Risk, Inflation, and the Stock Market

Risk, Inflation, and the Stock Market
Author: Robert S. Pindyck
Publisher:
Total Pages: 44
Release: 1983
Genre: Corporations
ISBN:

Most explanations for the decline in share values over the past two decades have focused on the concurrent increase in inflation.This paper considers an alternative explanation: a substantial increase in the riskiness of capital investments. We show that the variance of firms' real gross marginal return on capital has increased significantly, increasing the relative riskiness of investors' returns on equity, and that this can explain a large part of the market decline. We also assess the effects of increase in the mean and variance of the inflation rate, and a decline in firms' expected return on capital.

Inflation, Tax Rules, and Capital Formation

Inflation, Tax Rules, and Capital Formation
Author: Martin Feldstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226241793

Inflation, Tax Rules, and Capital Formation brings together fourteen papers that show the importance of the interaction between tax rules and monetary policy. Based on theoretical and empirical research, these papers emphasize the importance of including explicit specifications of the tax system in such study.

Strategic Asset Allocation

Strategic Asset Allocation
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019160691X

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

The Stock Market Price of Inflation Risk and Its Variation Over Time

The Stock Market Price of Inflation Risk and Its Variation Over Time
Author: Martijn Boons
Publisher:
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

The inflation risk premium (IRP) in the U.S. stock market varies over time. We use individual stocks to estimate the IRP, because this provides us with a heterogeneous cross-section of exposures. We find that the IRP is a significant -5.5% since the 1960s, but reverses to an insignificant positive value in the recent decade. Consistent with this reversal, we find that the IRP is more negative in recessions historically, but more positive in the two latest recessions. We show that both the introduction of Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) in 1997, an attractive alternative inflation hedge, and a reversal in the covariance between inflation and the real economy at the end of the 1990s contribute to this reversal. These findings are consistent with inflation as a state variable in the intertemporal capital asset pricing model (ICAPM).

Stock Returns and Inflation Redux: An Explanation from Monetary Policy in Advanced and Emerging Markets

Stock Returns and Inflation Redux: An Explanation from Monetary Policy in Advanced and Emerging Markets
Author: Mr. Zhongxia Zhang
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2021-08-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1513586750

Classical theories of monetary economics predict that real stock returns are negatively correlated with inflation when monetary policy is countercyclical. Previous empirical studies mostly focus on a small group of developed countries or a few countries with hyperinflation. In this paper, I examine the stock return-inflation relation under different monetary policy regimes and conditions using an expanded dataset of 71 economies. Empirical evidence suggests that the stock return-inflation relation is partially driven by monetary policy. If a country’s monetary authority conducts a more countercyclical monetary policy, the stock return-inflation relation becomes more negative. In addition, the results differ by monetary policy framework. In exchange rate anchor countries, stock markets do not respond to monetary policy cyclicality. In inflation targeting countries, stock markets react more strongly to inflation. A key contribution of this paper is to classify inflation targeters by their behaviors, and illustrate that behavior matters in shaping market perceptions: markets react to inflation and monetary policy cyclicality when central banks are able to control inflation within their target bands. In this case markets are sensitive to inflation dynamics when inflation is above the announced target bands. Finally, when monetary policy is constrained by the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB), a structural break is introduced and real stock returns no longer respond to inflation and monetary policy cyclicality.

Inflation Expectations

Inflation Expectations
Author: Peter J. N. Sinclair
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2009-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135179778

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Deep Risk

Deep Risk
Author: William J. Bernstein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 56
Release: 2013-08
Genre: Asset allocation
ISBN: 9780988780316

This booklet takes portfolio design beyond the familiar "black box" mean-variance framework. Most importantly, the short-term volatility of financial assets, commonly measured as standard deviation, is a highly imperfect measure of the actual long-horizon perils faced by real-world investors subject to the vagaries of financial and military history. These risks have names--inflation, deflation, confiscation, and devastation--and any useful discussion of portfolio design of necessity incorporates their probabilities, consequences, and costs of mitigation ... This booklet contains ... with luck, a framework within income and all-equity portfolios. This booklet contains ... with luck, a framework within which to think more clearly about risk. Note: the entire Investing for Adults series is not for beginners.

How to Listen When Markets Speak

How to Listen When Markets Speak
Author: Lawrence G. McDonald
Publisher: Crown Currency
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024-03-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0593727509

A New York Times bestselling author and leading expert on market risk argues that seismic shifts in the global economy will trigger a multi-trillion-dollar migration of wealth, outlining new rules of investing for the forward-thinking. “I can’t tell you how much I learned from How to Listen When Markets Speak. The historical perspectives and insights are something every investor needs to know. Buy this book.”—Mark Cuban From Wall Street to the White House, the fantasy of an eventual “return to normal” is still alive and well, nurtured by dangerously outdated theories. But the economic world as we know it—and the rules that govern it—are over. In the coming decade, we’ll witness sustained inflation, a series of sovereign and corporate debt crises, and a thundering of capital out of financial assets into hard assets. Few are prepared. Lawrence G. McDonald, founder of the economic research platform The Bear Traps Report, got a real-world education in market risk when, as a Lehman Brothers VP, he watched the firm ignore flashing warning signs before its collapse. His analysis led him to identify twenty-one indicators for gauging the health of an economy and detecting early signals of opportunity and danger. In How to Listen When Markets Speak, McDonald unveils his unique predictive models, connecting surprising dots between past, present, and future and outlining actionable trading ideas for staying a beat ahead of the markets. Readers will learn: • How disastrous Fed policy will collide with an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape to keep U.S. inflation near 3-5% for the next decade • How growing demand for oil and gas, underinvestment in urgently needed energy infrastructure, and cozy Russia–Saudi Arabia relations will lift the base price of energy to historic levels • Why hard assets and rare minerals like lithium and cobalt will outperform growth stocks, U.S. treasuries, and overcrowded passive investment strategies—how to detect bearish and bullish trends in advance • How passive investing and the vehicles intended to democratize finance have fueled bubbles and ideological skew by large market participants, leaving millions of 401(k)s and IRAs at risk • Why America will likely lose its position as a global superpower and holder of the world’s premier reserve currency, and may be forced to slash Social Security, Medicare, and military spending Rather than merely doomsaying, How to Listen When Markets Speak equips readers to make sense of our current moment, resist reactionary narratives and baseless analysis, and preserve their wealth in turbulent times. When markets speak, it pays to listen.

Time-Varying Inflation Risk and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

Time-Varying Inflation Risk and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns
Author: Dominic Burkhardt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 77
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

I provide empirical evidence indicating that inflation risk is time-varying and priced in the cross-section of individual stocks in the U.S. and UK equity markets. I establish that the way inflation risk is priced in equity markets is closely related to the cyclicality of inflation. I show that the market price of inflation shocks is positive (negative) in the cross-section of individual stocks when inflation is procyclical (countercyclical) and hence comoves positively (negatively) with measures of economic activity. As a consequence, risk premiums on stocks with positive/negative exposure to inflation shocks depend on whether the economy is in a pro- or countercyclical inflation regime. A zero-investment strategy that goes long low (high) inflation-beta stocks and short high (low) inflation-beta stocks when inflation is countercyclical (procyclical) yields economically large and statistically significant return premiums in both markets, even after controlling for well-known risk-factors.