IT IS LIQUIDITY DRIVING THE MARKET
by ilene - September 15th, 2009 3:17 pm
IT IS LIQUIDITY DRIVING THE MARKET
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Guest contribution from Pazzo Mundo:
The economist David Rosenberg makes the headline statement in today’s missive that “It’s not liquidity driving the market”. Rather than guess at his motivations – let’s have a look at how liquidity is driving the market.
First up, define liquidity as referring to the relative ease with which an asset can be sold. Typically, selling an asset for cash is the most expedient way to realise an asset’s value. In a sense, cash is the most liquid of assets (as a store of value its pretty darn good most of the time and everyone is happy to use it as a medium of exchange). For this reason, cash is at the very heart of the liquidity concept.
When there is an abundance of liquidity for a given asset, selling it can be achieved quickly and with minimum price disturbance to that asset. When there is an abundance of liquidity in an economy as a whole, there is lots of cash available to buy assets – it is relatively easy to sell assets across the risk spectrum.
From this definition, the impact of liquidity on markets seems straightforward. To get a sense of how it can be measured, a former roomie of Mr Rosenbeg, Stephen Roach, points to a useful indicator:
My favorite gauge of the quantity dimension of liquidity is the so-called “Marshallian K” — the difference between growth in the money supply and nominal GDP. In essence, this measures the surplus of money that is not absorbed by the real economy.
When the money supply is growing faster than nominal GDP, then excess liquidity tends to flow to financial assets. On the flip side, if money supply is growing more slowly than nominal GDP, then the real economy absorbs more available liquidity.
Under this model, asset price inflation will be the result of excess liquidity. For example have a look at some research from BCA on the correlation of the US$ gold price with the Marshallian K and then as compared to CPI:
Now while David makes the point that the Fed’s most recent pumping of the monetary base has had little impact on broader money aggregates (as bank lending continues to contract at record rates), by taking a step back from the four…


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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
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