Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

  • ROBERT ARMSTRONG: Welcome to Charts that Count.

  • What's wrong with this picture?

  • The red line is initial US jobless claims

  • of which there have been about 26 million

  • in the past five weeks.

  • The blue line is the S&P 500, which

  • is up almost 30% from its lows in the latter part of March.

  • Now, no one wants to pile a financial crisis on top

  • of a public health crisis.

  • But it is very fair to ask why the stock market is feeling

  • so enthusiastic when millions of Americans are out of work,

  • and hundreds of thousands of businesses are still shuttered.

  • There are two basic points to keep in mind

  • about this at the outset.

  • The first is that the stock market is not

  • the consumer economy.

  • The S&P 500 is about 25% tech stocks.

  • Another 15% is in health care.

  • And both of these sectors have done very well

  • through the crisis, supporting the rest of the index.

  • The second point is that monetary policy still matters

  • and matters immensely.

  • Central bank's easing of interest rates

  • and their purchases of bonds have driven fixed income yields

  • down to almost uninvestable levels.

  • This in turn forces investors who require real returns

  • into the stock market.

  • But is either one of these factors

  • really enough to explain the strength we see in stocks?

  • I don't think that they do.

  • I think there is another assumption at play--

  • the so-called V-shaped recovery, the idea

  • that the economy, once the virus crisis passes,

  • will rebound very quickly and hit its old levels of growth.

  • There is also the assumption that this V-shaped recovery

  • will happen relatively soon.

  • But are we really so confident in this?

  • Last week, the US automaker Ford issued bonds

  • at a yield of nearly 10%, showing just how much investors

  • demand to be paid if they are going

  • to put their money at risk in a company that

  • depends on the strength of the American consumer.

  • Oil for future delivery recently fell to negative price.

  • The market is not as strong as it seems.

  • Be careful out there.

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it