Austrian-style analysis in “Money for the Market “(CNN): Think stocks have gone too far, too fast? Think the rally has got out of hand, and the market is way too expensive? You may be right, but with all the country’s cash spigots cranked open, things could get a lot nuttier. Indeed, today’s environment is beginning to look similar to what prevailed in 1999, when a huge influx of money into the global economy helped fuel an 86 percent rise in the Nasdaq. There’s plenty of dough hitting the economy now, and it looks like there will be plenty more on the way. The Fed has put its overnight target rate at a 40-year low of 1.25 percent and looks set to lower it to 1 percent when it next meets in three weeks.
More important, the Fed has engineered a sharp move lower in long-term rates by signaling that it does not plan to raise rates until well after the economy starts growing strongly. Already, the effects of this have started to show. Mortgage and refinancing activity have both hit all-time highs. Corporations, too, are getting into the act, refinancing their higher yielding debt and freeing up cash. ... There are, after all, only a few things you can really do with money. You can stuff it into the mattress, you can spend it, or you can buy an asset. The low funds rate makes the mattress option less appealing -- money markets and savings accounts don’t throw off much of a return these days. Spending takes time to rev up. So the money gets parked in some sort of asset -- gold (which is going up), bonds (which are going up), houses (which are going up) or stocks (which are going up).
“When you print money, it’s going to inflate some asset price,” said Northern Trust chief U.S. economist Paul Kasriel. “Maybe we’ll revert to the late 1990s and buy stocks with it.”
Turn off the bubble machine
Many observers credit the easy money policies of the Fed and other central banks with fueling the late ‘90s stock bubble. First, worries over the health of the world’s financial system in the wake of the Russian debt crisis provoked the Fed to lower rates sharply, and then concern that Y2K would prompt a run on banks made it keep them low. Money supply rocketed higher and much of that money went into stocks -- particularly the most speculative ones. A similar expansion of the monetary base in Japan in the late 1980s helped feed speculative action in stocks and real estate.
