One Market Risk Ken Fisher Is Watching

Transcript

Ken Fisher:

Whenever I'm around our client base, I'm always asked, are there risks that I don't think the market's considering or pricing in?

That's a pretty hard one to get.

Let me give you my best thinking on that.

First, there's everything that I can't think about.

If I can't think about it because I try to, there's a good likelihood that other people aren't thinking about it too, whatever it is. And if it's big and bad, that's a serious risk. Any big or bad thing that I can't think about, probably other people aren't thinking about—therefore, it's not priced.

Now, let's step back from that for just a moment.

All of the big bad risks that everybody talks about, and I don't have to run through them right now, but you know many of them—fears of inflation, Iran War, etc. These are all ones that are priced, because everybody talks about them all the time.

One that I think is important to think about is the fact that we haven't had a bear market, coupled with a classic business cycle recession, in now, fully, 17 years—that's really long.

Embedded in there, somewhere, is the notion that there's a lot of house cleaning that needs to go on that hasn't happened, because normally, when you move into a bear market that's culminating with a business cycle recession, the whole purpose of the recession is to do the house cleaning that builds the base for the next economic expansion and bull market ahead of it, which goes on to new heights.

The fact is, we have had some extraordinary periods in these last 17 years. We had several years in the period around 2012 through with the European so-called PIGS crisis, where Portugal, Italy, Greece, Ireland and Spain had to do significant house cleaning on their own and other European countries similarly, just less so, for fear of the euro blowing apart.

We had, of course, a fair amount of house cleaning that went on tied to Covid, which wasn't a classic recession. It was a business contraction associated with government shutdown.

We had some house cleaning associated with what I call the anticipation of recession that never happened in 2022, and anticipation is a form of mitigation.

But we haven't had real deep house cleaning aimed at overcoming the obstacles of excesses built through expansion to be cleaned and purged before the next leg of economic expansion. We haven't had that in 17 years.

So, I would bet that when that finally does happen some day, and I don't expect it immediately—but when that happens, there'll be surprise and negativity associated with some of the things that have to be cleaned out because we've assumed that they're not problematic when they are.

Do I know exactly what they are? No. Do I know exactly where they are? No. But as Warren Buffett once famously said, nobody knows who's really swimming naked until the tide goes out. And when that tide goes out, we'll see.

But I think that's a fear to be reckoned with at a time in the future that will make things worse when that time happens than people are anticipating. Otherwise, I would say there's a very low likelihood of a lot of things that we can't contemplate, all the time.

I'm hesitant to bring up a kind of a pandemic, since we just went through that a few years ago, but things like a presidential assassination, things like mistakes that governments could make, like accidentally shooting off nuclear weapons.

There's all kinds of things that can happen that are very low probability, but as a group, it's worth kind of thinking through all of those and looking to see, are they likely to happen soon? Which the answer is no, or people would probably notice them, but what might trigger them, and think about that a little bit.

It's what we don't think about that's likely to be the risk, not what we do think about—which, because we do think about it, is inherently priced into stocks and other capital market securities right now.

Thank you for listening.

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