One narrative we've been building on for quite some time is the idea that both stocks and bonds have been propped up by a perpetual bid from price insensitive buyers. Put simply, it really doesn't matter how overvalued something is if your primary concern is something other than maximizing your return on investment.
Take corporate buybacks for instance. Both equity-linked compensation and the market's tendency to focus on quarterly results at the expense of the bigger picture have compelled corporate management teams to develop a dangerously myopic strategy that revolves around tapping corporate credit markets for cheap cash and plowing the proceeds into EPS-inflating buybacks. Whether or not this is the best use of cash is certainly debatable but when the goal is to manage earnings and appease stockholders, that doesn't matter, and indeed, companies have an abysmal record when it comes to buying back shares at levels that later prove to be quite expensive.
In America, the price insensitive corporate management bid simply replaced the monthly flow the market lost when the Fed – the most price insensitive of all buyers – began to taper its asset purchases. Of course QE in all its various iterations playing out across the globe, is price insensitive buying taken to its logical extreme. With the ECB's PSPP for instance, limits on the percentage of an individual issue that NCBs are allowed to own apply to nominal amounts meaning that, to the extent NCBs can buy bonds at a premium to par, they can effectively buy fewer bonds than they otherwise would have and still hit their purchase targets. In other words, if you overpay, it's easier to stay under the issue cap when supply is scarce in eligible paper. So in some respects, the more EMU central banks pay for the bonds they purchase, the better.
In Japan, the BoJ has amassed an elephantine balance sheet full of ETFs and because one cannot classify stocks as “held to maturity”, Haruhiko Kuroda's equity plunge protection is effectively a self-feeding loop – that is, the more stocks the central bank owns, the more it must buy in order to protect its balance sheet from the damage it would suffer were equities to sell off.
And then there are banks, mutual funds, and pension plans which for various reasons (regulatory and otherwise) are forced to accumulate assets at otherwise unattractive prices.
The question in all of this – and this may indeed become one of the most important considerations for market participants once every DM central bank bumps up against the Sweden problem – is this: what happens when the price insensitive buyers behind the inexorable rise in financial asset prices become price insensitive sellers?
Here with more on that question and more, is gmo's Ben Inker:
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Price-insensitive sellers
The last decade has seen an extraordinary rise in the importance of a unique class of investor. Generally referred to as “price-insensitive buyers,” these are asset owners for whom the expected returns of the assets they buy are not a primary consideration in their purchase decisions. Such buyers have been the explanation behind a whole series of market price movements that otherwise have not seemed to make sense in a historical context. In today's world, where prices of all sorts of assets are trading far above historical norms, it is worth recognizing that investors prepared to buy assets without regard to the price of those assets may also find themselves in a position to sell those assets without regard to price as well. This potential is compounded by the reduction in liquidity in markets around the world, which has been driven by tighter regulation of financial institutions, and, paradoxically, a greater desire for liquidity on the part of market participants. Making matters worse, in order to see massive changes in the price of a security, you don't need the price-insensitive buyer to become a seller. You merely need him to cease being the marginal buyer. If price-insensitive buyers actually become price-insensitive sellers, it becomes possible that price falls could take asset prices significantly below historical norms.
