How to Build Wealth (Even During Monetary Tightening)One question that many investors are asking right now is: How can I build wealth during monetary tightening?
To answer this question, one must understand how the money supply works.
The Money Supply
The money supply refers to the total amount of currency held by the public at a particular point in time. M2 is one of the most common measures of the U.S. money supply. It reflects the amount of money that is available to be invested. M2 includes currency held by the non-bank public, checkable deposits, travelers’ checks, savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts), small time deposits under $100,000, and shares in retail money market mutual funds.
The chart above is a time-compressed view of the money supply. The time scale has been compressed such that the money supply appears as a vertical line with clusters of dots. Each dot represents a quarter (or 3-month period).
During periods of monetary easing, when the central bank accelerates increases in the money supply, the dots stretch wider apart, as shown below.
During periods of monetary tightening, when the central bank decelerates increases in the money supply, the dots tighten together. In rare cases, the central bank can reduce the money supply to fight inflation, in which case the dots can retrograde.
The central bank rarely reduces the money supply because it usually results in economic decline.
The Money Supply and The Stock Market
Since the money supply reflects the amount of money that can be invested in the stock market, the stock market tends to track the money supply. As the money supply (M2SL) grows so too does the stock market (SPX).
The chart above shows that despite the stock market’s oscillations, over the long term, the growth rate of the stock market tends to track the growth rate of the money supply. The stock market goes up, in large part, because the money supply goes up.
The chart below is from the book Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel, Professor of Finance at the Wharton School. The chart shows that compared to other asset classes, stocks generally perform the best over time.
Stocks generally perform the best over time because the growth rate of the stock market generally tracks the growth rate of the money supply fairly well. Investing in the stock market is therefore an efficient means of preserving wealth over the long term.
One will always be better off investing in assets that grow in price at a faster rate than the rate at which the money supply grows than investing in assets that do not. When the money supply decreases during periods of monetary tightening, as is happening right now, only assets that outperform the money supply can produce positive returns.
Knowing these facts, we can reach the following conclusion: Generally, investing in the stock market does not intrinsically build wealth, it merely efficiently preserves wealth over time against the perpetual erosion of an ever-increasing money supply. To build wealth one must invest in assets that grow in price faster than the rate at which the money supply grows .
Preserving Wealth vs. Building Wealth
As noted, to build wealth one must invest in assets that move up in price faster than the rate at which the money supply moves up.
Investing in assets that move up in price over time, but at a rate less than that which the money supply moves up over time may seem like a good investment to an investor if the investor is making money, but such investments are not typically wealth-building. These investments are merely some degree of wealth-preserving.
When the price of an investment increases over time at a rate less than the money supply, that investment causes a loss of wealth, despite giving the investor the perception of increased wealth. A loss of wealth occurs because the investor’s purchasing power is decreasing over the period of time which the investment is held.
Purchasing power is the value of a currency expressed in terms of the number of goods or services that one unit of money can buy. It can weaken over time due to inflation. To keep things simple, let’s assume that other elements of inflation, such as money velocity, remain fairly constant and that an increasing money supply is the main cause of inflation.
Let’s consider some case studies.
Case Study #1: REITs
Suppose an investor, John, invests his money in real estate investment trusts (REITs), specifically BRT Apartments Corp.
John is a smart investor and does research before investing. In his research, he sees that BRT has decent profitability and a fair valuation. He also sees that BRT has decent growth potential.
After analyzing fundamentals, John does technical analysis. He sees the below chart which shows a decades-long bull run.
(Chart has been adjusted to include dividends)
He thinks to himself: This asset is a money maker. Despite periods of corrections, price generally goes up over time.
John then buys shares of BRT as part of a long-term investment strategy. John has done his due diligence and indeed he is right that, over the long term, his investment is likely to make quite a bit of money.
However, if John invests in this asset, although he will make money, he will lose wealth or purchasing power. That’s because the Federal Reserve is increasing the money supply at a rate that is faster than John’s investment grows.
Here’s a chart of BRT adjusted for the money supply (and adjusted to include dividends).
Adjusting the price of BRT by the money supply shows a clear downtrend over time. This means that while BRT is growing in price and its investors are making money, BRT’s investors are generally losing purchasing power over time by investing in this asset because the central bank is increasing the money supply at a faster rate than the rate at which BRT's price grows.
By increasing the money supply exponentially over time, central banks trick people into believing that they are building wealth by investing when in fact most investments are, at best, some degree of wealth preserving. Only a minority of assets outperform the money supply, and usually, that outperformance is temporary.
In the era of monetary easing, during which central banks drastically increased the money supply using various monetary tools, perceived wealth skyrocketed. However, actual gains in purchasing power or improvement in living standards, as measured by increased productivity, largely did not occur.
You may be thinking that I simply chose a bad investment to demonstrate my point. While BRT is actually a great investment relative to most other assets, let's move on to the second case study: an asset that has skyrocketed in price in recent years.
You will find that even for assets that have outperformed the growth in the money supply, the period of outperformance is usually temporary.
Case Study #2: Microsoft (MSFT)
Microsoft is an example of a stock that has outperformed the growth rate of the money supply in recent years. Below is a chart of MSFT adjusted for the money supply.
The chart shows that although the growth in MSFT's price generally outperforms the growth rate of the money supply, it undergoes prolonged periods of underperformance when investors can lose wealth. This wealth loss effect cannot be fully ascertained by looking only at a chart of just MSFT's price. It only becomes fully apparent when one compares the stock's price to the money supply.
Tech stocks have generally outperformed the money supply since the Great Recession. They were excellent wealth-building investments. However, now that the central bank has begun monetary tightening, interest-rate-sensitive tech stocks are especially likely to decline. Investing in these assets while the money supply is decreasing, and while interest rates are surging, may result in loss of wealth.
Case Study #3: Utilities (XLU)
The chart below shows how well the utilities sector performed over the past two decades.
Let’s adjust the chart to the money supply. (See chart below)
You can see that XLU moved horizontally relative to the money supply, meaning that it merely preserves wealth to varying degrees but does not generally build wealth over the long term.
By including the money supply in our charts, we remove the confoundment of monetary policy and elucidate the true intrinsic growth potential of assets.
Case study #4: ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK)
Look at the chart below which shows ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), managed by Cathie Wood, relative to the money supply.
Cathie Wood’s investment choices have actually caused a loss of wealth since the fund’s inception in 2014. You can see in the above chart that price is slightly below the center zero line, which means that wealth has been lost by those who invested in ARKK in 2014 and held continuously to the current time.
Finally, check out the below chart of SPY relative to the money supply. The entire post-Great Recession bull run in SPY was merely a recovery of the wealth lost since the Dotcom Bust, over 2 decades ago. The stock market is ominously again being resisted at this peak level.
The below chart shows that the stock market has given back much of the wealth built since the pre-Great Recession peak.
In summary, wealth-building requires investing in assets with a growth rate that is greater than the growth rate of the money supply. To accomplish this, an investor should compare an asset against the money supply before choosing to invest. Assets that continuously outperform the money supply over the long term are better investments than those that do not. One can use standard technical analysis on the ratio chart to determine candidates that are most likely to outperform the money supply.
In the face of high inflation, central banks must reduce the money supply. A decreasing money supply pulls the rug out from under the stock market. When the money supply is falling, corporate earnings and the stock market typically fall as well.
Inflation
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world increased the money supply by an unprecedented amount.
Throughout the course of its entire history up until the pandemic, the U.S. money supply moved up predictably within a log-linear regression channel, as shown in the chart below. Before the pandemic, the log-linear regression channel had an exceptionally high Pearson correlation coefficient (over 0.99), which suggests that the regression channel was reliably containing the money supply’s oscillations over time.
When the pandemic hit the global economy came to a halt. The Federal Reserve increased the money supply by a magnitude that was so astronomical that it went up vertically even when logarithmically adjusted. (See the chart below)
As a thought experiment, let’s assume that the log-linear regression channel above is valid and that data are normally distributed (typically they are not in financial markets).
If it were the case that such a sudden, astronomical increase in the money supply occurred totally randomly, the event would be a 10-sigma event (meaning 10 standard deviations away from the mean). The chance of such a rare event happening totally randomly is so small that it would occur about once every 500,000 quadrillion years. Since this is much longer than the age of the known universe, a 10-sigma event is essentially equivalent to an event that will statistically never happen. Thus, no one was prepared for the action that the Federal Reserve took.
By exploding the money supply by this extreme amount and flooding the market with so much newly created money, central banks instantly made everyone feel wealthier by giving them more money, but this action would eventually make everyone less wealthy by destroying their purchasing power as inflation ensued.
Once high inflation begins, it can be hard to stop. When inflation stays high for too long the public begins to expect more of it. The public then alters its spending and saving habits. The public also begins to demand higher wages to keep up with high inflation. This creates a negative feedback loop: When workers receive higher wages to keep up with inflation, workers can afford to pay inflated prices which keeps inflation higher for longer. As workers get paid more, keeping demand high, companies also charge more for their goods and services. Eventually, workers again demand higher wages to keep up with yet even higher prices.
At every stage of inflation, the best strategy for central banks is to downplay its true severity. This is because the easiest way to control inflation is by managing the public’s perception of it. The hard way to control inflation is to raise the cost of money – interest rates – which in turn induces economic decline, and which can cause financial crises as highly indebted consumers, companies and governments cannot afford higher interest payments.
Bonds
Government bond yields reached a record low during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The chart below shows that interest rates – or the price of money – reached their lowest level in the nearly 5,000 years for which records exist.
Since the start of 2022, interest rates have surged higher, breaking a multi-decade downtrend, and ushering the market into a new super cycle where interest rates will likely remain higher for the long term.
Interest rates and the money supply are inextricably linked. Few people know why an inverted yield curve predicts a recession. An inverted yield curve reflects the destruction of money. When the yield curve is inverted, banks can no longer profitably borrow at short term rates and lend at long term rates. Bank lending creates the most amount of money. An inverted yield curve is a market perversion that does not occur naturally but occurs only through central bank action. Inverting the yield curve is a highly obfuscated tool that central banks use to decrease the money supply. Furthermore, as we discussed before, since the stock market generally tracks the money supply, an inverted yield curve is a warning that the stock market will fall in the future. Recently, the yield curve (as measured by the 10-year minus the 2-year U.S. treasury bonds) inverted by the most on record.
Below is the chart of iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT). TLT tracks an index composed of U.S. Treasury bonds with remaining maturities greater than twenty years.
As you can see from the chart above, which excludes the past two years, it looks like TLT has been a great investment over the past two decades. (For this chart, I included dividends. TLT pays out dividends that derive from interest payments on its bond holdings.)
Look at the chart below to see what happens when we adjust the chart for the money supply.
In the chart above we see that since its inception TLT moved horizontally relative to the money supply. What this means is that holding TLT over this period was not wealth-building, but it was good at preserving wealth. Its price moved up in perfect lockstep with the money supply.
Now, let’s see how TLT performed in the past two years.
As we see in the chart above, until 2021, an investor who held long-term U.S. government bonds would have been preserving their wealth and shielding it from the erosion of perpetual increases in money supply. However, as interest rates on government debt surged higher as central banks fight high inflation, bond investors are now seeing major wealth destruction. In a stable monetary system, investing in government bonds should preserve wealth, since if it fails to do so, no one will buy bonds to finance the government.
The situation is also concerning when we examine investment-grade corporate bonds (LQD) relative to the money supply.
This chart of investment-grade corporate bonds adjusted for the money supply shows that we should be concerned about the current state of even the most high-grade corporate bonds. We see that the value of investment-grade corporate bonds over time, inclusive of their interest payments, has fallen off a cliff relative to the rate at which the money supply is increasing. This chart suggests that those who invested in corporate bonds have recently lost a lot of wealth. Until the current trend reverses, who would want to invest in corporate bonds? This is a problem for corporate finance.
Below is a chart of high-yield corporate bonds (HYG), (which are riskier than investment-grade corporate bonds), as compared to the money supply.
You can see from the chart above that all the wealth built by investing in high-yield corporate bonds since the Great Recession has been completely wiped out.
What I am about to explain next will be somewhat dense. Look again at the two charts below which show investment-grade corporate bonds relative to the money supply and high-yield corporate bonds relative to the money supply.
Recall that bond prices move inversely to bond yields. Thus, if we flip these charts of corporate bond prices, we will get corporate bond yields relative to the money supply.
Now let’s think. These charts show that the yields on corporate bonds are moving up faster than the supply of money. Corporate bond yields reflect the amount of money that corporations must pay on their debt. In other words, the amount of money that corporations will have to pay to service their debt is moving up faster than the money supply. As noted previously, the money supply speaks to corporate earnings since corporations can only ever earn some subset of the total supply of money in the economy. Thus, if the money supply decreases, as it is now, corporate earnings will likely decrease as well. If the interest on corporate debt is moving up much faster than the money supply, and the money supply which reflects corporate earning capacity is decreasing, what might this say about the future?
Mortgages
In the chart below, I analyzed the current median single-family home price in the United States adjusted by the current average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (as a percentage). I then compared this number to the money supply.
This chart gives us a sense of whether or not the Federal Reserve is supplying enough money to the economy to support the current expense of home ownership. As you can see, price is rapidly approaching the upper channel line (2 standard deviations above the mean), which signals that home ownership is the least affordable it has been since the early 1980s – the last time the upper channel line was reached.
If one believes that the 2 standard deviation level is restrictive, then one may conclude that there is not enough money being supplied by the Federal Reserve to sustain such high home prices as coupled with such high mortgage rates. If the Federal Reserve does not pivot back to a less tight monetary policy soon, then there is a high probability that a housing recession will occur in the coming years.
Perhaps what is more alarming is the below chart, which shows the EMA ribbon. The EMA ribbon is a collection of exponential moving averages that tend to act as support or resistance over time. When the ribbon is decisively pierced it reflects a trend change.
We can see in the above chart, that for the first time since the mid-1980s, we have pierced through the EMA ribbon. This could be a signal that a new super cycle has begun, whereby a higher interest rate environment will persist alongside high inflation for the long term, potentially making homes less affordable for the long term. This is one of many charts that seem to validate the conclusion that inflation will remain persistently high for the long term.
Commodities
In the below chart, the price of commodities is measured as a ratio to the money supply.
This chart informs us that commodity prices have broken their long-term downward trend relative to the money supply.
The chart above shows commodities as a ratio to the money supply side-by-side an inverted chart of the S&P 500 as a ratio to the money supply. It appears that the ratio of commodities to the money supply reflects an inverse relationship to the S&P 500 and the money supply. Think about what these charts may be indicating. Could they suggest that in the face of a shrinking money supply, more money will flow out of the stock market into increasingly scarce commodities? In a deglobalizing world facing conflict, climate change, and declining growth in productivity, it’s unlikely that commodity prices will return to the extremely undervalued levels seen in 2020.
One commodity, in particular, deserves its own discussion: Gold.
Gold
During a monetary crisis, the usual winner is physical gold.
Since the dawn of human civilization, gold has played an important role in the monetary system. As a scarce commodity gold is often perceived as inherently valuable.
In his 1912 book, The Theory of Money and Credit, Ludwig von Mises theorized that the value of money can be traced back ("regressed") to its value as a commodity. This has come to be known as the Regression Theorem.
Once paper money was introduced, currencies still maintained an explicit link to gold (the paper being exchangeable for gold on demand). However, the U.S. abandoned the gold standard in 1971 to curb inflation and prevent foreign nations from overburdening the system by redeeming their dollars for gold.
Currently, gold is extremely undervalued when priced in U.S. dollars. The current fair dollar-to-gold ratio is currently about $7,200 per ounce of gold. This number is produced by dividing the year-to-year increases in the money supply by the yearly production of gold in ounces.
Eventually, a monetary crisis will occur, and according to Exter’s Pyramid, investors will scramble for gold, which may force fiat currency to regress back to a gold standard to stabilize markets.
Bitcoin
In this final part, I will give a few thoughts on Bitcoin, as it relates to the money supply.
Below, you will see that when charted as a ratio to the money supply, Bitcoin formed a nearly perfect double top in 2021.
This chart could have warned traders that Bitcoin had topped in November 2021 given Bitcoin's inability to achieve a new high relative to the money supply. This shows that one can use the money supply in their charting as an additional layer of technical analysis.
In the below chart, we see how Bitcoin's market cap is moving relative to the U.S. money supply.
Bitcoin’s yearly chart is a bull flag relative to the money supply. There are very few assets outside of the cryptocurrency class that present as a bull flag relative to the money supply on their yearly chart. What might this chart reveal about Bitcoin's tendency to disrupt central banks' ability to conduct monetary policy?
The Federal Reserve’s inability to stop people from converting dollars into Bitcoin to store wealth is a problem that will likely result in Bitcoin and other forms of decentralized finance coming under the greater scrutiny of the U.S. federal government. In the future, I plan to write a post on investing in cryptocurrency. In that post, I will explore Bitcoin and blockchain technology in much greater depth.
Final thoughts
To build wealth one must invest in assets that grow in price faster than the money supply erodes purchasing power. To become a successful investor, one must revolutionize one’s perception of money and understand that cash – or central bank notes – are worth nothing more than the belief that the government will persist and remain solvent. To build wealth an investor’s goal should not be to make as much cash as possible, rather an investor’s goal should be to convert cash into assets that grow faster than the money supply and to accumulate as much of such assets as possible.
