made all the more illogical given the highly dynamic complex global macro environment the world finds itself in.

In evolution, those that are about to become extinct are the last to notice. The same is true in the social sciences of economics and the markets, where old rules in changed times demand the view that this time is different.