Is It 1998 All Over Again?

The 'Helicopter Economics Investing Guide' is meant to help educate people on how to make profitable investing choices in the current economic environment. In addition to the term helicopter economics, we have also coined the term, helicopternomics, to describe the current monetary and fiscal policies of the U.S. government and to update the old-fashioned term wheelbarrow economics.

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In some ways the market reminds me of 1998. Energy prices had hit a low in the spring and rebounded, but then dropped off again in the summer. Stocks were deteriorating into the summer, but rallied strongly in July for no really good reason. Low prices caused energy production to be curtailed and this eventually led to higher prices for the next 10 years. That scenario is quite likely to repeat itself. Whether or not the stock market collapses in August as it did in 1998 remains to be seen. Is there a contemporary version of Long-Term Capital out there?

The future of oil and natural gas prices is clearly laid out in Schlumberger's earnings report today. Like Halliburton earlier this week, Schlumberger said a sharp drop in natural-gas drilling in North America caused an earnings decline. Drilling in the U.S. and Canada reached a five-year low in recent months and no rebound is likely to take place in the foreseeable future. The reduction in drilling activity has also effected oil and has done so globally. While energy companies have scaled back oilfield activities worldwide, the number of rigs operating in the U.S. oil patch is off roughly 55 percent from last summer. If you also consider that a number of large-scale multi-year projects to increase productivity from declining fields (many of the world's biggest producers) were cancelled when oil prices were at lows in the winter, the future becomes easy to predict. There will be shortages of oil in a year or two. The U.S. is particularly vulnerable to these shortages because our energy production is dropping precipitously. The authorities will be surprised when this happens and they will blame greedy speculators and scheming by foreign producers for causing energy prices to skyrocket when these shortages appear.

As for the stock market, it has been going up no matter what. There has been a 10-day rally as of yesterday - a long time for an uninterupted rally. There was a big move up yesterday on fairly heavy volume. The Nasdaq has also just closed a gap on the weekly charts made last September. On the daily charts the RSI is about to hit the max. According to the mainstream media all of this is taking place because of good earnings. Even a cursory analysis of the earnings reports indicates that earnings are actually in very bad shape however. The earnings news out last night was uniformly bearish, but the European markets still rallied and U.S. stock futures were up this morning. So, it looks like the market goes up no matter what. This only happens when large amounts of liquidity are being poured into the financial system by the authorities. Why are they doing this now is a good question.

Reports have started to appear about how the Credit Crisis is over and the U.S. housing market is recovering. The worst of the Credit Crisis is indeed over, but this however doesn't mean recovery is taking place, nor that the economy is getting better - it isn't. As for housing recovering, this really strains credulity. Once a bubble collapses, it needs to have a long and severe drop to correct the excesses and housing has not gotten anywhere near that point yet. British GDP statistics were out overnight and the economy there shrank 5.6 percent year over year, the biggest drop since quarterly records began. Yeah, things are getting better all right.

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Daryl Montgomery
Organizer,New York Investing meetup
http://investing.meetup.com/21


This posting is editorial opinion. Like all other postings for this blog, there is no intention to endorse the purchase or sale of any security.