The junkies hooked on printed money

To what extent the US stockmarket is a “monetary policy junkie” getting a high from the central bank?

A recurring theme in the financial media in the past few years is the increasing influence of central banks in propping up stocks. An intriguing paper out this week from James Montier and Philip Pilkington of investment management group GMO attempts to quantify to what extent the US stockmarket is a "monetary policy junkie" getting a high from the central bank.

The authors built on research done by the Fed itself, which determined that a hefty proportion of annual returns came on days when the Fed's monetary policy committee (FOMC) was meeting. They compared the S&P 500's long-term progress from the mid-1960s with its performance excluding FOMC meeting days.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.