Perhaps the most interesting thing about China's “unprecedented” plunge protection efforts – which, as we outlined on Wednesday, have succeeded in making China Securities Finance Corp. a top-10 shareholder in at least eight firms – is that in some ways, they aren't “unprecedented” at all. That is, while some of what we've seen out of Beijing over the past month – notably the sweeping trading halts and the Politburo agitprop campaign aimed at “malicious” foreign short sellers – was more overt than what we might expect to see in more “developed' markets, there's certainly nothing terribly unusual about a central bank propping up equities.
After all, the BoJ is well on its way to cornering the ETF market in Japan and, as a matter of policy,steps in to support Japanese stocks when sentiment appears weak, while the SNB has amassed a stock portfolio worth nearly $100 billion. As for the US, well, we've made no secret of our feelings about the slightly more than arms-length arrangement between the NY Fed and Citadel.
Meanwhile, US corporate management teams are also in the business of propping up stocks as buybacks have served to replace the monthly flow lost to the taper.
Considering the above, one is certainly left to believe that the term “market” may have lost all meaning in the seven years since the crisis. Here with a rather shockingly honest lament on manipulated markets, the disappearance of Benjamin Graham's “voting machine”, and perhaps most importantly, a vindication of the tinfoil hat fringe blogs, is SocGen.
Via SocGen
No longer a voting machine
If in the short run, to paraphrase Benjamin Graham, equities are a voting machine, then it seems many of these votes are being coerced by interventionists. China is not alone in trying to influence equity prices, central bankers the world over have become obsessed with asset prices, to the extent that the notion of central banks making outright purchases of equities is no longer confined to the lunatic fringe. Of course none of these institutions are remotely interested in ‘weighing up' the long-term returns. If they were, given the absence of attractive valuations and actual cash flow growth, they might be a little more circumspect in their cheerleading.
