Larry Summers on EMH

In today’s Financial Times you can find an interesting interview with Larry Summers, director of the US president’s National Economic Council. A quote:

The chief intellectual casualty of the current crisis has been the “efficient markets” school – the theory, associated with such erstwhile laisser faire gurus as Alan Greenspan, that market participants are governed by rational expectations and markets are self-correcting. As an academic economist, Summers has studied the shortcomings of that approach but, working on Wall Street gave him, he says, a more visceral understanding of the “self-referential” character of markets: “Markets are concerned with the ultimate health of economies and the like but they’re equally or more concerned with what the likely judgments of other market participants in the short run are.”

I’m not quite sure whether Mr. Summers is aware that he is proposes to extend economists tool box with non-equilibrium models. Nevertheless it may indicate that non-equilibrium models are silently leaking into main stream of economics. Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH)has been falsified many times but I hope that this time it will be replaced by hypothesis better explaining how the market works. I think that G.Soros Reflexivity idea or MIT Andrew Lo Adaptive Market Hypothesis are good candidates to replace EMH for good.

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Asset price misalignments and the role of money and credit

ECB just released working paper on the role of money and credit indicators for detecting asset prices misalignments. This is most likely the second ECB publication on early warning asset bubbles indicators this year. Conclusion are quite intuitive that monetary and credit developments may be very useful in predicting asset bubbles burst. I have no problem with that conclusion because positive feedback loop from credit to house prices and again to credit was behind surge of house prices (also in Eastern Europe). I think that that to reduce price to price feedback (to avoid superbubbles creation) central banks should be more focused on credit growth and also closely monitor interactions between collateral valuation (i.e. house prices) and banks willingness to lend.

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Poland then(30's) and now(00's)

This chart is from Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke column comparing today’s global crises to the Great Depression. Although the general conclusion of the comparison is rather grim (i.e. no signs of green shoots in hard data) but Poland in that comparison is doing relatively well. The fall in the industrial output is relatively soft. What is than the receipt for success? I think Poland is weathering the storm so well (in relative terms) because of several factors : 1) Underdeveloped banking system 2) less leverage 3) smaller gaps /macro imbalances 4) regulations/constrains for domestic households to borrow in foreign currencies. Only if Poland would use good times (2005-2007) to reform state budged then it could be a clear winner of the crises

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S&P 500 - critical time

It is fair to say that the global economic system is one of the most complex systems known in the biosphere. Compared to physics, economics differs in the important fact that the basic constituents, or “particles”, are already quite complex: human beings. So macroeconomic knowledge is insufficient tool to predict market trends as not only hard data are important but also how human beings think about macroeconomic reality.

John Maynard Keynes made a famous observation that much of individual economic behavior is due to “animal spirits” rather than long-term rational calculus so beloved by economic theorists and fundamental analysts.

That’s why I don’t want here to discus macroeconomic picture (i.e most recent US job readings) because it’s rather trivial task as we are still in negative feedback process (i.e. banks continue to tighten credit standards –> less credit available means lower demand -> lower demand means higher unemployment -> higher unemployment undermines creditworthiness -> banks continue to tighten credit standards etc)

What I would like to focus here on fact that series generated by some complex systems (i.e. financial markets ) are characterized by periodic or nearly periodic behavior. In these cases, the dynamics can be characterized by scaling laws. Such dynamics are usually denoted as fractal or multifractal, depending on the question if they are characterized by one scaling exponent or by a multitude of scaling exponents. Sierpinski gasket is one fine example of fractal




Some times its necessary to conduct series of tests to find the scaling factor but in case of S&P 500 the self similar pattern is clear at the first glance.

I simply repeat the analysis which I done last year and I got very similar scaling factor 2.7. In words it may indicate that S&P 500 is around critical time and that in August we may test the March lows.

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Irrational Exuberance. LPPL signatures in EUR/PLN

People like to go to excesses. I think that what started out with a tulip, maybe four-hundred years ago, and continued through the South sea bubble and all of those sorts of things ( Tronic bubble in 60’s, new economy bubble in 90’s). I’m not saying here that that all human choices are orthogonal to rational ones but in human nature is to heard. Herding can result from a variety of mechanisms, such as anticipation by rational investors of noise traders strategies, agency costs and monetary incentives given to competing fund managers, sometimes leading to the extreme Ponzi schemes, rational imitation in the presence of uncertainty, and social imitation. Many financial economists recognize that positive feedbacks and in particular herding is a key factor that can push prices upward (downward) faster-than-exponentially which if unchecked can lead to bubbles.

Roughly 10 years ago Johansen and Sornette proposed model that attempts to incorporate those ingredients into a traditional rational expectations model of bubbles proposed by Blanchard.

The Jochansen-Sornette model assumes the financial market is composed of two types of investors: perfectly rational investors who have rational expectations and irrational traders who are prone to exhibit herding behavior. The noise traders drive the crash hazard rate according to their collective herding behavior, leading its critical behavior. Due to the no-arbitrage condition, this is translated into a price dynamics exhibiting super-exponential acceleration, with possible additional so-called “log-periodic” oscillations associated with a hierarchical organization and dynamics of noise traders.

A+B*(t-tc)^C*(1+D*COS(w*LN(t-tc)+O)

This so-called log-periodic power law (LPPL) dynamics given by has been previously proposed in different forms in various papers. The power law A−B(t−tc)_ expresses the super-exponential acceleration of prices due to positive feedback mechanisms. The term proportional to cos(w ln(t-tc)+o) describes a correction to this super-exponential behavior, which has the symmetry of discrete scale invariance. This formulation results from analogies with critical phase transitions (or bifurcations) occurring in complex adaptive systems with many interacting agents. The key insight is that spontaneous patterns of organization between investors emerge from repetitive interactions at the micro-level, possibly catalyzed by top-down feedbacks provided for instance by the media and macro-economic readings, which are translated into observable bubble regimes and crashes.

In previous posts I fit the LPPL formula into several financial time series. This time I fit LPPL into EUR/PLN exchange rate. As it is seen on the chart the formula fits remarkably well into the data. Even more surprisingly the LPPL model explains not only the periods when the positive feedbacks let to the zloty overvaluation but also it fits well to the period when zloty was depreciating (2001-2003). This confirms the universality of the process described by LPPL formula which describes well not only bubbles but also antibubbles.

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the global fiscal outlook is somber

IMF has released a Staff position note: Fiscal implications of the global economic crisis. Conclusion of the note is simple the global fiscal outlook is somber. Present fiscal cost of the crises + aging populations in advanced economies will strongly contribute to increase in DEBT/GDP ratios in the future. Also this momentum may raise the question of fiscal solvency. What is then the next big thing?
a) rising inflation
b) fiscal insolvency
c) a+b
or c) (put here something optimistic)

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Risk appetite remains low

Surprisingly the net average positioning index remains almost flat despite recent rally. (The shot description of the index you may find in one of the previous posts). It may indicate that portfolios still remain underweighted. So it looks like this rally has still room to go

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