Buenas noticias recientes no deben hacernos bajar la guardia

Genevieve Signoret & Patrick Signoret

Así advirtieron Robert Shiller en NYT y Jonathan Spicer en MacroScope de Reuters esta semana. Por otro lado, Bill McBride de Calculated Risk nota que el indicador de probabilidad de recesión de la Fed de St. Louis indica que la probabilidad de que EE UU esté en recesión es cercana a cero.

Shiller:

The recovery in housing, the stock market and the overall economy has finally gained sustainable momentum — or so it is said.

[…] Hope is a wonderful thing. But we also need to remember that changes in the stock market, the housing market and the overall economy have relatively little to do with one another over years or decades. (We economists would say that they are only slightly correlated.) Furthermore, all three are subject to sharp turns. The economy is a complicated system, with many moving parts.

So, amid all those complications, there are other possibilities: Could we be approaching another major stock market peak? Will the housing market’s takeoff be short-lived? And could we dip into another recession?

[…] Along with colleagues, I have been conducting surveys about aspects of stock market confidence. For example, since 1989, with the help of some colleagues at Yale, I have been collecting data on the opinions and ideas of institutional investors and private individuals. These data, and indexes constructed from them, can be found on the Web site of the Yale School of Management.

I have called one of these indexes “valuation confidence.” It is the percentage of respondents who think that the stock market is not overvalued. Using the six-month moving average ended in February, it was running at 72 percent for institutional investors and 62 percent for individuals. That may sound like a ton of confidence, but it isn’t as high as the roughly 80 percent recorded in both categories just before the market peak of 2007.

How do the these figures relate to other stock market measures? I rely on the measure of stock market valuation that Prof. John Campbell of Harvard and I developed more than 20 years ago. Called the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio, or CAPE, this measure is the real, or inflation-adjusted, Standard & Poor’s 500 index divided by a 10-year average of real S.& P. earnings. The CAPE has been high of late: it stands at 23, compared with a historical average of around 15. This suggests that the market is somewhat overpriced and might show below-average returns in the future.

Spicer:

Haven’t we seen this movie before? U.S. jobs growth is finding its stride, the unemployment rate is easing, stocks are soaring, and, just this morning, a surprise jump in the all-important retail sales figure. And all this rosy economic data with the spring fast approaching.

It’s almost enough to make one forget what happened in the summer of 2012. And 2011. Oh, and 2010.

As the frustrated U.S. Federal Reserve knows all too well, the economic recovery that seemed to have found its legs early in each of those years flopped hard around June or July. The flops, in turn, prompted the central bank to ramp back up its accommodative policies – and no doubt prompted some policymakers to kick themselves for laying off the monetary gas pedal too soon.

[…] So while it might seem odd, even reckless, that Fed policy is about as easy now as it was in the depths of the financial crisis, this fear of economic déjà vu probably means that QE3 will continue deep into the second half of the year.

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