Investors Face A World Where Stocks No Longer Reign
The age-old mantra of ‘there is no alternative’ to stocks gets a stiff test as market losses mount, inflation accelerates and interest rates rise.
6 min
For years after the 2008-09 financial crisis, interest rates were so low that many investors argued that to get a decent return, you had to put a hefty chunk of your portfolio in the stock market. That conviction was so popular that Wall Street gave it a name: TINA, short for “there is no alternative” to stocks. Sure, the stock market was riskier than, say, government bonds that are guaranteed to pay out coupons every year. But returns on stocks were so much better than practically everything else in the markets that investors saw few viable alternatives for where to put their money.
The Federal Reserve has turned that dynamic on its head. The central bank, determined to rein in inflation, has begun what could be its most aggressive campaign of interest-rate increases since the 1980s. Investors expect the Fed to bring rates to around 3% by early 2023 from near zero at the start of 2022. Once-loved stocks, as a result, have tumbled to multiyear lows.
The shift is inflicting pain on markets and investors of all stripes as losses mount for hedge funds, day traders and the funds that manage more than $4.5 trillion in retirement savings for U.S. firefighters, police officers, teachers and other public workers. It is hurting startups that just a year ago had found an easy way to raise money. A growing list of companies trying to go public through SPACs, or special-purpose acquisition companies, have cancelled their plans, citing market volatility. And traders of cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, have also taken a drubbing this year as the Fed’s policy shift dented the allure of once-highflying risky investments.
Investors are moving their money out of stocks and into ultrasafe assets that had largely been unloved for the past decade—such as cash, Treasury bills, certificates of deposit and money-market funds. Investors put $51.4 billion in global money-market funds in the week through April 27, the most for a week since October, according to Refinitiv Lipper. During the entire month of April they yanked $19.2 billion out of stock exchange-traded funds—the biggest outflows since 2019, according to Morningstar Inc. Meanwhile, 47% of global fund managers surveyed by Bank of America Corp. in April said they had larger than average cash positions in their portfolios—the highest level since April 2020.
The good news for some of these investors is that conservative bets are now starting to provide more bang for their buck. Three-month Treasury bills are now offering a yield of around 0.97%, up from near zero for most of the last two years. Capital One Financial Corp. is giving holders of five-year certificates of deposit an annual percentage yield of 2.25%, and the Treasury Department’s inflation-adjusted I Bonds are making interest payments of 9.62% to investors for the next six months.
“There’s a lot of sitting on hands,” said Jason Draho, head of asset allocation Americas at UBS Global Wealth Management. Many UBS private-wealth clients are holding cash instead of trying to identify the market bottom, he added.
‘I don’t want to buy stocks’
If stocks were still rising the way they did the past several years, these alternatives would likely be of little interest to investors. After all, the S&P 500 delivered annualized returns of 17% over the past decade. But between investor worries about tightening monetary policy, inflation, and Covid-19 lockdowns and supply-chain disruptions slowing global growth, the stock market has had an indisputably grim year.
The S&P 500 is now down 16% in 2022—on course to deliver its worst return since 2008. Even bonds, which have been hit by their own brutal selloff, have managed to beat the stock market so far this year. The Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index, which includes Treasurys, mortgage-backed securities and investment-grade corporate debt, has returned negative 9.4% in 2022.
“Before, people were saying ‘I don’t want to own bonds anymore because they yield too little, I’ll buy stocks instead.’ Today, they’re saying, ‘I don’t want to buy stocks because they’re falling,’” said Andy Kapyrin, co-chief investment officer at RegentAtlantic, which manages roughly $6 billion in assets.
What’s unusual about investors’ reactions is that, in the past decade, money managers typically were quick to swoop in after selloffs to pick up discounted shares—or in Wall Street parlance, to “buy the dip.” That helped keep stock drawdowns relatively short.
This time around, the market hasn’t gotten the same lift. The S&P 500 posted its sixth consecutive week of losses Friday, a streak last matched in length during the height of the 2011 European debt crisis. Many investors see the tumult as the consequence of the Fed finally winding down easy money policies that sent shares soaring and encouraged people to keep putting money into the stock market because they felt they had no other palatable choices.
One reason why stocks have struggled to make a comeback, investors say, is simple math. The S&P 500 has a dividend yield of around 1.5%. Amid this year’s tumult, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note is around 2.9%. The argument for holding stocks becomes less attractive when investors have an essentially risk-free alternative on their hands, Mr. Draho said.
Stock investors faced with rising interest rates and falling stocks have historically been rewarded by sticking it out in the market. For instance, the Fed raised interest rates in 1986 and 1987 to try to fight inflation. After stocks careened on Black Monday, the central bank immediately lowered rates again, helping stocks go on to produce double-digit percentage returns the following two years.
More recently, stocks fell in 2018 after the Fed raised rates and indicated it would continue to do so the following year. The central bank then wound up cutting rates three times—effectively taking away its 2018 rate increases—to try to give the U.S. economy a buffer from the trade war and slowing global growth. The S&P 500 once again rallied, rewarding investors with double-digit percentage returns in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Returns on cash and cash-like investments trailed well behind stocks over that period.
What’s given investors pause is the feeling that this time, the Fed may approach things differently. Many believe there is little chance of the central bank reversing course on its monetary policy tightening anytime soon, even if the market rout deepens substantially from here. That is likely to keep the TINA effect at bay for some time.
The Fed has indicated its top priority at the moment is to rein in price pressures. Data released last month showed the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, the personal-consumption expenditures price index, rose in March at its fastest pace since 1982. Prices for everything from cars to groceries to gasoline have soared over the past few months, leading President Joe Biden to declare inflation the economy’s biggest challenge in a speech Tuesday.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell himself said restoring price stability would be “absolutely essential” at a panel hosted by the International Monetary Fund in April. “Economies don’t work without price stability,” he added.
Few places to hide
The question many investors have: How long will it take for the Fed to get inflation under control? And how will markets fare in the meantime?
Wall Street analysts have sketched out a few ways the rest of the year could go.
In one scenario, the Fed pulls off what’s called a soft landing: cooling down the economy enough to get inflation back near its 2% target, but avoiding actually tipping the economy into a recession. That might help make stocks attractive again since corporate profits would remain strong, something that should encourage investors to place bets on publicly traded companies.
In a less upbeat scenario, the Fed’s interest-rate increases wind up putting the economy at the risk of recession. Bond yields should then fall, since they typically go down when investors are less optimistic about the economy and go up when they see higher growth and inflation in the future.
Would that revive the TINA effect?
Probably not immediately, say Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts led by chief U.S. equity strategist David Kostin. For starters, corporate earnings would likely suffer. Going back to 1949, the median per-share earnings decline during a U.S. recession has been 13%, the team wrote in a research note. Stock prices would then likely fall further. The S&P 500 has had a median fall of 24% from peak to trough during past recessions, the team found.
The not-so-nice takeaway for investors may be that, after a long and unusually strong period for the markets, simply parking money in stocks likely won’t deliver the type of returns they got used to over the past decade.
RegentAtlantic’s Mr. Kapyrin is advising his clients to limit their exposure to bonds with long durations, which tend to be more sensitive to rate increases than Treasury bills, which have shorter maturities, ranging from just a few days to a year. He’s also recommending that, within the stock market, clients look past technology stocks and toward consumer staples companies, which have the potential to deliver steady earnings even in a volatile environment.
“When the Fed goes through this kind of process, there are very few places to hide,” Mr. Kapyrin said. “It’s no longer the market’s friend.”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
Food prices continue to rise at a rapid pace, surprising central banks and pressuring debt-laden governments
4 min
LONDON—Fresh out of an energy crisis, Europeans are facing a food-price explosion that is changing diets and forcing consumers across the region to tighten their belts—literally.
This is happening even though inflation as a whole is falling thanks to lower energy prices, presenting a new policy challenge for governments that deployed billions in aid last year to keep businesses and households afloat through the worst energy crisis in decades.
New data on Wednesday showed inflation in the U.K. fell sharply in April as energy prices cooled, following a similar pattern around Europe and in the U.S. But food prices were 19.3% higher than a year earlier.
The continued surge in food prices has caught central bankers off guard and pressured governments that are still reeling from the cost of last year’s emergency support to come to the rescue. And it is pressuring household budgets that are also under strain from rising borrowing costs.
In France, households have cut their food purchases by more than 10% since the invasion of Ukraine, while their purchases of energy have fallen by 4.8%.
In Germany, sales of food fell 1.1% in March from the previous month, and were down 10.3% from a year earlier, the largest drop since records began in 1994. According to the Federal Information Centre for Agriculture, meat consumption was lower in 2022 than at any time since records began in 1989, although it said that might partly reflect a continuing shift toward more plant-based diets.
Food retailers’ profit margins have contracted because they can’t pass on the entire price increases from their suppliers to their customers. Markus Mosa, chief executive of the Edeka supermarket chain, told German media that the company had stopped ordering products from several large suppliers because of rocketing prices.
A survey by the U.K.’s statistics agency earlier this month found that almost three-fifths of the poorest 20% of households were cutting back on food purchases.
“This is an access problem,” said Ludovic Subran, chief economist at insurer Allianz, who previously worked at the United Nations World Food Program. “Total food production has not plummeted. This is an entitlement crisis.”
Food accounts for a much larger share of consumer spending than energy, so a smaller rise in prices has a greater impact on budgets. The U.K.’s Resolution Foundation estimates that by the summer, the cumulative rise in food bills since 2020 will have amounted to 28 billion pounds, equivalent to $34.76 billion, outstripping the rise in energy bills, estimated at £25 billion.
“The cost of living crisis isn’t ending, it is just entering a new phase,” Torsten Bell, the research group’s chief executive, wrote in a recent report.
Food isn’t the only driver of inflation. In the U.K., the core rate of inflation—which excludes food and energy—rose to 6.8% in April from 6.2% in March, its highest level since 1992. Core inflation was close to its record high in the eurozone during the same month.
Still, Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey told lawmakers Tuesday that food prices now constitute a “fourth shock” to inflation after the bottlenecks that jammed supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise in energy prices that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and surprisingly tight labor markets.
Europe’s governments spent heavily on supporting households as energy prices soared. Now they have less room to borrow given the surge in debt since the pandemic struck in 2020.
Some governments—including those of Italy, Spain and Portugal—have cut sales taxes on food products to ease the burden on consumers. Others are leaning on food retailers to keep their prices in check. In March, the French government negotiated an agreement with leading retailers to refrain from price rises if it is possible to do so.
Retailers have also come under scrutiny in Ireland and a number of other European countries. In the U.K., lawmakers have launched an investigation into the entire food supply chain “from farm to fork.”
“Yesterday I had the food producers into Downing Street, and we’ve also been talking to the supermarkets, to the farmers, looking at every element of the supply chain and what we can do to pass on some of the reduction in costs that are coming through to consumers as fast as possible,” U.K. Treasury Chief Jeremy Hunt said during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London.
The government’s Competition and Markets Authority last week said it would take a closer look at retailers.
“Given ongoing concerns about high prices, we are stepping up our work in the grocery sector to help ensure competition is working well,” said Sarah Cardell, who heads the CMA.
Some economists expect that added scrutiny to yield concrete results, assuming retailers won’t want to tarnish their image and will lean on their suppliers to keep prices down.
“With supermarkets now more heavily under the political spotlight, we think it more likely that price momentum in the food basket slows,” said Sanjay Raja, an economist at Deutsche Bank.
It isn’t entirely clear why food prices have risen so fast for so long. In world commodity markets, which set the prices received by farmers, food prices have been falling since April 2022. But raw commodity costs are just one part of the final price. Consumers are also paying for processing, packaging, transport and distribution, and the size of the gap between the farm and the dining table is unusually wide.
The BOE’s Bailey thinks one reason for the bank having misjudged food prices is that food producers entered into longer-term but relatively expensive contracts with fertilizer, energy and other suppliers around the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in their eagerness to guarantee availability at a time of uncertainty.
But as the pressures being placed on retailers suggest, some policy makers suspect that an increase in profit margins may also have played a role. Speaking to lawmakers, Bailey was wary of placing any blame on food suppliers.
“It’s a story about rebuilding margins that were squeezed in the early part of last year,” he said.
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
