How Sensitive Are Stocks To Interest Rates? Time to Find Out

There is a new urgency to the old question of how much credit falling interest rates should get for your stock portfolio’s strong performance.

The Federal Reserve and Bank of England have raised borrowing costs over the past week, confirming the end of near-zero rates and, analysts fear, of a decadeslong boost to stock valuations.

Higher share prices relative to company earnings explain half the returns of the S&P 500 over 10 years. That proportion rises to 60% for the technology-heavy Nasdaq as Google parent Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com have left “old economy” banks and utilities in the dust.

The raft of profitless tech-focused startups that hit the market last year, such as electric-vehicle maker Rivian Automotive Inc., fintech lender SoFi Technologies Inc. and various air-taxi ventures, seem particularly exposed to the turning tables. Otherwise, though, investors need to do some homework before simply rotating back to old-economy sectors.

A bond with a 2% coupon becomes less attractive when the return investors get by leaving the money in the bank rises from 0% to 1%. And its resale value will fall a lot more if it matures in 10 years rather than in two, because investors are locked in for a decade of disappointing returns. In financial jargon, it has higher “duration,” which is both a measure of sensitivity to rates and the weighted average time until all the cash flows are paid.

What about stocks? While they offer much more legroom to speculate because payments aren’t fixed, their value is—usually—still tied to expectations of making a profit. Mature businesses with predictable dividend payments can be seen as having low duration, whereas growth-led firms have more of their value tied to earnings in the distant future. Startups have extra-long duration: They are akin to buying a lottery ticket with a payout in 10 years’ time.

Most stocks, however, fall somewhere in between, which requires going beyond intuition or sector correlations with bond yields.

In a 2004 paper, University of Michigan researchers Patricia M. Dechow, Richard G. Sloan and Mark T. Soliman popularised a way to estimate a company’s “implied equity duration” by predicting future cash flows based on the growth of sales, earnings and book value. Applying their math to S&P 500, Euro Stoxx 50 and FTSE 100 stocks puts the duration of blue-chip stocks at around 20 years. As expected, the consumer services, healthcare and tech sectors, which have done better in the period of rock-bottom borrowing costs, rank above average, while energy, finance and telecommunications are below.

Sector averages are misleading, however. Within tech, the implied duration of Amazon and Netflix is above 23 years, whereas International Business Machines Corp. and Intel Corp. are closer to the market average and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., a maker of laptops and printers, ranks near the bottom at less than 14 years.

Meanwhile, electric-vehicle maker Tesla Inc. is an example of a long-duration disrupter in a mature industry. Cable operator Charter Communications Inc. and clothing giants Inditex, Burberry and Under Armour Inc. are less-obvious cases of old-economy but high-duration stocks.

Investors need to be careful with distortions created by the pandemic, which sunk the short-term profits of some more traditional sectors. As a 2021 paper shows, the crisis lengthened their implied duration by tying more of their value to post-Covid earnings, making casinos and cruise companies look more growth-focused than they are.

Markets still predict that the Fed will keep rates below 3% this economic cycle, compared with more than 5% pre-2008. So this past decade’s trend may only be partially reversed, especially because much of the valuation premium fetched by the likes of Amazon and Alphabet reflects the growing dominance of these firms in the real world. Conversely, banks may make more money when rates are higher, but the main reason they have suffered in recent years is weak economic growth and stricter financial regulation.

This is the moment for investors to take a closer look at the duration of their individual stockholdings. But they shouldn’t forget that strong balance sheets and growing profits win the day, no matter where interest rates are.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has described the global economy as “surprisingly resilient” amid rapid interest rate rises to quell high inflation since 2022, post-pandemic supply chain disruptions, a short-term spike in energy prices due to the war in Ukraine and increased geopolitical tensions involving China and the Middle East.

The IMF’s biannual World Economic Outlook report says the world has so far avoided stagflation and recession, with large pandemic savings enabling households to cope with higher rates and inflation, and strong immigration in advanced economies creating unusually tight labour markets.

IMF economic counsellor Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said most indicators point to a soft landing for the global economy and the IMG now expects “less economic scarring from the pandemic”. He noted that markets had reacted exuberantly in recent weeks to the prospect of central banks lowering interest rates soon.

However, the IMF says global growth will moderate over the next five years to its lowest level in decades. It projects 3.2 percent global growth in 2024 and 2025, the same pace as 2023, with still-high borrowing costs, the withdrawal of fiscal support and weak productivity growth weighing economic activity down.

Australia is expected to underperform other advanced economies, especially the United States, this year but will surge beyond them from 2025. The IMF predicts annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 1.5 percent in Australia in 2024, which is well below our long-term pre-pandemic average of 2.5 percent. The US is expected to book above-average growth of 2.7 percent in 2024 and the world’s advanced economies are tipped to average 1.7 percent growth.

Australian economic growth will then move above other advanced economies and maintain upward momentum through til 2029. The IMF predicts 2 percent GDP growth for Australia in 2025 and 2.3 percent in 2029. For the US, the IMF expects 1.9 percent growth in 2025 and 2.1 percent in 2029. For the advanced economies in aggregate, the IMF forecasts 1.8 percent growth in 2025 and 1.7 percent in 2029.

The IMF said higher interest rates had had less effect on the US economy compared to Australia because most US mortgages are on long-term fixed rates and household debt has been lower since the global financial crisis. In Australia, most loans are on variable rates and therefore immediately impacted by every rate rise, household debt is high, and housing supply is restricted.

“The exceptional recent performance of the United States is certainly impressive and a major driver of global growth, but it reflects strong demand factors as well, including a fiscal stance that is out of line with long-term fiscal sustainability,” said Mr Gourinchas.

An example of unusual fiscal policy is the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes US$369 billion in new spending to encourage green energy investment. “This raises short-term risks to the disinflation process, as well as longer-term fiscal and financial stability risks for the global economy since it risks pushing up global funding costs,” he said.

While things are going well now, Mr Gourinchas said risks to global economic progress remain.

“On the downside, new price spikes stemming from geopolitical tensions, including those from the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza and Israel, could, along with persistent core inflation where labour markets are still tight, raise interest rate expectations and reduce asset prices. A divergence in disinflation speeds among major economies could also cause currency movements that put financial sectors under pressure.”

Mr Gourinchas said growth in China could falter, hurting trading partners, without a comprehensive response to its property sector downturn. “Domestic demand will remain lacklustre for some time unless strong measures and reforms address the root cause. Public debt dynamics are also of concern, especially if the property crisis morphs into a local public finance crisis.”

He also noted that weak productivity growth remains a challenge for the whole world and “much hope rests on artificial intelligence delivering strong productivity gains in the medium term”.

How Sensitive Are Stocks To Interest Rates? Time to Find Out

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