Inflation Was Sooo 1970s! Will It Roar Back in the 2020s?

Inflation I: Post-Pandemic Worry. I was an early believer in “disinflation.” I first used that word, which means falling inflation, in my June 1981 commentary titled “Well on the Road to Disinflation.” The Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rate was 9.6% that month. I predicted that Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker would succeed in breaking the inflationary uptrend of the 1960s and 1970s, which he did.

Nevertheless, throughout my career, I’ve often fielded questions about the likelihood of a rebound in inflation from accounts who were worried that it just might make a comeback. After all, the Fed chairs who followed Volcker tended to favor stimulative monetary policies. This year, as a result of the unprecedented monetary and fiscal policy stimulus provided by governments around the world to offset the adverse financial and economic consequences of the Great Virus Crisis (GVC), I’m hearing more concern that inflation could come roaring back once the pandemic is over.

In this widely feared scenario, interest rates might soar. That would create all sorts of trouble. The mountains of debt accumulated by the public and private sectors would compound at a faster pace. The credit markets could seize up, causing a credit crunch and a recession, possibly worse than those of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). Stock markets would fall into bear markets as earnings declined and valuation multiples tumbled. If inflation were to come roaring back, my upbeat Roaring 2020s outlook would be its biggest casualty.

Given the consequences of getting their expectations for inflation wrong, it’s no wonder investors are worried about this bad-case scenario even if they aren’t ready to do anything in response to it, other than talk about it more often. In any event, while I’m still a disinflationist, our YRI team is focused on watching out for signs of trouble on the inflation front. Before I review what we are seeing, let’s briefly recount what happened during the Great Inflation of the 1970s.

Inflation II: A Brief History of Inflation in the 1970s. Almost everything that could go wrong did so back then. I reviewed what happened in my 2020 book titled Fed Watching for Fun and Profit. For starters, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, which ended the Bretton Woods system that had kept the dollar’s value at a constant $35 per ounce of gold since the system was established in 1944. The value of the dollar in foreign exchange markets suddenly plummeted, causing spikes in import prices as well as the prices of most commodities priced in dollars.

During the summer of 1971, Nixon imposed wage and price controls. They didn’t work, and the controls were lifted in 1973. During 1972 and 1973, for the first time since the Korean War, farm and food prices began to contribute substantially to inflationary pressures in the economy. Also, there was a major oil price shock during 1973 and again in 1979 (Fig. 1).

Together, the two oil price shocks of the 1970s caused the price of a barrel of West Texas crude oil to soar 11-fold from $3.56 during July 1973 to a peak of $39.50 during mid-1980, using available monthly data (Fig. 2). As a result, the CPI inflation rate soared from 2.7% during June 1972 to a record high of 14.8% during March 1980. Even the core inflation rate (i.e., the rate excluding food and energy) jumped from 3.0% to 13.0% over this period as higher energy costs led to faster wage gains, which were passed through into prices economy-wide. During the 1970s, strong labor unions in the private sector succeeded in quickly boosting wages through cost-of-living clauses in their contracts. The result was an inflationary wage-price spiral (Fig. 3).

It’s my view that the 1970s were uniquely inflation prone. Paul Volcker stopped the inflationary wage-price spiral by tightening monetary policy significantly during the late 1970s and early 1980s, causing a severe recession. However, inflation continued to trend lower since then through today, mostly because of the four deflationary forces (i.e., the “4Ds”), which we have discussed many times along the way. (For a summary, see the excerpt from my 2020 book titled Four Deflationary Forces Keeping a Lid on Inflation.)

Inflation III: Will the 4Ds Drown in M1’s Tsunami? The question for us today is whether the 4Ds are still relevant or whether they’ve met their inflationary match in the extraordinary monetary and fiscal policy responses to the pandemic. The 12-month federal deficit rose to a record high of $3.3 trillion through October, while the Fed’s purchases of Treasury securities totaled a record $2.4 trillion over the same period (Fig. 4). Most of those expansions occurred since the week of March 23, when the Fed and the Treasury essentially embraced Modern Monetary Theory and morphed into “T-Fed” in response to the GVC.

Contrary to Milton Friedman’s claim that inflation is essentially a monetary phenomenon, it has remained subdued ever since the GFC notwithstanding the ultra-easy monetary policies of the major central banks. We soon should find out if money matters to the inflation outlook given that the GVC has resulted in ultra-easy monetary policies on steroids and speed combined! In the US, M1 has increased by $2.3 trillion since the last week of February to a record $6.2 trillion during the week of November 23 (Fig. 5). It is up an astonishing and unprecedented $498 billion during the latest week and 57% y/y! MZM and M2 are up 28% and 25% y/y (Fig. 6).

Our money is on the 4Ds. They should continue to keep a lid on inflation. Here is our current bottom lines on each of the 4Ds:

(1) Détente. In the grand sweep of economic history, inflation tends to occur during relatively short and infrequent episodes, i.e., during war times. The more common experience has been either very low inflation or outright deflation during peacetimes.

Periods of globalization follow wartimes. During peacetimes, national markets become increasingly integrated through trade and capital flows. The result is more global competition, which is inherently deflationary. The worsening Cold War between the US and China is a threat to globalization, but probably won’t heat up to the point of causing inflation now that a regime change is coming to Washington. In any event, China’s exports during November edged back up to the record high hit during July notwithstanding Trump’s trade war with that country (Fig. 7).

(2) Technological Disruption. Nevertheless, recent global trade tensions and the pandemic are likely to cause businesses to diversify their offshore supply chains away from China and to onshore more of them. That could be costly and inflationary. It could also be cost effective now that labor shortages attributable to global demographic trends are stimulating technological innovations in automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and 3D manufacturing. These all enable onshoring and boost productivity to boot.

Nonfarm productivity jumped 4.0% y/y during Q3, the fastest pace since Q1-2010. We are expecting a secular rebound in productivity growth during the Roaring 2020s. So far, so good: The 20-quarter growth rate of productivity (at an annual rate) is up from a recent low of 0.6% during Q4-2015 to 1.7% during Q3 (Fig. 8). I believe that the pandemic accelerated the pace of applying new technologies to boost efficiency and profit margins, as we will discuss more fully tomorrow.

(3) Demographics. Fertility rates have plunged below population replacement in recent decades around the world as urbanization has changed the economics of having children. Instead of being an important source of labor and elder care, as they were in agrarian communities, children are all cost in urban settings. Nursing homes have few vacancies, while maternity wards have plenty. Increasingly geriatric demographic profiles are inherently deflationary.

4) Debt. During the 1960s through the 1980s, debt was stimulative; more of it stimulated more demand and added to inflationary pressures. Now, easy credit conditions aren’t as stimulative to demand as in the past because so many consumers have so much debt already. However, easy monetary conditions are a lifeline to zombie companies, enabling them to raise funds to stay in business and add to global supplies of goods and services, which is deflationary.

Inflation IV: By the Numbers. Now let’s review the latest inflation data around the world. Inflation remains remarkably subdued, as it has been since the mid-1990s. Consider the following:

(1) G7. The core CPI inflation rate among the seven major industrial economies has fluctuated in a flat range between a high of 2.2% and a low of 0.7% since 1997 (Fig. 9). The core rate was only 1.1% during October. Here are the latest core CPI inflation rates for the US (1.6%), Eurozone (0.2), and Japan (-0.4) (Fig. 10).

(2) China. While China’s economy has staged a significant recovery from its lockdown recession at the start of the year, the CPI inflation rate dropped from a recent peak of 5.8% during February to only 0.5% during October. The Producer Price Index was down 2.1% y/y during October.

(3) US. The pandemic has had a dramatic inflationary impact on only one component of the CPI: Used car and truck prices are up 11.5% y/y through October (Fig. 11). (They are up 14.4% in the PCED, or personal consumption expenditure deflator, measure.) This is a category with little weight in the CPI.

Rent of shelter has a much bigger weight, and its inflation rate has been falling sharply as a result of the pandemic because of two phenomena: people unable to pay their rent and renters becoming homeowners. This CPI item’s inflation rate is down from 3.4% at the start of the year to 2.1% during October (Fig. 12). It does include hotel and motel fees, which should reflate once a vaccine is widely distributed.

Inflation V: Bonds, the Dollar & Commodity Prices. Notwithstanding all the above, the financial markets seem to be signaling that inflationary pressures are making a comeback of sorts. More likely, in our opinion, is that they’re simply signaling that the deflationary pressures initially unleashed by the pandemic are abating as the global economy continues to recover. Consider the following:

(1) Expected inflation rebounds. The 10-year US Treasury bond yield has been relatively flat just below 1.00% recently, while the comparable TIPS yield has been edging lower again following a smallish and shortish rebound from its fall earlier this year (Fig. 13). As a result, the yield spread between the two, which is widely used as a proxy for the average annual 10-year expected inflation rate, has rebounded from this year’s low of 0.5% on March 19 to 1.9% on Monday (Fig. 14).

(2) Copper is red hot. The price of copper has rebounded dramatically along with China’s economy as auto sales in China rose for a fourth straight month in October. The price of the red metal is up 65.5% since the year’s low on March 23 from $2.12 per pound to $3.51 on Monday (Fig. 15). The two previous rebounds that exceeded the current one since 2004 were not associated with rising CPI inflation.

Meanwhile, the ratio of the nearby futures prices of copper to gold continues to signal that the bond yield should be closer to 2.00% than to 1.00% (Fig. 16). There’s been a tight fit between the ratio (multiplied by 10) and the yield since 2004. Without the Fed’s open market purchases of Treasury notes and bonds, the yield would probably be higher, boosting the expected inflation proxy over 2.00%.

By the way, the reason why the copper/gold ratio tracks the nominal yield so closely is that the price of copper is highly correlated with the yield spread inflation proxy, while the price of gold is highly correlated with the inverse of the 10-year TIPS yield (Fig. 17 and Fig. 18).

(3) The dollar’s descent. Yet another interesting set of correlations is the ones between the inverse of the dollar versus the price of copper and versus expected inflation (Fig. 19 and Fig. 20). All three variables are consistent with rising inflation pressures. However, similar past episodes in recent years signaled that deflationary pressures were abating rather than inflation rebounding.

The Carrie Trade: From Bond Vigilantes to Bond Zombies

Carrie is a horror novel by Stephen King. It was his first published novel, released on April 5, 1974. It was turned into a movie in 1976 starring Sissy Spacek and John Travolta. Carrie is a misfit bullied in her high school and dealing with an abusive, religious fanatic mother at home. She finds that she can channel her angst into telekinetic powers, which she uses to exact revenge on her tormenters. Much blood is spilt along the way, including Carrie’s. In the final scene, she seems to rise from the dead but that’s just a bad dream.

The Bond Vigilantes have been buried by the Fed. However, in our nightmare scenario, they could rise from the dead like Carrie. It isn’t likely to happen if inflation also remains buried, as I expect.

Meanwhile, there are other vigilantes in the financial markets. The Dow Vigilantes sent out a blood-curdling scream when the S&P 500 plunged 33.9% in 33 days earlier this year (Fig. 1). The Fed responded with QE4ever on March 23. The Dollar Vigilantes are threatening a crash in the currency if US fiscal and monetary policies continue to placate the Dow Vigilantes by swelling the federal budget deficit and the money supply (Fig. 2, Fig. 3, and Fig. 4). A plunge in the dollar could revive inflation and unleash a plague of Bond Zombies.

It’s hard to get a clear signal from the financial markets since their price mechanisms have been so distorted by the Fed and the other major central banks. The one clear signal may be coming from the commodity markets. Consider the following:

(1) CRB raw industrials. The CRB raw industrials spot price index continues to signal rebounding global economic activity (Fig. 5). It is highly inversely correlated with the trade-weighted dollar. The rising CRB index is bullish for the Emerging Markets MSCI stock price index, the Australian and Canadian dollars, and the S&P 500 Materials sector. (See our Market Correlations: CRB Raw Industrials Spot Price Index.)

The CRB index is also highly correlated with expected inflation as measured by the yield spread between the 10-year nominal Treasury bond and the comparable TIPS (Fig. 6). This spread has rebounded from this year’s low of 0.50% on March 19 to a range of 1.6%-1.8% in recent weeks.

(2) Copper. The price of copper is one of the 13 components of the CRB raw industrials spot price index (Fig. 7). (Petroleum and lumber products are not included in the index.) The copper price has been leading the overall CRB index higher since this year’s bottom. On Monday, copper closed at the highest price since January 2, 2014. Driving the price of the red metal higher has been China’s M-PMI, which has recovered solidly over the past six months through November (Fig. 8).

(3) Copper/gold ratio. When I multiply the ratio of the nearby futures prices of copper to gold by 10, the resulting series has shown a remarkably close fit with the 10-year Treasury bond yield since 2004 (Fig. 9). The ratio currently suggests that the bond yield should be closer to 2.00% than to 1.00%. As I discussed on Monday in my Morning Briefing, the yield has remained under 1.00% since March 20, as the Fed has been buying Treasury notes and bonds faster than the Treasury has been issuing them:

“From the last week of February through the last week of October, the Fed’s holdings of Treasury securities increased $2.1 trillion as follows by maturities: One year or less ($421 billion), 1-10 years ($1,281 billion), and over 10 years ($351 billion) (Fig. 9). From the end of February to the end of October, the Treasury increased its outstanding marketable debt by $3.4 trillion as follows: bills ($2,420 billion), notes ($735 billion), and bonds ($284 billion) (Fig. 10). In other words, the Fed financed 62% of the Treasuries financing needs across all maturities, and purchased $613 billion more notes and bonds than were issued over that period!”

That’s the “Carrie trade.” As long as it continues, the Bond Vigilantes will remain buried.

(1) The July 27, 1983 issue of my weekly commentary was titled “Bond Investors Are the Economy’s Vigilantes.” I concluded: “So if the fiscal and monetary authorities won’t regulate the economy, the bond investors will. The economy will be run by vigilantes in the credit markets. During the 1980s and 1990s, there were a few episodes when rising bond yields slowed the economy and put a lid on inflation.”

Comparative Roaring '20s

This should be the first and last holiday season requiring us all to socially distance from one another. Apparently, we will have a cornucopia of vaccines and treatments available for mass distribution early next year. If so, then 2020 may mark the beginning of the Roaring 2020s, as I've discussed in previous LinkedIn articles. Let’s compare the current situation to the one before and during the Roaring 1920s:

(1) World War I. Recall that the years leading up to the Roaring 1920s included World War I from July 28, 1914 through November 11, 1918. The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was about 40 million, with estimates ranging from around 15-22 million deaths and about 23 million wounded military personnel—ranking World War I among the deadliest conflicts in human history.

(2) Spanish flu. That was followed by the Spanish flu pandemic from February 1918 through April 1920. It infected 500 million people—about a third of the world's population at the time—in four successive waves. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.

(3) Depression of 1920–21. There was a severe deflationary recession in the US, the UK, and other countries beginning 14 months after the end of World War I. It lasted from January 1920 to July 1921. How depressing! The Great War (as it was called back then) and the pandemic of 1918-20 killed between 32 million and 72 million people. That was followed by a global depression (as recessions were called back then). No one at the start of the decade could have anticipated the technology-led revolution of the Roaring 1920s or the resulting prosperity of that period. Thanksgiving during 1920 must have been extremely depressing indeed.

(4) The high-tech revolution of the 1920s. As I reviewed in my August 12 article, the 1920s was a decade of amazing technological innovations. Some of them sped up activities that were too slow when done by horses and automated activities that required lots of workers. Assembly lines required fewer workers, and their productivity increased. The revolution allowed for a greater division of labor. The focus was mostly on brawn.

The automobile produced on assembly lines revolutionized transportation. The bulldozer did the same for construction. The standard of living improved dramatically for everyone as electric grids provided clean, bright light without emitting smoke. Urban water networks supplied clean water, and sewer systems removed waste without the pungent odors of chamber pots and outhouses. Telephones allowed people to converse with distant friends. National food brands proliferated, as did restaurants. Department stores and mail order retailers provided goods to a rapidly growing consumer market. Penicillin was discovered.

(5) The trade wars of 2018-19. The 2020s were preceded by a trade war between the US and China. President Donald Trump started and escalated it during 2018 and 2019. The Biden administration is likely to deescalate the resulting Cold War. Nevertheless, as a consequence of both ongoing tensions between the two countries and the pandemic, manufacturers are likely to move more of their operations and supply chains to the US. That could be inflationary. More likely is that some of the technological innovations discussed below will boost productivity and reduce energy and transportation costs.

(6) The pandemic of 2020. So far, the Covid-19 virus has killed 1.5 million people worldwide including 276,000 in the US. That’s a terrible outcome, but nowhere near the Spanish flu’s lethal toll. The biotech revolution is likely to deliver effective vaccines against the Covid-19 virus this time.

(7) The high-tech revolution of the 2020s. Today’s “Great Disruption,” I like to call it, is increasingly about technology doing what the brain can do, but faster and with greater focus. Given that so many of the new technologies supplement or replace the brain, they lend themselves to many more applications than did the technologies of the past, which were mostly about replacing brawn. Today’s innovations produced by the IT industry are revolutionizing lots of other ones, including manufacturing, energy, transportation, healthcare, and education. My friends at BCA Research dubbed it the “BRAIN Revolution,” led by innovations in biotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. That’s clever, and it makes sense.

The current pandemic seems to be speeding up the pace at which these and other technologies are proliferating. I believe that productivity growth has been heading toward a secular rebound during the post-pandemic Roaring 2020s. Even before the Great Virus Crisis (GVC), companies had been moving to incorporate into their businesses a host of state-of-the-art technologies in the areas of computing, telecommunications, robotics, artificial intelligence, 3-D manufacturing, the Internet of Things, among others. The GVC is accelerating that trend as companies rethink how to do business ever more efficiently in the post-pandemic era. See my September 2 article titled “The Future Is Coming: The Technology Revolution of the Roaring 2020s.”

(8) One major difference. The one major difference between the 1920s and the early 2020s (post the November 3 election) is the political persuasion of the presidency. During the 1920s, the White House was occupied by two very conservative Republican presidents: Warren G. Harding (March 4, 1921–August 2, 1923) and Calvin Coolidge (August 2, 1923–March 4, 1929). Coolidge advocated smaller government and laissez-faire economics.

Andrew Mellon was secretary of the Treasury from March 9, 1921 through February 12, 1932. One of his achievements was the Revenue Act of 1926, which reduced the top marginal rate to 25%. In addition to cutting taxes on top earners, the act raised the personal exemption for federal income taxes, abolished the gift tax, reduced the estate tax rate, and repealed a provision that had required the public disclosure of federal income tax returns.

The incoming Biden administration has promised to raise numerous taxes including on corporations and on taxpayers earning more than $400,000 annually. I remind the incoming administration that trickle-down economics works both ways: Higher taxes on the rich and on corporations inevitably trickle down to everyone else.

S&P 500 EARNINGS, VALUATION, AND THE PANDEMIC: Introduction

The following is the Introduction to our latest study in our "Predicting the Markets" series. The paperback and e-book are available on Amazon here. The other studies in this series are available on my Amazon author's page here.

I started my career on Wall Street in 1978. I spent the prior year at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the economics research department after receiving my undergraduate degree in economics and government from Cornell University in 1972 and my PhD in economics from Yale University in 1976. Over the past 40-plus years, I’ve worked as both the chief economist and the chief investment strategist at several firms on Wall Street. Since January 2007, I’ve been the president of my own consulting firm, Yardeni Research, Inc.

My job continues to be to predict the financial markets, particularly the major stock, bond, commodity, and foreign exchange markets around the world. I’ve learned a lot about these markets over the years. I recently started sharing what I’ve learned in a series of books and studies.

In this study, I will focus on the S&P 500 stock price index, examining how it is determined by the earnings of the 500 companies that are included in the index and the valuation of those earnings by the stock market.

Why pick the S&P 500?

The S&P 500 is a stock market index that measures the stock price performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most widely followed equity indexes. The stocks in this index are a representative sample of leading companies in leading industries. Many equity managers benchmark the performance of their portfolios to the S&P 500. Among the largest exchange-traded funds are those that track the S&P 500. The S&P 500 represents more than 83% of the total domestic US equity market capitalization.[1]

The widely followed Dow Jones Industrials Average (DJIA) has only 30 companies. It was launched in 1896 and was a spin-off of the Dow Jones Transportation Average, which was first compiled in 1884 by Charles Dow, the co-founder of Dow Jones & Company. The S&P 500 dates back to 1923. That year, the Standard Statistics Company (founded in 1906 as the “Standard Statistics Bureau”) developed its first stock market index, consisting of the stocks of 233 US companies and 26 industries, computed weekly. (The company also began rating mortgage bonds in 1923.) In 1926, it developed a 90-stock index, computed daily. In 1941, Poor’s Publishing merged with Standard Statistics Company to form Standard & Poor’s (S&P). On March 4, 1957, the index was expanded to its current 500 companies and was renamed the “S&P 500 Stock Composite Index.”

The components of the S&P 500 index and other S&P indexes are selected by the firm’s US Index Committee, which meets monthly. All committee members are full-time professional members of the firm’s Indices staff. At each meeting, committee members review pending corporate actions that may affect the indexes’ constituent companies, statistics comparing the indexes’ composition to the broad stock market, candidate companies under consideration for addition to an index, and the bearing of any significant market events on the indexes.

The committee identifies important industries within the US equity market, approximates the relative weight of these industries in terms of market capitalization, and then allocates a representative sample of stocks within each industry of the S&P 500. There are 11 sectors according to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS): Communication Services, Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Staples, Energy, Financials, Health Care, Industrials, Information Technology, Materials, Real Estate, and Utilities.[2] These sectors are further divided into 24 industry groups, 69 industries, and 158 subindustries.

Candidates for inclusion in the S&P 500 index must meet specific criteria in eight areas: market capitalization, liquidity, domicile, public float, GICS, financial viability, length of time publicly traded, and stock exchange listing. The index is reconstituted quarterly, though changes are made infrequently.

The S&P 500 index is a free-float, capitalization-weighted index. That means that companies are weighted in the index in proportion to their market capitalizations. To determine the market-capitalization weight of a company, only the number of shares available for public trading (free float) is used. Shares held by insiders or by controlling shareholders that are not publicly traded are excluded from the calculation. The largest companies (based on market capitalization) in the S&P 500 account for a substantial portion of its total market capitalization. Since the index is market-capitalization weighted, these companies have the greatest influence on the index’s price performance.

Notwithstanding occasional bear markets, the S&P 500 has been a great investment over the years—so much so that “S&P” could stand for “Success & Profit.” Since January 1, 1955, through September 2, 2020, the index has been down in bear markets during 3,029 of the 16,535 trading days—i.e., just 18.3% of the time. It has risen at a compounded annual rate of 6%, a rate that doubles the value of this portfolio every 12 years. And that doesn’t include the dividend return provided by many of the S&P 500 companies.

The first chapter in our study covers the various measures of earnings for the S&P 500 and why we favor forward earnings among them. The second chapter discusses various models of valuation, again focusing on the S&P 500. The final chapter uses the resulting analytical framework to review how it has worked in good times and bad, focusing on the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Virus Crisis.

[1] See S&P Global, S&P 500: The Gauge of the Market Economy and S&P U.S. Indices Methodology, August 2020. See S&P Dow Jones Indices.

[2] The Global Industry Classification Standard is jointly developed and maintained by S&P Dow Jones Indices and MSCI.

INCOME & WEALTH IN AMERICA: Who Owns Equities?

A large team of the Fed’s researchers have been busy constructing a new database containing quarterly estimates of the distribution of US household wealth since 1989. They launched it with the release of a March 2019 working paper titled “Introducing the Distributional Financial Accounts of the United States.” The Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA) is an impressive accomplishment combining quarterly aggregate measures of household wealth from the Financial Accounts of the United States (FA) and triennial wealth distribution measures from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF).

I. A much more comprehensive database. We believe that the new database can be used to resolve lots of controversial issues about wealth distribution in the US. The DFA’s balance sheet of the household sector is much more comprehensive and timely than previously existing sources. The Fed’s researchers observe that their “approach produces rich and reliable measures of the distribution of the Financial Accounts’ household-sector assets and liabilities for each quarter from 1989 to the present.” The data can be used to study the distribution of wealth in America by wealth and income percentiles, education, age, generation, and race. Melissa and I intend to do just that in coming months with the goal of assembling a comprehensive study tentatively titled “Income & Wealth in America: Myths & Realities.”

II. Who owns equities in America, according to FA? Aggregate data are available in Table L.223 in the FA for corporate equities held by each of the major sectors in the accounts. Unlike the DFA, the household sector in the FA includes nonprofit organizations, and this sector’s data are calculated residually from the other accounts. Let’s review our findings:

(1) The supply side of equities. The total market value of equities held in the US during Q2-2020 was $52.0 trillion, with domestic issues totaling $43.5 trillion and foreign issues totaling $8.5 trillion (Fig. 1). Domestic issues included $33.5 trillion of nonfinancial issues and $10.0 trillion of financial issues and consisted of $37.2 trillion of publicly traded and $6.3 trillion of closely held equities (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3). The $6.3 trillion of closely held equity consisted of $4.7 trillion in S corporations and $1.6 trillion in C corporations (Fig. 4).

(2) Ownership by sectors. During Q2-2020, of the $52.0 trillion in equities, the major sectors directly held the following amounts and percentage shares: household sector ($19.5 trillion, 37.6%), mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) ($14.5 trillion, 27.8%), rest of the world ($8.2 trillion, 15.8%), and institutional investors ($7.0 trillion, 13.4%) (Fig. 5 and Fig. 6).

(3) Directly and indirectly held by households. The FA includes a Table B.101e titled “Balance Sheet of Households and Nonprofit Organizations with Debt and Equity Holdings Detail.” It provides extraordinary insight into the indirect equity holdings of households through life insurance companies, private and public pension funds, and mutual funds. During Q2-2020, households and nonprofits directly held $19.5 trillion (37.6% of all equities) and indirectly held $12.4 trillion (23.8% of the total) (Fig. 7). In other words, their direct and indirect holdings of equities totaled $31.9 trillion, or 61.4% of all equities (Fig. 8). Interestingly, this percentage has been remarkably stable around 65% since the early 1980s.

III. Which households own equities, according to DFA? The link between the household sector in the FA and in the DFA is Table B.101.h titled “Balance Sheet of Households,” which unlike Table L.223 excludes nonprofit organizations from the household sector. On the other hand, this balance sheet shows the household sector’s combined holdings of corporate equities and mutual fund shares, which include bond funds but not money market mutual funds or ETFs. The assets and liabilities in this version of the household balance sheet are the ones for which the DFA provides all the data needed for analyzing the distribution of household net worth. (See “Household Balance Sheet” from our forthcoming study on income and wealth in America.)

Now, let’s analyze the distribution of the DFA’s various series for corporate equites and mutual fund shares held by households, sliced and diced by wealth percentile, generation, and education:

(1) DFA by wealth percentiles. We repeat: The DFA is based on the FA’s Table B.101.h, which is the “Balance Sheet of Households” excluding the assets and liabilities of nonprofit organizations. It shows only annual data and reveals that corporate equities and mutual funds held by households at the end of 2019 totaled $29.1 trillion (Fig. 9). In the DFA, this series is shown on a quarterly basis. By the way, we can derive a similar quarterly series as the sum of corporate equities held by households and nonprofits plus mutual fund shares held by them, as reported in FA Table L.224, which excludes money market funds and ETFs (Fig. 10).

The DFA shows that corporate equities and mutual fund shares held by households was down slightly to $26.8 trillion during Q2-2020, with the following ownership and percentage shares of the total among wealth percentile groups: top 1% ($14.1 trillion, 52.4%), 90%-99% ($9.5 trillion, 35.8%), 50%-90% ($3.0 trillion, 11.2%), and bottom 50% ($0.2 trillion, 0.6%) (Fig. 11 and Fig. 12).

The bottom 50% never owned more than 1.6% of this asset category. The 50%-90% crowd’s share peaked at 21.4% during Q3-2002 and since has fallen to 11.2% currently. The 90%-99% group has held a fairly steady share around 35% since the early 1990s. The top 1% has ranged between a low of 40.2% and a high of 52.8%.

The widespread notion that the very rich own a disproportionate share of corporate equities is true, but their collective share is more like 50% of the total held by households than the urban legend of 80%-90%.

(2) DFA by generations. The DFA allows us to compare the amount of an asset or liability held and the percentage shares by four generations: Silent (born before 1946), Baby Boomer (1946-1964), GenX (1965-1980), and Millennial (1981-96).

Here are the values of corporate equities and mutual funds held by the four generations and their percentage shares during Q2-2020: Silent ($5.1 trillion, 19.0%), Baby Boomer ($14.8 trillion, 55.3%), GenX ($6.3 trillion, 23.4%), and Millennial ($0.6 trillion, 2.2%) (Fig. 13 and Fig. 14).

Since the start of the data in 1989, the percentage share held by the Silent generation has dropped from around 80%-90% to 19% currently, while the percentage share of the Baby Boom generation increased from 10%-20% to 55% currently. The GenX share was close to zero in early 2009 and has been trending up; it’s around 23% currently. The Millennials’ share remains close to zero.

(3) DFA by education. Finally for now, let’s have a look at the impact of education on the ownership of corporate equities and mutual fund shares. The DFA data show that households headed by college-educated persons held 82.9% of corporate equities and mutual fund shares during Q2-2020 (Fig. 15 and Fig. 16). That percentage has been trending higher since Q1-1995, when it fell to a series low of 60.2%. Households with heads who had some college, high school, and no high school owned only 9.9%, 6.3%, and 0.8%. Education is clearly a vitally important determinant of financial well-being.

IV. What's the bottom line? Since the early 1960s, the household sector (including nonprofit organizations) has directly and indirectly held 65% of equities in America. Of the equities held by households (excluding nonprofit organizations), the “1%” hold around 50% of this asset class. Older people with college educations tend to own more equities than younger ones with less education.