Mike Wilson: The Decline in Consumer Sentiment

With consumer sentiment hitting an all time low due to inflation concerns, the question investors should be asking is, are these risks to the economy properly priced into the market?

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Monday, June 13th, at 11 a.m. in New York. So let's get after it. 

Over time, the lion's share of stock returns is determined by earnings growth if one assumes that valuations are relatively stable. However, valuations are not stable and often hard to predict. In our experience, most investors don't spend nearly as much time trying to predict multiples as they do earnings. This is probably because it's hard to do consistently, and there are so many methodologies it's often difficult to know if you are using the right one. For equity strategists, predicting valuations is core to the job, so we spend a lot of time on it. 

Our methodology is fairly simple. There are just two components to our method; 10 year Treasury yields and the equity risk premium. 

At the end of last year, we argued the P/E at 21x was too high. From our vantage point, both ten year Treasury yields and the equity risk premium appeared to be mispriced. Treasury yields are more levered to inflation expectations and Fed policy. At year end 10 year Treasuries did not properly reflect the risk of higher inflation or the Fed's reaction to it. Today, we would argue it's not the case. In fact, 10 year Treasury yields may be pricing too much Fed tightening if growth continues to erode and recession risks increase further. 

In contrast to Treasury yields, the equity risk premium is largely a reflection of growth expectations. When growth is accelerating, the equity risk premium tends to be lower and vice versa. At year end, the equity risk premium is 315 basis points, well below the average of 375 basis points over the past 15 years. In short, the equity risk remaining was not reflecting the rising risks to growth that we expected coming into this year. Fast forward to today and the equity risk premium is even lower at just 300 basis points. Given the rising risk of slowing growth in earnings, this part of the price earnings ratio seems more mispriced today than 6 months ago. At the end of the day, we think 3400 represents a much better level of support for the S&P 500 and an area we would consider getting bullish. 

Last Friday, consumer sentiment in the U.S. hit an all time low due largely to concerns inflation is here to stay. This has been one of our greatest concerns this year with respect to demand and one of the areas we received the most pushback. We continually hear from many clients that the consumer is in such great shape due to the excess savings still available in checking accounts. However, this view does not take into account savings in stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies and other assets, which are down significantly this year. Furthermore, while most consumers have more cash on hand than pre-COVID, that cash just isn't going as far as it used to, and that is likely to restrain discretionary spending. 

Finally, we think it's important to point out that the latest reading is the lowest on record, and 45% lower than during the last time the Fed embarked on such an aggressive tightening campaign, and was able to orchestrate a soft landing. In other words, the consumer was in much better shape back then, and that probably helped the economy to stabilize and avoid a recession. Let's also keep in mind that inflation was dormant in 1994 relative to today and allowed the Fed to pause, a luxury they clearly do not have now given Friday's red hot Consumer Price Index report. 

Bottom line, the drop in sentiment not only poses a risk to the economy and market from a demand standpoint, but coupled with Friday's CPI print keeps the Fed on a hawkish path to fight inflation. In such an environment, we continue to recommend equity investors keep a defensive bias with overweighting utilities, health care and REITs until the price or earnings expectations come down further. 

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