Howard Marks: A Once In 25 Year Stock Market Event Is Beginning

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결론: 하워드 막스는 2023년 1월 메모에서 1980~2020년 저금리 시대가 끝나고 높은 금리·인플레이션이 지배하는 새로운 투자 환경(시대 전환)이 시작됐다고 진단한다. 과거 전환기 1: 1969~1974년 니프티 50 붕괴. 고평가된 우량주(월마트, 디즈니 등)가 PER 50배 이상에서 약 95% 폭락. 이후 위험 대비 수익(risk-return) 분석이 자리잡고 하이일드 채권 시장이 성장. 과거 전환기 2: 1970년대 중반 OPEC 석유 금수로 유가 급등, 인플레이션 장기화. 1980년 볼커 의장이 금리를 20%까지 올려 1982년 인플레이션 3.2%로 안정. 이후 40년간 금리 하락이 주식 수익률(연 10.3%)을 견인. 금리 하락의 효과: 차입비용 감소로 소비·투자 증가, 자산 현재가치 상승, 낮은 요구수익률, 자산효과와 레버리지 극대화. 막스는 이를 공항 무빙워크에 비유하며 금리 상승기에는 역방향으로 작용한다고 설명. 현재 전환기: 2009~2020년 초저금리와 양적완화로 주식이 연 16% 상승, 투자자들이 위험 자산(암호화폐, SPAC 등)으로 이동. 팬데믹 이후 대규모 부양과 공급병목으로 2021년부터 인플레이션 발생, 연준의 급격한 금리 인상으로 채권·주식·암호화폐·기술주가 급락. 향후 전망: 인플레이션 원인은 일부 완화되겠지만 세계화 이익 축소와 공급망 국내 회귀로 인플레이션 압력이 지속될 가능성. 연준이 과거 인플레 과소평가 경험 때문에 쉽게 금리를 내리지 않을 것으로 봄. 연준의 약 9조 달러 자산 축소도 유동성 흡수 요인. 투자 시사점: 금리 상승으로 모든 위험자산의 기대수익률이 높아졌으므로, 우량 기업을 합리적 가격에 살 기회가 늘었다. 다만 단순히 많이 떨어졌다고 매수하는 것은 아니며, 기업의 질을 봐야 한다. 출연자 전망: 막스는 단기 경제 예측은 하지 않으며, 장기적으로 고금리·고인플레 환경을 전제함.

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01. a sea change is a major transformation of the environment a complete change in attitudes Etc and I suspect that we may be at the beginning of one how would monks just release the memo explaining that we are experiencing a once in 25-year economic event the near perfect investing conditions of the past 40 years has ended and we are undergoing what he calls an economic sea change something he's only seen twice before in his highly successful 53-year investing career today I'm going to be explaining the two previous sea changes that occurred in the 70s 80s and 90s as well as the one that we are currently experiencing and ultimately titled together for what it means for investors today if you don't already know Howard marks is an incredibly successful investor with a net worth of 2.2 billion dollars he started as an equity research analyst for city cop in the 70s followed by working for TCW group investing in distressed debt Securities in 1995 he founded oak tree Capital Management which focused on high yield debt distressed debts and private Equity with his funds generating an average long-term return of about 20 after fees like Ray dalio Howard marks is extremely knowledgeable about how the economic machine works so his monthly memos that he releases on his websites provide some incredible insights for investors the bottom line for me is that in many ways conditions at this moment are overwhelmingly different from and mostly less favorable than those of the post GFC climate but in my view we're unlikely to quickly see the same optimism and ease that marked the post-gfc period he calls this a sea change something he's only seen two other times in his 53-year career well as he change is a major transformation of the environment a complete change in attitudes Etc so to understand the current investing environment and how it's shifting dramatically I first want to talk about the two previous sea changes that Marx talks about in his memo that occurred in the 70s 80s and 90s the first change started in 1969.

02. at the time Equity markets were flourishing and investors were focused heavily on the few number of high quality businesses where a lot of the stock market returns were concentrated these companies were called the nifty 50 and were considered safe Blue Chip companies that could be bought at any price and held forever some recognizable names are Walmart and the Walt Disney Company but others like Polaroid have been long forgotten during the 60s these companies had incredible growth and were often priced as much as 50 times earnings or even higher which is significantly more than the market average which has historically been at around 15 to 20 times earnings by 1974 the party was over and the nifty 50 stocks had fallen 95 now that doesn't sound very Nifty but what would be is if you're enjoying the content and if you went and hit the little subscribe button down below so if you're liking the content hit the Subscribe button it tells YouTube that you're enjoying the content and encourages YouTube the YouTube's algorithm to send it out to a broader audience which helps me grow so I'd really appreciate if you could do that um so I appreciate it thank you but essentially all of a sudden the idea of investing in Safe Company safe Blue Chip companies at any price all of a sudden that made absolutely no sense a new era of investing was ushered in instead of trying to avoid Risk by only investing in high grade bonds or blue chip companies investors started to consider risk relative to return the opening of investors Minds to what we call risk return analysis and before the 70s the job of the investor was to avoid risk uh after the 70s and was to intelligently take risk and that was a big change so essentially investors started looking towards more risky Investments more risky stocks such as smaller unprofitable companies as long as the potential future return compensated for the additional risk it also became possible for funds to issue new investment grade bonds that today are called high yield bonds Marx talks about in the 70s how the market for these bonds was just two billion dollars today it's 1.2 trillion and it's important to note that the utter collapse of previously considered safe Investments such as Blue Chip companies also changed the perspective on how to invest in those businesses while those companies on a business level were relatively safe with high quality management teams competitive advantages and in strong Financial Health the safety of their future returns or their future cash flows also meant that prices were driven up and therefore returns were driven into the ground Howard Marx was investing in taking advantage of this change by investing in non-investment grade bonds which did have a much higher risk of default but for which the return more than compensated for sea change 2 occurred in the mid 70s when an OPEC oil embargo drove the price of oil from 24 a barrel all the way up to 65 a barrel this essentially started a nine-year battle with surging inflation from 1972 to 74 inflation Rose from 3.2 percent to 11 then for four years it declined to six to nine percent then it surged again to 13.5 percent in 1980 and was only when volca the chairman of the FED jacked interest rates to 20 did inflation begin to move down permanently settling at 3.2 percent in 1982 and as Market Cycles tend to do after a decade of tough economic circumstances and a lot of financial pain the US was about to enter the strongest 40-year period for financial markets ever seen on record and all fueled by one important factor declining interest rates from 1980 to 2020 the federal funds rate declined from 20 percent to zero percent and drove the U.S stock Market to return 10.3 percent per year for 40 years of course there's been other factors that have driven growth over the past 40 years such as strong economic growth strong performance of the largest U.S businesses a lot of technical technological innovation and then most importantly I think a significant shift of globalization where a lot of manufacturing was shipped overseas reducing costs for businesses in the U.S but Marx believes that declining interest rates had the biggest impact on stock market returns for a few reasons firstly it accelerated growth of the economy as it reduced the cost of debt for consumers and businesses which drove spending and investment it increased the fair value of assets which are discounted less heavily as rates decline it reduced the return demanded by investors as money in the bank began to earn less driving them to invest more in Risky assets and the lifting of assets created a wealth effect which drove even more spending in use of debt Marx goes on to talk about how not only are declining interest rates extremely helpful for investors but if combined with leverage then it can be it can produce massive results he analyzes a company concludes that he can make 10 a year on it and decides to buy it then he asks his head of capital markets how much it would cost to borrow 75 percent of the money when he's told it's eight percent It's Full Speed Ahead earning 10 percent on three quarters of the capital that's borrowed at eight percent would lever up the return on the other one quarter he's Equity to 16 percent the interest cost on his floating rate debt declines over time and when his fixed-rate debt matures he finds he can roll it over at five percent now the deal is a home run a 25 levered return all else being equal the point that MOX is trying to point out to you for investors is that the last 40 years has been filled with a number of significant Tailwinds for investor returns he talks about how it's kind of like walking on the moving walkways at the airport you basically move along as fast as your walk speed plus the speed of the machine but it also means the opposite is true in a rising interest rate environment if in that analogy your walk speed is the investment return Then investing in a rising interest rate environment is like walking against the airport walkway or in other words if we do go into a sustained period of interest rate increases then investors shouldn't expect returns to be anywhere near the last four decades so that brings us to today's sea change what is happening right now and has been happening over the last 18 months as we've entered essentially this new paradigm the backdrop of the shift is the ultra low interest rates that were seen from 2009 to 2020.

03. rates had already been declining for 30 years but then after the global financial crisis in 2008 the Federal funds rate was nearly zero percent at the same time the FED began the largest quantitative easing program that it had ever done which primarily included the Federal Reserve essentially printing money and purchasing treasury bonds from the government as well as buying mortgage-backed Securities to push money into the markets and stimulate the economy we have been living in a highly stimulated very positive uh easy money environment uh for uh roughly 14 years and during that 11-year period of stimulus stocks returned a historic 16 per year there was so much liquidity in the markets that prices on high quality Investments were driven so high and returns dried up in those areas to the point where if investors wanted to continue to make the same high or decent returns they had to go further and further out onto the risk curve looking at riskier and riskier asset classes such as cryptocurrency uh spax and a bunch of other types of more speculative investment classes and then the pandemic hit once again the FED stepped in to stimulate the markets by dropping rates to zero percent and doing an even larger purchase of bonds in fact they purchased so many treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities that today the FED still has about nine trillion dollars of assets on their books and of course all of this stimulus through the financial markets back to work up a hundred and fourteen percent in just two years but stimulus of this magnitude does not come without consequences in early 2021 the US began to experience higher inflation Marx believes that this was a combination of the highest savings rates that people had through the covert restrictions and from stimulus then being pushed to drive higher consumer demand and that was happening at the same time as a lot of supply side bottlenecks because businesses were also coming out of lockdowns and ramping up their production again of course there are other factors that happened at the same time even non-economic things such as the war in Ukraine but essentially all of it drove inflation higher and forced the Federal Reserve to jack up interest rates extremely quickly and Marx calls what happened next a predictable course of events higher interest rates and higher returns were demanded by an investors with bonds and even savings accounts starting to offer better returns it essentially Drew money out of risky assets like stocks bonds also faced a similar effect where older bonds with low interest rates essentially had to have their prices come down to fall in line with the newly issued higher interest rate bonds the fear of missing out in the market was replaced with fear of further loss and the hottest performing assets of the previous year became the worst performance including crypto Tech spax all getting obliterated in record time so what's next for us well Marx believes that inflation and interest rates even though inflation is easing will likely dominate The Narrative of the financial markets in the economy over the next few years the past two years in the financial markets has pretty much completely been about inflation and interest rates higher inflation has meant that there's been an expectation of higher interest rates and that's exactly what happened but even as inflation has begun to ease a little bit it's very likely that what happens with interest rates and even inflation going forward will dominate The Narrative and impact Financial Pockets the funny thing is the general consensus at the moment is that things are improving markets since October have had a little bit of a rally and that seems to indicate that markets believe that inflation is easing and that maybe even the FED will be lowering interest rates in 2023 after having to Jack them up so quickly in 2022 and while Marx doesn't tend to make short-term economic predictions he does have a different view of what's coming he does agree that the underlying causes of inflation are probably going to subside right we've seen savings rates go from record highs to record lows as people have spent a lot of their money and a lot of the supply side bottlenecks have improved so the walked Supply demand equation that has been driving inflation is much more in line now than it was even just 12 months ago but that doesn't mean that inflation is going to go away because there are so many other events and factors that could influence inflation over the next few years one example of this is the maximization of globalization which has occurred over the past 40 years the past 40 years has been pretty much a consistent trend of U.S businesses shipping jobs and Manufacturing and other supply side things overseas essentially reducing their costs and that acts as deflationary because they're reducing their costs and increase in their profits but now it looks like the maximum benefits of globalization at least for us companies seems to have been met and it may even be reversing a little bit where jobs and Manufacturing is coming back to the US which is very likely to be inflationary Marx also thinks it's pretty unlikely that the FED would look to lower interest rates because remember that it was only a year ago where the FED had already underestimated inflation so they don't want to underestimate inflation for a second time in just a couple of years because they'll ultimately lose consumer confidence and finally the FED still has nine trillion dollars of assets on its books that it has been slowly selling but may continue to sell at a faster rate essentially pulling more money out of the financial markets I think that you know a lot of people began to invest or came into the business in those 14 years not too many have a perspective on the period before the Global Financial crisis and and uh they may think that the last 14 years was normalcy I don't think so I think it was the best imaginable period for borrowers and for asset owners uh and I don't think that it's necessarily going to continue essentially in this memo Marx is expressing that we are in a completely different investing environment today and over the next decade than we've seen over the past few decades instead of low inflation low interest rates and globalization and many other factors we're now facing High inflation higher interest rates and maybe even declobalization but it's certainly not all doom and gloom particularly if you're a value investor because as interest rates have risen it essentially increases the return uh the future returns of all risky asset classes including stocks of great companies so in other words if there is a company that has an incredible management team at Deep economic modes and is in strong Financial Health over the past years interest rates have risen and stock prices have come down all that's really changed is that the stock has a better future return now than it did previously and that's not to say that every stock that is down a little bit is now uh worth investing in just because it's a high quality company that's dropped 20 or 30 percent but what it does mean is that because the returns of everything have gone up the number of companies that fall within our range of offering a 15 return has likely significantly increased meaning it's going to be easier to find investment opportunities in great companies with decent long-term returns