Märkte vor dem Minsky-Moment?
John Plender von der FT ist ein besonders scharfsinniger Beobachter der Märkte. Darum lässt es aufhören, wenn er die Investoren vor einem “Minsky-Moment” sieht. Definiert ist dieser so (Wikipedia): “A Minsky moment is a sudden, major collapse of asset values which generates a credit cycle or business cycle. The rapid instability occurs because long periods of steady prosperity and investment gains encourage a diminished perception of overall market risk, which promotes the leveraged risk of investing borrowed money instead of cash.” – bto: also genau unsere Lage heute und das schon lange:
- “If the maverick economist Hyman Minsky were alive he would almost certainly regard the current economic cycle as a testing ground for his instability hypothesis. This holds that the financial system has an innate tendency to swing from robustness to fragility because periods of financial stability breed complacency and encourage excessive risk-taking in markets.” – bto: gut zu beobachten wenn man auf die geringen Risikozuschläge für Unternehmensanleihen blickt.
- Wer schuld ist, ist diesmal völlig klar: “It is historically atypical in that the central banks have been encouraging market participants through quantitative easing to take on more risk to help stave off a perceived deflationary threat. This was, in a sense, a perpetuation of the asymmetric policy pursued by the Federal Reserve before the crisis. The manic search for yield that results from ultra-loose monetary policy guarantees that risk is being mispriced. So it is a worthwhile exercise to ask where complacency might do most damage.” – bto: Am Ende, denke ich, wird es politisch der größte Schaden sein.
- “Since 2008 debt has grown notably faster than nominal gross domestic product. This is most obviously the case in the US where public sector debt was on an unsustainable path even before Donald Trump introduced the first pro-cyclical fiscal expansion since Lyndon Johnson’s in the 1960s. (…) Against that background the Fed might have to tighten policy faster than expected. This would expose overborrowed companies and households while disrupting US asset markets and creating problems in the banking system as borrowers default.” – bto: Da könnte man nun sagen, dass es kein US-Problem alleine ist und zudem die Fed bereits erste Entspannungszeichen sendet.
- “It would also expose complacency in bond and credit markets where credit quality has been declining markedly. The yield gap between the best and the worst paper has narrowed sharply on the basis of a search for yield regardless of risk. Lending conditions have increasingly been relaxed. The extreme case is the market for leveraged loans where the IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report argues — much too tentatively — that markets may be underpricing the deterioration in covenant quality that, according to rating agency Moody’s, is at the lowest level on record.” – bto: weshalb hier die wirklich größte Gefahr droht.
- “Regulatory curbs on proprietary trading in banks are clearly having an impact. So, too, are many structural changes in the markets including collective investment vehicles that are assumed to be able to liquidate investments if investors seek to pull out in a troubled market. The difficulty is that the search for yield has pushed people into areas such as the corporate bond market that has never been particularly liquid.” – bto: Szenario: Alle wollen verkaufen und niemand will oder kann kaufen.
- “And then there are the more esoteric new markets where prices may be tentative or based on computer modelling rather than market data. The IMF detects that liquidity may have become more segmented across different trading platforms and more dependent on high-frequency traders and benchmark-driven institutional investors.” – bto: Womit wir beim Kernproblem sind. Es sind zu viele Akteure im Markt die pro-zyklisch handeln werden.
- “Henry Kaufman, an acute observer after nearly 70 years involvement in markets, worries about concentration. Back in 1990, he points out, the 10 largest financial institutions held about 10 per cent of US financial assets. Today the figure is about 80 per cent. When there is a high concentration of investments in relatively few institutions, he adds, the marketability of a large volume of securities is reduced, as is competition among market makers.” – bto: was nochmals an ein Kino mit nur einem kleinen Ausgang erinnert, in dem Feuer gerufen wird.
- “Liquidity is an elusive quality at the best of times. In a bear market it can disappear in a moment. Rest assured that not all of today’s trading strategies are predicated on that reality.” – bto: der ideale Treibsatz für die nächste Krise.
- !”To return to Mr Minsky, the big question around the instability hypothesis now turns on the behaviour of the central banks. In an ever more concentrated financial sector the role of the Fed and other central banks in providing liquidity becomes more important. It is just possible that we have moved into an era of permanent asymmetric monetary policy and central bank hyper-activism — in which case we may need a new, revisionist hypothesis.” – bto: Wie die These von “this time it is different” stimmt auch das nicht. Selbst den Notenbanken geht die Puste einmal aus, nämlich dann, wenn das Geld nichts mehr gilt.
