저자: KenFisher · 외국인
요약 보기
금리가 주식에 미치는 영향은 은행 대출 수익성을 통해 간접적으로 나타나며, 장기금리 상승이 대출 의욕을 높이면 강세 요인이 될 수 있다. S&P500은 매출의 약 40%가 해외지만 기업은 본국 법규·투자자·인력 영향으로 여전히 본국 시장처럼 움직인다. 주식시장은 3~30개월 앞을 선반영하며, AI 관련 우려는 도입 속도가 느려 과장되어 있다. 이번 달 가장 과장된 공포는 AI이며, 중간선거 등 정치 리스크에 대한 공포도 시간이 지나면 사그라든다고 본다.
다듬은 글
Our culture will absorb AI slower than its fans think, and also slower than those who are afraid of it think. Every month people write questions to me for some crazy reason. I come up with some crazy reason to answer them, and I call that the mailbag. And so I type them up on big letters so I can read them with my septuagenarian eyes and give you what's supposed to be a short answer, which is pretty much always nearly impossible to do for me, since I tend to be wordy.
So the first one is how do interest rates affect the stock market? Interest rates have a partial effect on the stock market because, on the one hand, interest rates, as they would rise short and long term, are competing more favorable change in them as an investment opportunity relative to what what previously, the stock market.
If you think of everything. Otherwise staying the same, which is almost never true. And then the other part is that, and this is the part that gets trickier and complicated, and why I can never answer these things in a very, very, very short way. They impact hugely bank lending. When short rates, banks take in short-term deposits as the basis for funding long-term loans.
So the higher long-term interest rates are relative to short-term interest rates, the more eager banks become to lend because they make more money off of subsequent loans. If long rates or long-term interest rates are falling and short-term interest rates are rising, banks get ever less eager to lend because the profitability of the loan shrinks.
When it's a big spread, banks make a lot of money on lending. When it's a small spread, they don't. When it's a small spread and they stop lending, that constricts the economy. That tank stocks. The stock market figures it out before it gets to the economy. So that's really the biggest way that interest rates impact stocks.
Central banks control short-term rates. Free market controls long-term rates. People think, and they're half right, when long rates go up that's bearish because the bond at that higher rate compared to other things now becomes attractive and pulls money away from those other things like the stock market.
On the other hand, if long rates rise and short rates stay low, or they were, it actually becomes bullish because it increases the desire of banks to lend. And the more banks lend, the more money there is for all forms of economic activity on Main Street and on Wall Street. And stocks tend to do well in that environment.
So those are really the way interest rates impact economy, impact market. Next one, since the S&P gets about 40% of its revenue globally, why is international diversification still necessary? You know, this question has been being asked forever. And let me just give you the most basic answer. Forgetting about more technical stuff, which we could go into in a minute.
The basic reason is because it has long been true and remains true, that stocks tend, whether they're huge and global or small and local to their own country only. They tend to act more like their country stocks and less like the rest of global stocks than anyone would ever expect. Yes, it is true that a fully global stock has a little bit of that global effect to it, so that a big US global stock and a big Spanish global stock, or a big Japanese global stock will act a little more like each other than small stocks that don't have global orientation from each of those countries.
But they mostly act like their own country. That's the most important reason. Why? Because that's the way they act. You can measure that. It's a very measurable effect. Why does the measurable effect occur? Because I think that's also the other part of what's behind the question, because there's a lot more to what makes a company what it is than where it sells.
Where it sells, that's something. That's real. But there's a lot more to that. First, they're governed more than by global law, by the law of the land in which they are based. Secondly, that is usually the core stock market that they operate in, where the bulk of the investors are who would buy or not buy that stock.
Thirdly, the biggest chunk of their employees are from that culture, whether they're in the country or out of the country. When a firm operates, let's say an American firm operates overseas, it hires employees from there, wherever there is, but it also hires Americans and puts them there. It remains overwhelmingly in its culture and in its people, the country of origin.
And that law, the culture, the regulations that impact it, and the fact that the bulk of the revenue still comes from the primary country is why the stocks act like their primary country's stock market more than they all do, at the same like they were all together, because they have a significant amount of the revenue outside of the country.
Can you explain what you mean by stocks are forward looking and why this matters for investors? Sure. Forward looking is a word that I use sometimes. It means the same thing as saying the capital markets and primarily the stock market pre-price the future. What the stock market's doing all the time and the bond market trying to do this too, just does it a little less because it's got a little bit less variables involved, is trying to look at all the stuff that's going on and figure out the pricing of what that means to economic realities, sort of 3 to 30 months ahead.
Sometimes the stock market's pricing a little further into the future. Sometimes it's getting a little more close to the vest, down to that kind of pricing what three months into the future is. Figuring out where you are in that process is very questionable you might say. Sometimes the market's little pricing a little closer to the vest.
Sometimes it's looking a little further out and sometimes that moves pretty fast depending on what comes along. But the market's not trying to price, for the most part, short-term stuff other than a little bit of volatility. It's trying to give you a sense of what the discounted value of future earnings would be today based on what will happen longer time ahead.
It's not perfect at that, but it's not terrible at that either. It's actually pretty good. It's pretty efficient. It's trying to look past the speed bump of today at where the road's going down into the future, as it would impact the cumulative earnings that you would get from owning businesses, aggregating that together and adjusting for speed bumps that we bump into regularly.
But that's what I mean by its forward looking or its pre-pricing the future. And that's a really hard concept for people to get into their bones. That it's not about today. It's about those periods ahead and also not about too far into the future, like 5, 10, 20 years from now, which sometimes people get carried away thinking things way off into the future are going to impact in a big way.
But it's one of the reasons, for example, that I'm babbling at you, that AI is seen right now as such a big thing because it does impact the next 3 to 30 months. The final one for this month is of the issues investors worry about today, from debt and tariffs to AI and the Fed, which concern do you think is the most overblown and why?
I think you kind of nailed it here. I think the most overblown fear and I'll talk about a couple other fears in a minute. But I think the most overblown fear is fears of AI. All the things that people think AI might do that's terrible to us. First off, AI will create problems. No doubt about it. The internet created problems.
Once upon a time, for a lot of people, the tractor created problems, believe it or not. Every new innovation in technology creates problems for somebody. It's about simultaneously creating benefits for others. So our culture will absorb AI slower than its fans think, and also slower than those who are afraid of it think.
Problems that can be associated with data centers necessary for AI. Well, if the data centers come along slower, so does the AI. The implementation and usage. Every time you got to use a new tool, even though the new tool may be cool and nifty. You learn how to use it. These things always take longer than their proponents think they will, and those who are afraid of them think they will.
But right about now, because people fear losses in all things, always more than they love comparable sized gains, the fear of what AI could do negatively is way overblown power to our culture and to our markets. Let me say another one is you can see this right here, right now. This month is fear of what will happen in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If your political opponent, whoever that is, an ideological opponent, whoever that is, prevails in the midterms. For the Republicans, that's what happens if the Democratic Socialists gain in the midterms and take control of Congress. On the Democratic side, it's if the Republicans and all those MAGA Republicans and Donald J.
Trump can keep control. They'll do terrible things. Trump might even end democracy as we know it. The fact of the matter is these are all overblown. And I'm going to say to you, as I've said at other times and recently and four years ago and four years before that, and four years before that, going back about twenty years, all those fears that happen at about this time as midterms heat up toward finality, dissipate when you get into the next year.
And you'll see there'll still be rhetoric that Democrats will still hate President Trump. The Republicans still hate so-called Democratic Socialists, ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. But you'll see the fervor of it and the reality of it become something that people come to realize fades away. Sorry I couldn't answer any of these real quickly for you.
That's my mailbag answers for this month. Feel free to write in questions next month if you want. Until next month, thanks for listening to me. See you then. Take care. Bye. .
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