Tape 115 - The Dow Jones tops 1,000
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | Welcome once again as MIT professor Paul Samuelson | 0:02 |
discusses the current economic scene. | 0:05 | |
This biweekly series is produced by | 0:07 | |
Instructional Dynamics Incorporated | 0:09 | |
and was recorded November 17, 1972. | 0:11 | |
- | The big news on the financial pages of the last week | 0:15 |
has been the fact that the venerable | 0:21 | |
Dow Jones Industrial Average | 0:23 | |
finally broke through and closed above | 0:25 | |
the magic barrier of 1000. | 0:29 | |
My telephone began to ring when that happened. | 0:34 | |
And my invariable answer had to be to | 0:39 | |
journalists that it was a pretty silly thing | 0:43 | |
to call on a professor of economics | 0:46 | |
to give an interpretation of | 0:49 | |
what's happening in the stock market. | 0:52 | |
Well, I'm not on this tape going to venture | 0:55 | |
to predict the future of common stock prices | 1:00 | |
and certainly not the Dow Jones Industrial Average. | 1:06 | |
But, let me try to give some basic economic background | 1:09 | |
against which to put this new development. | 1:14 | |
First, I think to an economist, | 1:20 | |
the remarkable thing is not that this index number | 1:25 | |
of 30 stocks has passed a thousand. | 1:29 | |
The remarkable thing is that it didn't do so earlier. | 1:34 | |
It was as far back as 1966, | 1:40 | |
that the Dow Jones Industrial Average | 1:44 | |
was poised right at a thousand. | 1:47 | |
In fact, on an intraday basis, it burst through a thousand. | 1:48 | |
Then again, on, in 1968 the Dow Jones Industrial Average | 1:54 | |
was poised at the lip of the 1000 and indeed again, | 2:02 | |
on an intraday basis it had gone above a thousand. | 2:10 | |
Now, why is it surprising that it took so long? | 2:16 | |
Think back | 2:21 | |
how much has happened since 1966. | 2:24 | |
Even if you are of the belief | 2:28 | |
that stock market prices were too high in 1966, | 2:30 | |
and of course, we all know what correction followed, | 2:35 | |
an awful lot of real growth has taken place since 1966. | 2:39 | |
Six years real growth. | 2:49 | |
Now, less than the amount of real growth | 2:50 | |
that one could of hoped for the American economy. | 2:54 | |
This has not been six years | 2:56 | |
of the most remarkable real growth. | 2:58 | |
Indeed, this was a period of stagflation. | 3:00 | |
And so, in part of the period | 3:03 | |
there was negative real growth. | 3:06 | |
But for the period as a whole, there has been real growth. | 3:09 | |
The very fact that -flation was in the expression | 3:12 | |
stagflation indicates secondly, | 3:15 | |
that an awful lot of inflation has taken place since 1966. | 3:18 | |
And indeed since 1968. | 3:22 | |
So that the cost of reproducing | 3:24 | |
the brick and mortar, | 3:27 | |
the cogs and wheels | 3:31 | |
of American corporations, plants, | 3:35 | |
and equipment, their capital stock, | 3:39 | |
that which the New York Stock Market | 3:42 | |
is presumable evaluating, that has gone up | 3:44 | |
and has gone up steadily and remorselessly. | 3:49 | |
So that, if the Dow Jones Industrial Stocks, | 3:53 | |
those 30 stocks were at all fairly priced | 3:57 | |
in '68 or in '66, | 4:02 | |
then a naive economist | 4:07 | |
would say that they are now under-priced. | 4:09 | |
Now, I'm not saying that, | 4:12 | |
because you have to make your own judgment | 4:13 | |
as to how much of an excess was built into that price. | 4:16 | |
What I am saying, is that at the same total price, | 4:20 | |
these 30 stocks are a better buy in 1972 | 4:26 | |
then they were in 1968 and in 1966. | 4:30 | |
But there's a different and more important point. | 4:37 | |
I say more important, because, remember, | 4:41 | |
that game of how high stocks were in 1929 | 4:43 | |
could be played in 1935 they still weren't back. | 4:48 | |
They weren't back in 1937, they weren't back in 1939. | 4:52 | |
They weren't back in 1946. | 4:57 | |
My recollection is, that you would have had to wait | 4:59 | |
from 1929 to something like 1953 | 5:02 | |
in order to find the Dow Jones Index | 5:07 | |
back to where it had been. | 5:09 | |
So, these historical, looking-backwards periods, | 5:11 | |
comparisons are not so good as to look at | 5:15 | |
what has actually been happening. | 5:19 | |
The first place, the Dow Jones Industrial Averages, | 5:22 | |
is just one group of 30 blue-chip stocks. | 5:26 | |
These stocks are selected rather sensibly, | 5:32 | |
but they're not representative of the whole market. | 5:37 | |
And if you use a more comprehensive index | 5:40 | |
of what's been happening to the whole market, | 5:42 | |
and I suggest that as a very quick approximation | 5:45 | |
you use Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index. | 5:48 | |
Then you will know that the 1966 level, | 5:52 | |
and the 1968 levels, were left behind sometime back. | 5:55 | |
Nothing happened new in the Standard & Poor Index | 6:01 | |
this last fortnight | 6:05 | |
that hasn't been happening for a long time, | 6:08 | |
namely that it's been breaking into new ground. | 6:10 | |
Moreover, I think that if you were to take | 6:13 | |
a comprehensive New York Stock Exchange Index | 6:15 | |
and combine that with a comprehensive | 6:18 | |
American Stock Exchange Index | 6:22 | |
and combine that with a comprehensive | 6:23 | |
Over-the-Counter Market Index | 6:26 | |
you would find that the total valuation, | 6:28 | |
on a corrected-per-share basis, | 6:34 | |
and mind you, there are some important corrections | 6:36 | |
that have to be made and I'll make some mention | 6:38 | |
of what they are in a moment, | 6:41 | |
but if you do that very carefully, then you will find | 6:43 | |
that we are not now returning the the 1966 and 1968 levels. | 6:47 | |
We are, in fact, above those levels | 6:53 | |
and we are, in fact, at the highest level in our history. | 6:55 | |
Now, anybody who thinks that | 6:59 | |
when you're at the highest level in your history | 7:01 | |
you're in trouble, ought to start worrying. | 7:02 | |
But that person would spend most of | 7:07 | |
the months and years and weeks and days | 7:11 | |
under our mixed economy worrying. | 7:15 | |
Because it's the rule that | 7:17 | |
you've got to break records all the time, | 7:20 | |
just in order to be living up to par. | 7:22 | |
And, as a matter of fact, | 7:25 | |
if we look at the six-year period | 7:28 | |
from 1966 to the present, or 1968 to the present, | 7:30 | |
and if we ask the question as we should ask it, | 7:33 | |
on a corrected, per-share basis, | 7:37 | |
taking into account a comprehensive index of all values. | 7:41 | |
What's been happening to the fortunes | 7:46 | |
of a holder of common stocks? | 7:50 | |
Then, I think our answer must be the following. | 7:53 | |
He has been showing gains, but those gains | 7:56 | |
have been less than what constitute par | 8:00 | |
for a healthy, growing economy. | 8:07 | |
This is just another way of saying that | 8:11 | |
President Nixon's first term, | 8:15 | |
taking into account what he had inherited | 8:18 | |
from President Johnson, his predecessor, | 8:22 | |
in the way of demand-pull inflation, | 8:25 | |
in the way of subtracting economic resources | 8:30 | |
from our domestic needs and applying them to our | 8:37 | |
believed security needs in Southeast Asia. | 8:42 | |
Taking these things into account, | 8:47 | |
the American economy has had some fairly rough years. | 8:48 | |
Now, people in the stock market are very familiar with this. | 8:53 | |
Indeed, they exaggerate the lack of progress | 8:57 | |
made in these particular years, | 9:00 | |
and let me mention why they do. | 9:02 | |
It's a very common thing for me to pick up | 9:06 | |
brokerage letters or financial columns. | 9:09 | |
And I'm now referring to the sort of thing | 9:16 | |
that appears in Barron's or in Forbes, | 9:18 | |
or in the Wall Street Journal | 9:21 | |
or in The New York Times Financial Pages, | 9:23 | |
or the Washington Post. | 9:27 | |
And I'm not referring to the lunatic-fringe | 9:29 | |
financial literature that I receive. | 9:36 | |
But in these respectable places, | 9:38 | |
there is often a computation made | 9:41 | |
of how many stocks have gone up | 9:44 | |
and how many stocks have gone down. | 9:45 | |
How many stocks have gone by their peak. | 9:47 | |
And, I'm sure, I haven't seen this done, | 9:49 | |
but I'm sure that if you do it | 9:52 | |
and take the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones' averages, | 9:54 | |
even though they're at an all time high, | 9:58 | |
you will find that more than 15, more than half of them, | 9:59 | |
are lower than their previous peak. | 10:05 | |
Now what people don't realize sufficiently | 10:09 | |
is how equity money grows. | 10:11 | |
Equity money grows in this country | 10:16 | |
by a portfolio putting its dollars into a range of stocks. | 10:18 | |
Let's say 30 stocks for the sake of the argument. | 10:27 | |
Now, any one of those 30 stocks can lose 50% in value, | 10:31 | |
over a period of time. | 10:35 | |
It can lose 90% in value over a period of time. | 10:37 | |
It would be rare, but it is possible | 10:41 | |
for a stock to lose 100% of its value. | 10:43 | |
And this has happened to many stocks, | 10:46 | |
and if you're making a computation of | 10:47 | |
what happens to the average portfolio over time, | 10:50 | |
you must be very careful not to omit from your consideration | 10:54 | |
the stocks that go off the board completely. | 10:59 | |
As an example, in the 1920s, | 11:03 | |
Studebaker Auto Company stock | 11:06 | |
was running in a high and mighty way. | 11:08 | |
In the Great Depression, Studebaker stock went to zero. | 11:12 | |
Now, you will recall that after World War II | 11:17 | |
there was a Studebaker stock, | 11:20 | |
but it wasn't the same Studebaker stock. | 11:21 | |
And the common stock holders | 11:25 | |
of the old Studebaker were wiped out completely. | 11:26 | |
It would be a very biased way of calculating | 11:29 | |
how the typical investor did from 1925 to the present day | 11:33 | |
if you just dropped Studebaker quietly from your sample. | 11:37 | |
What you must do, before you drop it, | 11:40 | |
is indicate its 100% loss. | 11:43 | |
Now, I'm concentrating upon how much you can lose. | 11:47 | |
That's a very good thing for any astute investor to do. | 11:51 | |
Most people are good buyers | 11:53 | |
and are very good at calculating what they might win, | 11:55 | |
but they don't always have the same care | 11:57 | |
in calculating what their risk is. | 12:01 | |
But still, and this is my point, you only lose 100%. | 12:05 | |
On the other hand, how much can you make from a stock? | 12:09 | |
Well, the sky is the limit. | 12:12 | |
With limited liability, you can lose 100%. | 12:15 | |
With unlimited sharing in the gains, | 12:18 | |
a stock may double, it may triple, it may quadruple. | 12:23 | |
This doesn't mean that stocks are ipso facto good buy, | 12:27 | |
because you can be sure that the price | 12:30 | |
has taken into account the larger probability | 12:32 | |
of each stocks going down. | 12:36 | |
So, to put the matter technically, | 12:38 | |
stock market prices are skewed off to the right. | 12:42 | |
And if their mean value is to be at unity, | 12:46 | |
so that a dollar just brings you back a dollar, | 12:50 | |
it means that the bulk of the probability | 12:52 | |
must be that stocks will lose. | 12:56 | |
Now actually, the mean value of stocks | 12:58 | |
over a long period of time is more than one. | 13:00 | |
It's one plus something. | 13:04 | |
It's not as large as most people in the marketplace | 13:07 | |
who are performance-minded think it is. | 13:11 | |
I have had former students of mine | 13:15 | |
who've gone into Wall Street and who've done very well, | 13:18 | |
and when I ask them what they do for their clients, | 13:20 | |
they'll say, and this is just a typical answer, | 13:24 | |
I undertake to make about 15% a year for my clients, | 13:27 | |
that's taking into account dividends plus capital gains. | 13:33 | |
Other people may try for 25% | 13:36 | |
and still other people may have to be satisfied with 7%, | 13:39 | |
but good old I, graduate from MIT with my superior skill, | 13:44 | |
I simply aim towards a kind of safe, steady 15%. | 13:51 | |
Well, that is self-deception. | 13:57 | |
The actual audited results of the best performers | 14:00 | |
come nowhere near to 15% per year | 14:05 | |
on a prudent, taking account of risk basis. | 14:10 | |
Now, I know immediately, some subscriber | 14:16 | |
is going to write in to me and tell me | 14:18 | |
about T. Rowe Price in Baltimore | 14:20 | |
or about the Morgan Guaranty Trust Bank customers | 14:23 | |
of the First National City Bank, | 14:28 | |
or whoever has been doing well | 14:29 | |
in the performance derby recently. | 14:32 | |
And I have no criticism to make | 14:35 | |
of any of the money managers | 14:38 | |
whose names I've just mentioned. | 14:40 | |
They certainly over the long run | 14:42 | |
have among the better records. | 14:44 | |
But you must remember that from | 14:47 | |
probability considerations alone, | 14:49 | |
you're going to hear about the T. Rowe Price winners, | 14:51 | |
and you're not going to hear about the other firm losers. | 14:55 | |
Just recall Jerry Tsai and the Manhattan Fund. | 15:02 | |
If you think that that's loading the dice in the wrong way, | 15:07 | |
just recall the Dreyfus Fund, some ways, | 15:11 | |
or the Fidelity Funds, | 15:14 | |
these were the beginners of the performance derby. | 15:16 | |
Widen your net, talk about the Massachusetts Investors Trust | 15:22 | |
or Massachusetts Investors Growth Fund. | 15:26 | |
And when you do this, you will find that there is, | 15:30 | |
over a long period of time, from 1925 to, | 15:35 | |
let's say, 1960, | 15:39 | |
the annual compound rate of growth enjoyed | 15:41 | |
was something like 11%, | 15:45 | |
but this is just what the total overall averages showed. | 15:50 | |
I'm quoting, of course, from the Merrill Foundation Study | 15:53 | |
made at the Graduate School of Business | 15:56 | |
at the University of Chicago, | 15:57 | |
which very carefully tried to control for all these matters. | 15:58 | |
And don't for a moment think | 16:01 | |
that you made those earnings on a riskless basis. | 16:03 | |
On the contrary, you lived through the Great Depression | 16:07 | |
and this very long period of time, | 16:12 | |
in which for perhaps a score of years, | 16:14 | |
you didn't come back to where you had been in 1929. | 16:17 | |
So, and this is the moral of what I'm saying, | 16:23 | |
you mustn't be fooled by an enumeration | 16:26 | |
of the number of stocks, | 16:33 | |
which are below their 1966 peak | 16:35 | |
or below their 1968 peak, | 16:37 | |
into thinking that that means that | 16:40 | |
the market as a whole has made no progress. | 16:41 | |
On the contrary, the way everybody makes money, | 16:43 | |
and I don't mean now the plungers, | 16:46 | |
but every balanced portfolio is that you take, | 16:48 | |
hopefully, small loses on a number of ventures | 16:54 | |
and a few, and it need be only a very few, | 16:59 | |
of your successful ventures come in in a big way, | 17:03 | |
doubling, tripling, quadrupling your money. | 17:06 | |
And by the way, that's not a rare event at all | 17:09 | |
to double, triple, quadruple your money. | 17:11 | |
If you don't know somebody down at the club | 17:15 | |
who's able to boast of such lucky, | 17:16 | |
sorry, such astute investments made by him, | 17:21 | |
then you're not dealing with the | 17:25 | |
random person in Wall Street. | 17:30 | |
Everybody can't help but have some winners, | 17:32 | |
and what's important is that it's those winners | 17:35 | |
that do balance out the losers. | 17:38 | |
That's the name of the game in having equity investments. | 17:40 | |
Well, this now puts the whole matter into a new perspective. | 17:45 | |
Namely, the stock market has been | 17:52 | |
making progress in the last several years. | 17:55 | |
In particular, it was just a year ago | 18:00 | |
when I was talking on these tapes | 18:03 | |
that Wall Street was so very gloomy. | 18:06 | |
And then I did something, | 18:08 | |
which is very uncharacteristic for me. | 18:09 | |
Of course, I didn't come out and say | 18:12 | |
I'm going to make some stock market forecasts, | 18:14 | |
because I would never do that. | 18:17 | |
I would think that ridiculous, | 18:20 | |
but what I did do was frame my analysis in such a way | 18:24 | |
that anybody reading between the lines | 18:27 | |
must have realized that I thought | 18:30 | |
either the business situation is out of line | 18:33 | |
and isn't going to grow in the way | 18:35 | |
that all the so-called experts think it's going to grow, | 18:38 | |
or Wall Street is in a temporary blue funk, | 18:42 | |
which can't be justified by anything in the economic scene. | 18:46 | |
People are always saying, | 18:50 | |
what does Wall Street see that we don't see? | 18:51 | |
Well, the answer is that much of the time | 18:53 | |
it just sees its own frightened shadow in the glass darkly. | 18:56 | |
And that was the case up til last Thanksgiving. | 19:01 | |
And of course, the market rose and rose very strongly | 19:06 | |
from about last Thanksgiving until about Easter, | 19:11 | |
then it began to make its own waves. | 19:15 | |
But, by and large, the market is not, | 19:18 | |
has not reacted in a amplified way, | 19:27 | |
to the amount of growth that's been | 19:31 | |
in the system since August 15th, 1971. | 19:34 | |
I think that's a very convenient benchmark. | 19:37 | |
It's the interval in which the New Economic Program | 19:40 | |
of Richard Nixon has been in effect. | 19:45 | |
And in that time, the market has made progress. | 19:50 | |
Indeed, by that time, it had come out | 19:53 | |
of its doldrums of May 1970. | 19:57 | |
Most economists thought, in May 1970, | 20:00 | |
that the social malaise, which was afflicting our system, | 20:03 | |
and which was much more acute than anything in the GNP, | 20:08 | |
was being reflected in the stock market. | 20:12 | |
In particular, memories are short, | 20:15 | |
so let me recall to you, the invasion of Cambodia, | 20:17 | |
which led to a great deal of dissension | 20:20 | |
on American campuses and a division in American life. | 20:23 | |
I thought, at the time, and said on these tapes, | 20:28 | |
was taking its toll from canny investors' evaluation | 20:30 | |
of what is the worth of equities. | 20:37 | |
Now, I'm not commenting on whether | 20:40 | |
this is rational or irrational, | 20:41 | |
because if you had thought at that time | 20:43 | |
that American society was really falling apart | 20:45 | |
and that there was going to be disorder in the streets, | 20:49 | |
it's not at all clear to me | 20:53 | |
why you wanna be left in doomsday, | 20:54 | |
in cash and not in equities, | 20:58 | |
but there is some historical evidence | 21:02 | |
that people don't like uncertainty | 21:04 | |
and they wanna be ready to be able | 21:06 | |
to jump in any direction. | 21:09 | |
And there isn't any doubt, it seems to me, | 21:11 | |
that these non-economic factors have been a minus. | 21:14 | |
As a matter of fact, let's just cast our memories back | 21:18 | |
to the election period and try to see | 21:22 | |
and understand, if we can, | 21:26 | |
what happened to the stock market. | 21:28 | |
You remember that we had a phenomenal second quarter, | 21:30 | |
in terms of economics. | 21:35 | |
The GNP growth of more than 9%, | 21:37 | |
the abatement of inflation down to below 2%, | 21:40 | |
And, in the face of this, the stock market | 21:45 | |
was in the doldrums, now why? | 21:48 | |
One of the explanations given, | 21:50 | |
and there always are plenty of explanations, | 21:51 | |
after the fact, in Wall Street, | 21:53 | |
to explain what's just happened. | 21:56 | |
One of the explanations offered at midsummer | 21:58 | |
was that this man McGovern is sweeping the primaries. | 22:02 | |
He's going, perhaps, to be elected. | 22:07 | |
He's a wild man with radical economic advisors | 22:10 | |
and with youth following him like the Pied Piper. | 22:14 | |
And therefore, we who are canny investors | 22:20 | |
had better begin to put into safe gilt edge, | 22:24 | |
in vaults, in socks, maybe in Swiss-numbered bank accounts. | 22:29 | |
This was all exaggerated, nothing was actually happening | 22:35 | |
among prudent men commensurate with this sort of talk, | 22:38 | |
but it was required to find an explanation | 22:41 | |
for the weakness of the market. | 22:44 | |
One thing you can say about the public opinion polls | 22:47 | |
is that they pretty soon put an end | 22:51 | |
to this kind of nonsense. | 22:56 | |
Because it became obvious that the Democrats | 22:58 | |
were not going to elect a president. | 23:03 | |
That has became obvious to anybody | 23:06 | |
who respected scientific evidence, | 23:08 | |
taking into account the presumed | 23:12 | |
margin of error of that evidence. | 23:14 | |
Now, in my last tape I actually commented | 23:16 | |
on what a triumph this had been, | 23:19 | |
this last election, for the public opinion polls. | 23:23 | |
And before the election, the one thing, | 23:25 | |
the one place where I went against the polls | 23:28 | |
was that I said I just cannot believe, | 23:30 | |
in terms of ordinary plausible common sense, | 23:32 | |
that there will not be a coattail effect | 23:35 | |
stronger than the polls are showing. | 23:38 | |
It illustrates how important it is | 23:41 | |
to be impressed by evidence, | 23:43 | |
because I was just, just wrong | 23:44 | |
and the polls were right in terms of what we've seen. | 23:46 | |
Well, how then, since McGovern isn't gonna win, | 23:52 | |
can the market explain its failure to rebound upward | 23:55 | |
in the prospect that a conservative president | 23:59 | |
is going to be elected, and, again, | 24:02 | |
there was no shortage of explanations. | 24:06 | |
And the explanations that were given | 24:08 | |
in the financial press was that | 24:10 | |
the financial community was getting frightened | 24:12 | |
that President Nixon would, as the joke went, | 24:15 | |
turn Republican, turn back Conservative. | 24:19 | |
And stop being the cage in which he had temporarily | 24:22 | |
said that he was in view of the election. | 24:26 | |
And that he would, therefore, | 24:30 | |
be clamping down on government spending | 24:32 | |
and this would bring the healthy, | 24:34 | |
no longer anemic recovery, back to an anemic stage | 24:38 | |
or even into a downturn. | 24:42 | |
Now, I'm going in my next tape | 24:44 | |
to give my official forecast for the year. | 24:48 | |
And I will certainly have to factor into that forecast | 24:51 | |
what I believe to be President Nixon's attitude | 24:54 | |
in the second term on the problem of government spending. | 25:00 | |
Without anticipating in any detail that discussion, | 25:04 | |
let me say that I believe that President Nixon | 25:07 | |
is a conservative in these matters, | 25:13 | |
and if given his druthers he would like to bring down | 25:16 | |
the fractional importance of government spending | 25:20 | |
in the Gross National Product. | 25:24 | |
And I also know that this is an adversary process, | 25:26 | |
and so this is one of the elements | 25:31 | |
which seems to me the stock market | 25:33 | |
must rationally take into account, | 25:35 | |
informing a judgment of where we go from here | 25:38 | |
now that the so-called Dow Jones Average has hit a thousand. | 25:41 | |
Now, in order to really complete an analysis | 25:45 | |
of the economic background, | 25:54 | |
which would help someone form a judgment | 25:57 | |
on where common stocks are going to go, | 26:00 | |
I really should first have at hand | 26:04 | |
the forecast of where the economy is going to go. | 26:07 | |
So, since our time is short | 26:11 | |
and since we don't have that material, | 26:14 | |
I'm not going to be able to be useful to you. | 26:18 | |
But let me try to suggest what it is | 26:21 | |
in the next tape forecast, | 26:27 | |
which would be important for a person, | 26:30 | |
let's say, in Holland, debating, or Japan, | 26:35 | |
debating whether to bring money in increased amounts, | 26:38 | |
or for the first time, into the American equity market. | 26:42 | |
What is it that rationally moves stock prices? | 26:46 | |
Note my emphasis on rationally, | 26:52 | |
because I don't suppose there's any one of us | 26:54 | |
who believes that there's any formula | 26:56 | |
for predicting stock prices. | 26:58 | |
There are plenty of unpredictable, irrational elements. | 27:00 | |
The hope of an astute analyst is that | 27:06 | |
in there, intermingled with all the noise, | 27:11 | |
there is a message. | 27:14 | |
I'm using the terminology of electrical engineering. | 27:16 | |
And that that economic message does have an influence | 27:18 | |
in the long run, even though the noise modulates | 27:24 | |
and interferes, reinforces and opposes it. | 27:26 | |
Without doubt, if the Good Fairy | 27:33 | |
could give me knowledge of three or four things | 27:36 | |
to enable me to make a reasoned guess | 27:39 | |
as to where the Dow Jones Industrial Averages | 27:43 | |
will be 12 months from now, | 27:45 | |
I would wanna know what's going to happen | 27:47 | |
to the money-GNP rate of growth in the next 24 months. | 27:50 | |
That's the year beyond the period | 27:56 | |
for which we're trying to estimate stock prices, | 27:58 | |
because I think the market is very forward looking. | 28:00 | |
I would like to know what the rate of inflation will be. | 28:02 | |
And/or the rate of real growth of GNP, | 28:10 | |
those are the same things, | 28:13 | |
because if we know two of these three magnitudes | 28:14 | |
we can pretty easily get, by subtraction, the third. | 28:16 | |
The reason that real growth | 28:22 | |
and the behavior of prices is important | 28:23 | |
is that the best way of predicting | 28:26 | |
what corporate profits will be | 28:29 | |
is to know what is going to happen to the GNP. | 28:31 | |
But even after I've made my estimate-- | 28:34 | |
So, the fourth thing I would wanna know | 28:36 | |
is what's going to happen to corporate profits | 28:39 | |
over the next 24 months. | 28:41 | |
What is the probable range? | 28:43 | |
However, you can't just factor in | 28:46 | |
an estimate of earnings and know what stock prices are. | 28:48 | |
You have to make some guess as to what the range | 28:52 | |
of the price-earnings multiple will be. | 28:56 | |
And here, it seems to me, that the important thing | 28:58 | |
is what the future of earnings themselves is likely to be, | 29:01 | |
but I've already covered that. | 29:04 | |
But also, one would wanna know what's | 29:06 | |
going to be happening to interest rates, | 29:09 | |
because the interest rate is, so to speak, | 29:11 | |
the reciprocal of the price-earnings multiple | 29:14 | |
applied to a competing security to common stocks, | 29:16 | |
namely to bonds. | 29:20 | |
And so, I hope in the annual forecasting tape | 29:23 | |
I can throw some light on what the best experts | 29:31 | |
seem to be now predicting for money, GNP, growth, | 29:37 | |
next year, year and a half, two years, | 29:43 | |
real GNP, corporate profits, interest rates. | 29:45 | |
- | If you have any comments or questions for | 29:50 |
Professor Samuelson address them to | 29:52 | |
Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, | 29:54 | |
166 East Superior Street, | 29:56 | |
Chicago, Illinois, 60611. | 29:58 |
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