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The economy continues to chug along, and this week’s batch of economic data — GDP, JOLTs, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, and a jobs report — is expected to provide evidence that the soft landing is here.
But it hardly feels like a landing. There’s too much going on, from Big Tech earnings and crazy weather effects on data to an impending election. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) just closed at its 28th record high of the year Tuesday.
But that’s not just it.
Schwab senior investment strategist Kevin Gordon, who recently appeared on Yahoo Finance’s Stocks in Translation, described a certain cognitive dissonance investors face.
“We’re living through the soft landing now,” he said, adding, “It’s not a destination in my mind. It’s a process.” In that regard, Gordon agrees with San Francisco Federal Reserve president Mary Daly. She recently penned an article, “Landing Softly is Just the Beginning,” in which she liberally uses the preferred term “sustained expansion.”
To their point, all the talk about landings might have been putting the cart before the horse.
It’s worth remembering that until we get a nationwide recession, we’ll still be living in the midst of the pandemic expansion that began with the restart of the US economy following a historic lockdown.
We can see this clearly by analyzing the GDP metric that will be updated this week.
After the historic drop and surge of 2020, US growth has remained robust except for the first couple of quarters in 2022. And the recent revision to Q2 2022 GDP, which flipped it to positive from negative, only strengthens the arguments for continuous expansion.
While this cycle expansion is now in its fourth year, astute investors will recall that we only recently celebrated the two-year anniversary of this bull market. Digging into this mismatch helps explain why this bull market has bucked most of the norms of the prior four decades.
“It is a weird bull market,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, said in another episode of Stocks in Translation. “I’m scratching my head too,” she added.
“[We thought that] small caps [were] going lead us to the races,” Cox said. Small-cap indexes like the Russell 2000 (^RUT) continued to make new lows as the megacaps were off to the races in 2023.
But Cox raised the other key insight that distinguishes the current bull market from others over the last 40 years. “[The weird market] was a product of the rate environment,” Cox said. And it’s here that the Fed has perhaps surprised investors and business owners the most.
Despite the most aggressive rate-hiking cycle in 40 years that was designed to choke off the easy-money spigot for businesses — non-bank corporations in the US have actually seen the burden of their interest payments trend down continuously since the pandemic, as highlighted by Apollo’s chief economist and partner Torsten Sløk. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.)
“To be sure, firms with weak earnings, weak revenue, and weak cash flows have been hit by Fed hikes,” Slok wrote. “[But] the negative effects of Fed hikes on corporates have been small.”
Gordon reflected on the positives for investors.
“If you’re in a sustained expansion where the labor market is intact, inflation expectations are well anchored, and you’ve got the economy growing at a pretty respectable pace, then you’re in a relatively good spot,” Gordon said.
On Yahoo Finance’s podcast Stocks in Translation, Yahoo Finance editor Jared Blikre cuts through the market mayhem, noisy numbers, and hyperbole to bring you essential conversations and insights from across the investing landscape, providing you with the critical context needed to make the right decisions for your portfolio. Find more episodes on our video hub or watch on your preferred streaming service.
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