Plunge in U.S. stocks not as bad as it appears

Well, the bad news is the Dow industrials dropped 111.89 points to 2532.92 last week. That’s 4.2 percent of its value. Again, that’s the bad news.

The good news is: things could have been a worse. That is, if you’re keeping track of other markets around the the world.

In this comparative regard, Wall Street is holding its own.

Let’s see how Japan fared last week. Heck, on Thursday alone, their average lost a whopping 5.8 percent. For the week, the plunge was an astounding 10.1 percent. Wow.

Then there’s Germany. Try Tuesday, when it lost 5.2 percent. For the week, the total loss was 6.3 percent.

Since the U.S. lost only 4.2 percent, this means Japan fell at a 140 percent faster rate. Germany fell 50 percent faster.

Want more? Hong Kong lost 6.8 percent for the week.

It’s sort of discouraging but relatively comforting to know we seem to be in relatively better shape. At least I hope so.

Now let’s confront conventional wisdom and assess blame for all of this. After all, Japan is down nearly 40 percent from its peak, the U.S. about 13 percent and Germany roughly 20 percent. Surely we can blame all this on nasty old Iraq and the fear of an interruption of oil supplies or war.

Well, as a catalyst item, yes. Bear in mind that a catalyst is something that helps some other item along a given path without the catalyst actually becoming a part of the event.

That’s the way I see this Iraq thing. It’s merely a catalyst. More motivating are the long term fundamental reasons. Let me explain.

In Japan, stocks were way overpriced for several years. Real estate speculation was such that just a little bit of downtown Tokyo was worth more than the whole state of California. And their prices aren’t exactly cheap.

Where a good U.S. stock recently sold for a price of maybe 12 times its current earnings (P/E), the Japan counterpart sold at a 60 multiple. That’s 500 percent more.

Clearly, Japanese prices have been overextended for a long time and ditto for other nations but perhaps for different reasons.

Now the U.S. stares at a recession, and we want to blame someone. But think twice.

We are already in the longest peacetime expansion ever. How long do we expect it to continue?

Debts are at absurdly high levels. We have borrowed till we could ask for no more and built home and real estate prices to levels not sustainable by economic fundamentals. We are living full tilt and chock full of debt.

Worse, we want more. To even improve that standard of living, we ask our politicians to borrow and spend even mpre, creating unsustainable deficits.

It’s only natural to expect a correction of these excesses.

Paul Jarvis is a stockbroker in Bangor with A.G.