HARI SREENIVASAN: Stock prices just keep going up and up. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high yesterday, and so did a closely watched broader index, the S&P 500.
To help explain what's behind the latest surge on Wall Street, we are joined now via Skype from Richmond, Virginia by Roben Farzad. He is the host of the radio program "Full Disclosure."
So, a lot of people on Wall Street are talking about the latest buying events in Japan. Their stock index, the Nikkei, was up nearly 5 percent just yesterday after their government there announced a new stimulus program. So what did it do, and why does that matter here?
ROBEN FARZAD, HOST, "FULL DISCLOSURE": Because we're so connected at this point. All these central banks across the globe are flooding the plane with money to get people to go out and take risks, take chances. The Bank of Japan actually goes out and buys equities in the Japanese stock market, which has been moribund for so long.
Here in the United States, the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates near zero for the better part of six years now. And on top of that, they have $3.5 trillion of emergency bond buying measures. So, there's a lot of cheap money going around stoking people to get into real estate and riskier bonds and riskier assets like stocks.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, this week we learned our own economy grew 3.5 percent during the third quarter of 2014. So, how much of a factor is that in the market's recent rise?
ROBEN FARZAD: The markets really right now are looking at the big intervening variable, which is the Federal Reserve's largesse. Like I said, six years of emergency low interest rates – can anybody remember when it cost 6 percent or 7 percent to take out a mortgage or when you could get a little over four pointd on a government bond or a treasury bond? It's just not really in the institutional memory.
So, when you get not too hot but not too cold economic indicators, and by extension the Federal Reserve is telegraphing that it's going to sit on its hands, maybe well into 2015, there's this perception there's– that there's more room to run for the market.
HARI SREENIVASAN: October was a pretty wild ride on Wall Street. Earlier last month, the Dow had the biggest weekly decline in more than two years. Then it came roaring back. What's behind all this volatility?
ROBEN FARZAD: Again, what's behind the lack of volatility over the past three or four years? We have dodged so many bullets from 2008 and 2009 where there was an outright collapse. I believe the market peak to trough fell 55 – 57 percent. And then Greece collapses. And then we have the debt showdown and debt debacle here, and the fiscal cliff. And now you have worries about electoral uncertainty, and there are whispers of global deflation.
There are lots of things at play, and I think investors have developed a person amount of scar tissue, the ones that are still in the market realize that it's — when you see something approaching a correction– and we didn't even hit a full correction — that there are people that are going to step in and buy.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right. Speaking of participation, we came across some interesting numbers showing a specifically lower percentage of Americans own stock now than they did a dozen years ago. So who dropped out, and what are the bigger repercussions?
ROBEN FARZAD: You worry about the solvency of Social Security and people's retirements in general in an era where government debts maybe are not sustainable. People really en masse looked at what happened in 2000 with Y2K. They got their hearts broken with the tech crash.
And then again in 2007, when they hesitatingly came back to the market, we get the mother of all economic collapses with the Great Recession and the market getting cut in half. And so, it's kind of a like a case of fool me thrice; I'm not going to be that sucker.
And so even with the numbers being as spectacular as they are in this five-plus-year bull market, you're getting a lot of people that are saying no, I'm not going back to that asset class.
You're going to have to show me much more security and much better risk reward for me to get my money back. And that's not helping their case. They're going to need the market to help them into retirement.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Roben Farzad, the host of the radio program "Full Disclosure." Thanks so much.
ROBEN FARZAD: My pleasure.