While many investors are fretting over what stage of the business cycle we are in, the global monetary system is collapsing — with a whimper initially, but ultimately a bang. The whimper is causing losses for equity investors. The bang will impact global asset prices as much as the end of the Bretton-Woods system or the end of the gold standard.
The system that is ending has no name. It is a system patched together in the embers of the Asian economic crisis, when many countries intervened in the foreign exchange markets to prevent the appreciation of their currencies. The impacts for investors were profound. The roughly $10tn rise in world foreign exchange reserves between 1999 and 2014 resulted in the forced purchasing of US Treasuries. Foreign central bankers owned just 13 per cent of the Treasury market in 1995, but held a third of it by 2014.
This monetary system thus provided a funding holiday for global savers, freeing them to focus on funding the private sector instead. Meanwhile, central bank liabilities increased by $10tn. What could be better for global investors than a monetary system that depressed the global risk-free rate while boosting growth through an explosive rise in the money supply of emerging markets, particularly China? For equity investors the combination of a low discount rate and high growth rate drove prices and valuations higher until 2014.