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Category: Price of Risk

In Search of a Steady State: Inflation, Interest Rates and Value

by Aswath Damodaran

The nature of markets is that they are never quite settled, as investors recalibrate expectations constantly and reset prices. In most time periods, those recalibrations and resets tend to be small and in both directions, resulting in the ups and downs that pass for normal volatility. Clearly, we are not in one of those time periods, as markets approach bipolar territory, with big moves up and down. The good news is that the culprit behind the volatility  is easy to identify, and it is inflation, but the bad news is that inflation remains the most unpredictable of all macroeconomic factors to factor into stock prices and value. In this post, I will look at where we stand on inflation expectations, and the different paths we can end up on, ranging from potentially catastrophic to mostly benign.

Inflation: The Full Story

    I wrote my first post on this blog in 2008, and inflation merited barely a mention until 2020, though it is an integral component of investing and valuation. Since 2020, though, inflation has become a key story line in almost every post that I write about the overall market, and I have had multiple posts just on the topic. To see why inflation has become so newsworthy, take a look at the chart below, where I graph inflation from 1950 to 2022, in the United States:

Download data

While I report multiple measures of inflation, from the consumer price index (adjusted and unadjusted) to the producer price index, to (Read more...)

A Viral Market Meltdown VI: The Price of Risk

by Aswath Damodaran

It is a sign of how volatile the last few weeks have been,  that a week like the last one, where index levels move only 2-3% a day, high by historic standards, felt stable. As in prior weeks, I will start this one by looking at how the market action last week played out across asset classes, and within equity, across regions and industries first, but the bulk of this post will be an update on the price of risk, and how it has changed in both bond and stock markets over the last six weeks. In the process, I will compare this six-week periods to the 2008 crisis, which was also global, and shook the faith people had in markets, institutions and companies.

The Markets last week
The market action last week was more muted than it had been in prior weeks, but that is a relative statement, as we still saw big swings in almost every asset class. Using the same sequencing that I have used for the last few weeks, I will start with a  review of equity indices globally:
Download raw data
It was a quiet week for most markets, with the Nikkei and the Sensex being the exceptions, dropping 8,09% and 7.46% respectively. Over the last month, every market has seen double digit negative returns, with Shanghai being the only exception. Moving on to US treasuries, we saw more calm than in prior weeks, with rates staying close to where they were in the previous (Read more...)

A Viral Market Meltdown VI: The Price of Risk

by Aswath Damodaran

It is a sign of how volatile the last few weeks have been,  that a week like the last one, where index levels move only 2-3% a day, high by historic standards, felt stable. As in prior weeks, I will start this one by looking at how the market action last week played out across asset classes, and within equity, across regions and industries first, but the bulk of this post will be an update on the price of risk, and how it has changed in both bond and stock markets over the last six weeks. In the process, I will compare this six-week periods to the 2008 crisis, which was also global, and shook the faith people had in markets, institutions and companies.

The Markets last week
The market action last week was more muted than it had been in prior weeks, but that is a relative statement, as we still saw big swings in almost every asset class. Using the same sequencing that I have used for the last few weeks, I will start with a  review of equity indices globally:
Download raw data
It was a quiet week for most markets, with the Nikkei and the Sensex being the exceptions, dropping 8,09% and 7.46% respectively. Over the last month, every market has seen double digit negative returns, with Shanghai being the only exception. Moving on to US treasuries, we saw more calm than in prior weeks, with rates staying close to where they were in the previous (Read more...)