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Though no one can yet say how the virus will continue to develop in the U.S., and therefore how the markets will go, a review of the past few weeks can allow this conclusion (with apologies to Winston Churchill at the end of the Battle of Britain): This is not the end or even the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.
Whenever markets suffer a shock – a collapse somewhere in the economy, natural disaster, war – participants panic. This happened in March as the extent and severity of the Covid-19 pandemic became apparent. Such panic could of course return if markets were to suffer another terrible surprise, but their recent behavior suggests this beginning phase of the market correction seems to have ended:
- Equity prices have clawed back some of the ground lost to March’s panic. Stock prices fell precipitously between February 21, and March 23, with the benchmark S&P 500 stock index sliding almost 35 percent in just some four weeks, wiping out all the impressive gains of the prior three years. Since then, investors seem to have recovered the sense that perhaps pricing had anticipated the worst, especially since the Federal Reserve (Fed) and the government have initiated policies to mitigate if not erase the recessionary effects of the measures needed to fight the spread of the virus. Pricing has begun to improve. Stocks have risen some 19 percent from those lows, still some 21 percent below the highs of February, but a sign that panic has passed for the moment.
- Bond markets, while still fearful, remain relatively stable. On the first news of pandemic, Treasury yields fell precipitously, with the yield on the 10-year note dropping from just under 2.0 percent at the end of January to just over 0.6 percent by mid-March. To a large extent, the move reflected the Fed’s efforts to drive down all interest rates and bond yields. A flight to quality also was an element here. As investors sold off bonds issued by entities with lesser credit ratings and put the proceeds into presumably safer Treasury issues, the yields on all other bonds actually rose, widening the yield spread lesser credits offered over Treasuries from a little over 3.5 percentage points late in February to just over 10.5 percentage points late in March. This was not as high as the 20 percentage point spread that prevailed for a while in the Great Recession of 2009, but it’s hardly a sign of confidence. (This post will brief you on how bond prices and yields interact.) The past few weeks have seen only modest improvement. these yield spreads have declined to some 9 percentage points –– hardly much improvement but nonetheless a tentative sign of relative calm.
- Commodity markets tell a similar story to bonds.As the lockdowns and quarantines effectively shut down the economy, industrial materials prices dropped quickly. Copper prices illustrate the common story, falling by almost 20 percent from early to late March. Oil prices did worse, falling some 40 percent during this time, though extra pumping by Saudi Arabia (because of a dispute with Russia) exaggerated the general price retreat. Prices of oil, copper and most industrial materials have since risen slightly –– again, not a sign of confidence but at least a halt to the earlier panic.
- Currency markets, in contrast, have all but corrected their earlier panic. When the seriousness of the pandemic first became evident, money moved toward dollars, as it does in almost every emergency. A global index of the dollar’s value rose some 5 percent, but has nearly returned to its level of early March. Some might interpret this as a sign that Covid-19 infections in the U.S. have risen, but on a per-capita basis the American infection rate is no worse than in most developed countries and a good deal better than some. The movement away from the dollar speaks to a lessening of panic.
All this could change if COVID-19 changes its course. If it worsens, panic could reappear, and the markets would return to their levels of late March or even lose more value. But if the effects of the disease ease and promise a return to more normal levels of economic activity, the relative calm of recent weeks suggests that markets could regain ground quickly.
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