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ist vom Markt noch nicht ausreichend gewürdigt worden und schon kommt der nächste Kurstreiber mit dem Apple I-Phone auf den Markt. Zieht doch die Anschaffung der neuen Technik ein hohes Maß an Nachfolge-Investitionen nach sich, wodurch der Aktien Markt wohl weiterhin Interssant bleiben dürfte.
Ist doch den Märkten wurscht. Meint der Economist. Und Unrecht hat er nicht.
Bomb proofJul 5th 2007
From The Economist print edition
CAR bombs are placed in London and Glasgow airport is attacked; Britain's terrorism-alert status moves briefly to the highest level, suggesting another attack is imminent. So how does the stockmarket react? The FTSE 100 index fell on July 2nd, the first full day of trading after the Glasgow incident, by a measly 17 points.
Of course, the attacks failed. But they did seem to point to a frightening prospect: that terror tactics perfected in Baghdad might be brought to the streets of Britain on a regular basis. Investors, however, seemed completely unconcerned.
This is part of a pattern that has seen each successive terrorist attack cause smaller and smaller shockwaves in the markets. The September 11th outrage in America had a huge effect; stockmarkets had to close. But share prices eventually recovered, with the help of effective central-bank action. Subsequent attacks, such as the bombings in Madrid, Bali and London, have been one-day market events.
Perhaps this points to an admirable sang froid on the part of investors. Terrorist attacks kill far fewer people than car accidents, so why should they have a long-term impact? After all, mainland Britain survived 20 years of bombing by the IRA and Spain's economic growth has not been thrown off course by the activities of ETA, the Basque separatist group. Provided the violence is sporadic, people have to carry on with their daily lives.
However, one could see the market's resilience as more evidence of the split that emerged at the beginning of the year between the two types of folk who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos—those in the political elite, who were worried about the Middle East, North Korea and terrorism, and the captains of business and finance, who were luxuriating in boom conditions.
It has not paid investors to worry about geopolitical risk in recent years. The stockmarket began its long rally just days before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. If investors had been told then that America and Britain would be bogged down in a civil war four years later, or that oil prices would be $70 a barrel, the rally would probably have been stillborn.
But the markets seem to have climbed the “wall of worry” with barely a slip, surmounting everything from bird flu to America's current-account deficit and cold-war rhetoric from Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. Far more important in driving up share prices has been the remarkable strength of corporate profits and the wave of liquidity buoying almost every asset from art to zinc.
Perhaps this indicates that investors are complacent. Markets might be undermined by what Nassim Taleb, an author, has described as a “black swan”—an event with a small probability of happening, but a big impact if it does. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian, pointed out in a lecture on July 2nd to London Business School's Global Leadership Summit that a previous era of globalisation was brought to a swift end by the first world war. Financial markets were barely anticipating military conflict less than two weeks before its start; just like today, the spread, or excess interest rate, on emerging-market bonds was at historical lows. But the war brought the suspension of trading for months on end and wiped out whole asset classes, such as Tsarist bonds.
Although Professor Ferguson is not forecasting another world war, he believes that a wider Middle Eastern conflict is much more likely than most people think. Such an outcome could play havoc with investors' portfolios. And if he is right, then investors are acting in a complacent fashion. But might that complacency, in an odd way, be rational? Betting on a black swan does not offer attractive odds. If a catastrophe only happens 1% of the time, then 99 times out of 100, betting on such an event will lose money. The investor will underperform the benchmark and lose clients.
Staying fully invested, and waiting to get sandbagged by events, makes more business sense. After all, if a catastrophe does happen, the investor has the perfect excuse: nobody saw it coming. The chances are that everybody's portfolios will suffer in tandem.
In any case, since terrorism has been a constant subject of discussion over the past six years, it hardly belongs in the black-swan category. Something much more deadly than a car bomb, such as a nuclear or biological device, would be needed. Events in Iraq are no longer seen as a market-moving factor. Perhaps military action outside the Middle East, involving the two Koreas, India and Pakistan or even China and Taiwan, would be the kind of real shock that would turn investors into nervous ninnies overnight.
__________________
ignorance is bliss
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