Finance

FA Playbook

The human brain is wired for financial self-sabotage, experts said at the CNBC Financial Advisor Summit.
Examples include a tendency to buy high and sell low, make a purchase due to the “fear of missing out” or engage in herd mentality.
There are ways to overcome these financial habits, however.

D3sign | Moment | Getty Images

Human psychology and money don’t mix well. Left unchecked, our psyches can easily sabotage financial decision-making, behavioral experts said during a panel discussion at CNBC’s Financial Advisor Summit.  
“We’re all crazy when it comes to money,” said Brad Klontz, managing principal of YMW Advisors in Boulder, Colorado, and a founder of the Financial Psychology Institute.

“The miracle is that anyone is doing it right,” he added.
The human brain is hard-wired to make choices that are long-term money losers, such as buying high and selling low, making a purchase due to the “fear of missing out” or engaging in herd mentality, for example, said Klontz, a certified financial planner and member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council.

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These shortcomings actually do make some sense. Many date to evolutionary processes that played out thousands of years ago species-wide or more recently, on an individual level in early childhood, experts said. Parents, culture and socioeconomic status are powerful forces that shape money beliefs from a young age, they said.
Additionally, feelings of shame, such as thinking we have too much or too little money, are pervasive, experts added.
This tendency traces its roots to comparing oneself to others in the “tribe,” feeding into a sense of needing to “keep up with the Joneses,” Klontz said. Households may therefore place outsized importance on amassing an arbitrary amount of wealth — perhaps $1 million or $5 million — when these figures don’t mean much for overall happiness, he said.

“The number itself needs to be very personal,” Preston Cherry, founder and president of Concurrent Financial Planning in Green Bay, Wisconsin, said of a financial target.
“It’s different for everyone. It’s kind of like a thumbprint, so it’s very unique,” added Cherry, a CFP and member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council.

Well-being is a leading measure of ‘wealth’

Financial well-being is about more than one’s investments, experts said. It’s about a person’s goals and how money can help achieve those desires, experts said.
In fact, a new Charles Schwab survey suggests most American adults today think overall well-being, not money, is the leading measure of wealth.
Cherry advised putting a “focus on FOMO over FOMO,” meaning, “focus on moving on” with your vision and plan rather than a “fear of missing out.”
“Keep your blinders on and look straight,” he said. “Don’t compare yourself with others.”

Social media, which is full of misinformation and bad financial advice, has made this a challenge, experts said.
Further, money has become increasingly abstract in a digital world of cashless payments. That may make it tough for children to learn good money habits, since our brains better comprehend concrete examples, Klontz said.
When buying an expensive item, such as a vacation, parents can be good role models for their children by setting up a savings plan and demonstrating how it works. For example, they can set aside a certain amount of their paycheck over six months to achieve the goal, teaching important financial concepts such as delayed gratification and saving for the future, Klontz said.
More broadly, money is still a “somewhat taboo” topic when it comes to both conversations with others —whether a spouse, kids, friends or parents — and when thinking about our own lives, Cherry said.
“The more often we can have healthy conversations [about it] … I think we can have better outcomes with money and what we do with our money,” Cherry said. More

Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Thursday to remove five charges against alleged crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
A Bahamas court ruling had cast doubt on whether the U.S. government had followed the correct procedure for bringing the charges against the former billionaire.
The charges, however, have merely been “severed,” or punted to 2024.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried leaves US Federal Court in New York City on March 30, 2023.
Kyle Mazza | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Thursday to remove five charges against alleged crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, including bribery of a foreign government official, after a Bahamas court ruling cast doubt on whether the U.S. government had followed the correct procedure for bringing the charges against the former billionaire.
Bankman-Fried’s legal team had previously argued before both U.S. and Bahamanian judges that the charges were not part of the FTX founder’s original indictment under which he had been extradited from the Bahamas months earlier. A Bahamian judge said they would review Bankman-Fried’s arguments earlier this week, prompting the request from federal prosecutors.

The charges, however, have merely been “severed,” or punted to 2024, giving the federal government ample time to ensure the conditions of the U.S.-Bahamas extradition treaty have been met, and to satisfy concerns from the Bahamas government.
The severance means that Bankman-Fried’s legal team will likely now have to gird for two legal fights: one to try the original eight-count indictment later this year, and another in 2024, for the five counts that federal prosecutors have asked to sever.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’ office is prosecuting Bankman-Fried. He was originally indicted on eight counts, including conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, over his role in allegedly orchestrating the theft of billions of dollars of customer assets and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in late 2022.
Bankman-Fried has entered a plea of not guilty and is expected to be tried later this year. More

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European Central Bank  President Christine Lagarde is due to give a press conference following the bank’s latest monetary policy decision.

The bank announced that it was taking its main rate up by 25 basis points to 3.5%, diverging from a U.S. Federal Reserve decision to pause its own hikes on Wednesday.
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Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Check out the companies making headlines in premarket trading.
Target — The retailer gained 0.6% after announcing it would increase its dividend by 1.9%, or 2 cents, to $1.10 per share.

Cognyte Software — Shares rose 5.6% in the premarket following the software company’s quarterly report. Cognyte posted a loss of 23 cents per share excluding items, slightly larger than the 22 cent consensus estimate of analysts polled by FactSet. But revenue came in stronger than expected, with Cognyte reporting $73.4 million against Wall Street’s $71.5 million forecast.
Aldeyra Therapeutics — The biotech stock added 10% after Aldeyra announced it say statistical significance in the primary and all secondary endpoints for a drug that could be used for a type of eye inflammation.
American Express — Shares of the credit card company dipped 2% in premarket trading after Citi warned that credit card spending trends have slowed. Citi opened a negative catalyst watch for American Express, warning that travel and entertainment categories are slowing more sharply than other categories.
Coinbase — The crypto platform dropped 4.5% after Mizuho questioned if traders were moving to Robinhood, which was down 2.1% before the bell. Mizuho reiterated its underperform rating in a note to clients.
Domino’s Pizza — The pizza chain rose 2.1% following an upgrade to buy from hold by Stifel. The firm noted delivery sales will continue to stabilize while carry-out sales grow in the next 12 months.

SoFi — Shares slid 4% after Oppenheimer downgraded the financial technology stock to perform from outperform. Despite staying bullish long term, Oppenheimer said the downgrade came following a period of the stock price seeing appreciation much stronger than experienced in the broader market.
Corning — Shares added 1.7% after being upgraded by Citi to buy from neutral. The Wall Street firm said it has “greater conviction” in the glass maker’s margin recovery potential and boosted its price target to $40 from $36, suggesting upside of more than 20% from Wednesday’s close.
Zions Bancorp — The bank stock slid 1.4% in the premarket. Janney downgraded Zions Bancorp to neutral from buy, and lowered its fair value estimate, saying it sees weaker spread income and margin on rising funding costs.
— CNBC’s Sarah Min, Michelle Fox and Jesse Pound contributed reporting. More

A wage-price spiral is the stuff of inflationary nightmares. It refers to a situation when prices gallop higher—perhaps because of a sudden shock or policy missteps, or both—and wages race upward to keep pace with them, in turn feeding through to yet more price rises and yet more wage increases, and so on in a vicious circle. It can seem as if the world’s economies have been living this horror: in America hourly earnings rose by about 6% last year, the biggest annual increase in four decades. In Britain wages excluding bonuses are rising at an annual clip of about 7%. On June 14th, when the Federal Reserve elected to leave interest rates unchanged after ten consecutive increases, Jerome Powell, its chairman, warned that he was watching wage trends as one test of whether the central bank might resume raising rates in July. But the dangers that appear in nightmares usually bear little resemblance to the threats worth worrying about in reality. The world’s uncomfortable ride with inflation over the past two years seems to point to a similar conclusion about wage-price spirals: they are a caricature of what happens to an economy with an inflation problem.The historical parallel often trotted out in discussing wage-price spirals is the 1970s. Price and wage inflation seemed to interact throughout that decade, much as the spiral framework suggests. Each surge in general price inflation was followed by a surge in wage inflation, which was followed by more price inflation—and on it went. But the 1970s are flawed as evidence for the existence of spirals. The repeated waves of inflation stemmed more from successive oil-price shocks (in 1973 and 1978) than from prior wage gains. To the extent that wages and prices moved in lockstep, this reflected trade unions’ practice back then of pegging salaries to the cost of living, guaranteeing a ratchet effect. Spirals were a feature of contracts rather than proof of an economic concept.Late last year a group of economists at the IMF interrogated the historical record, creating a database of wage-price spirals in advanced economies dating back to the 1960s. Applying a fairly low bar—they looked for accelerating consumer prices and rising nominal wages in at least three out of four consecutive quarters—they identified 79 such episodes. But a few quarters of high inflation is not all that scary. A few years is far more frightening. Judged by this longer standard, the IMF economists offered a more upbeat conclusion: the “great majority” (they omitted the exact percentage) of short-term spirals were not followed by a sustained acceleration in wages and prices.In a note in March, Gadi Barlevy and Luojia Hu, economists with the Fed’s Chicago branch, took a closer look at the role of wages in the current episode of inflation. They focused on “non-housing services”, a category that covers everything from car washes to medical check-ups and which Mr Powell regularly cites as a useful indicator because of its tight association with wages. Mr Barlevy and Ms Hu concluded that wages do help to explain this segment of inflation: nominal wage gains have outstripped productivity growth by a sizeable margin over the past year. Facing that cost squeeze, service providers would naturally want to raise prices.However, the spiral thesis claims not merely that wages matter, but that they predict future inflationary trends. On this count, the Chicago Fed economists found the relationship unidirectional: inflation helps to forecast changes in labour costs, but changes in labour costs fail to predict inflation. Service providers, in other words, raised prices before rising wage costs hit their bottom line. Mr Barlevy and Ms Hu posit that employers may have been ahead of the curve in anticipating the effects of a tight labour market. That makes wages a lagging, not a leading, indicator for inflation. Adam Shapiro, an economist with the San Francisco Fed, has been even more critical of the wage worries. In a note in May, he isolated unexpected changes in wages to argue that rising labour costs were only a small driver of non-housing service inflation and a negligible one in broader inflation. Like his Chicago colleagues, he concluded that wage growth was following inflation. None of this means that wage-price spirals are a total myth, which some overeager commentators have written. As the IMF‘s study noted, serious spirals can occur; it is just that they are extremely unusual. Were inflation to stay very high for a long time, people might start to view fast-rising prices as a basic fact of life and incorporate that assumption into their wage demands. It is possible that this process has begun in Britain.But in America what is striking about the past two years is how relatively moderate inflation expectations have remained, despite price pressures. In a paper last month for the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, Ben Bernanke, a former chairman of the Fed, and Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the IMF, decomposed the drivers of pandemic-era inflation. They concluded that a triumvirate of shocks (commodity-price spikes, strong demand for goods and supply shortages) accounted for most of the inflation overshoot since 2020. There was scant evidence that inflation itself had triggered higher wage demands. Wages shot up simply because demand for workers outstripped supply.Dreaming spiralsWages and prices can be driven up by the same force: excessive spending in the economy compounded by shortages of both products and the workers to produce them. Overheated economies are worth worrying about regardless of whether prices and wages are feeding on each other.For their part, Messrs Bernanke and Blanchard argue that as pandemic shocks fade away, overheated labour markets are likely to contribute more to inflation. To stop that, central bankers need to make sure that the demand for workers cools off. Only if inflation persists once the labour market is back in balance will fear of a self-sustaining spiral be worth losing sleep over. ■We’re hiring (June 12th 2023). The Economist is looking for a Britain economics writer, based in London. For details and how to apply, click here.Read more from Free exchange, our column on economics:A flawed argument for central-bank digital currencies (Jun 8th)What does the perfect carbon price look like? (Jun 1st)What performance-enhancing stimulants mean for economic growth (May 25th)Also: How the Free Exchange column got its nameFor more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

In the 1960s South Korea was a poor, backward country recovering from a devastating war. Now it is the 12th-largest economy in the world. Its 52m people earn an average of $35,000 a year, nearly as much as Italians and way more than Iberians. Its stockmarket is the 16th-biggest globally, with a capitalisation of $1.8trn, and the seventh-busiest by daily traded volumes. The IMF has deemed South Korea an advanced economy since 1997. Anyone still describing it as an emerging market might therefore appear to have been asleep for the past half-century. And yet this is what MSCI, a company that creates market benchmarks, has been doing for three decades. South Korea was the 13th country to join its Emerging Market Index, which now counts 24 members. Some have since been relegated to a “frontier” basket (Croatia, Morocco), shunted to “standalone” markets (Argentina) or even dropped altogether (Venezuela). Less glitzy economies than South Korea’s, such as Greece and Portugal, were elevated to MSCI’s Developed Market index years ago. South Korea therefore thinks it is overdue a promotion. It may hope to achieve one on June 22st, when MSCI announces which countries stand a chance to receive the accolade next year. The index provider has long pointed out that investing in South Korean assets is often an unnerving experience. Shareholders’ rights are weak. Ownership structures are byzantine. Repeated scandals expose lapses in governance. And state interventions routinely warp markets. To address such misgivings the government in January announced a raft of ambitious reforms. Rules governing the distribution of dividends, for years clear as mud, will be brought closer to Western standards. Procedures for takeovers and spin-offs will be revamped to better protect minority shareholders. An arduous registration process for foreign investors will be abolished by the end of the year, with large South Korean companies required to release filings in English from then on (smaller firms are slated to follow in 2026). Most important for MSCI, South Korea has pledged to open up its foreign-exchange market and to extend its working hours, which should help make the won more tradable internationally.Such reforms aim to make South Korea’s financial markets more dynamic—a worthy goal in itself. But the government reckons inclusion in MSCI’s elite benchmark is also worth angling for, because it would bring with it a vast influx of cash from foreign investors. About $3.5trn of assets under management, spread across the globe, currently track MSCI’s Developed Market index—nearly twice as much as the money following its emerging-market cousin, according to Goldman Sachs, an investment bank. Analysts estimate that a promotion could lure some $46bn-56bn of fresh capital into South Korean assets. Moving on up could also help put an end to the “Korean discount”—the persistently lower valuation of South Korean firms relative to foreign ones with similar earnings and assets. Investors had to contend with poor governance and shareholders’ rights, along with the nagging risk of a conflict with North Korea; they often received meagre dividends for their trouble. By signalling that the regime is becoming friendlier, the logic goes, an msci upgrade would help dispel investors’ doubts.The trouble is that South Korea has been there before. It made it on to MSCI’s coveted watchlist in 2009, only to be crossed off in 2014 after the index provider alleged it was not sufficiently upping its game. Various administrations have since aimed for the promotion but failed to set adequate reforms in motion. Some critics paint even the latest batch of measures as half-hearted. South Korea has ruled out some changes the MSCI would like, such as removing limits on foreign ownership in key industries and loosening restrictions on short-selling. And political whims continue to make investors queasy. Last year bond markets experienced a wild few days after a provincial governor refused to honour the region’s debts. In February the country’s president, Yoon Suk-yeol, ordered the markets watchdog to keep a lid on banks’ profits, because they are “part of the public system”. Investors were unimpressed.MSCI has already indicated that this might still not be South Korea’s year. On June 8th it hinted that it would wait until the capital-market reforms were fully implemented and see how investors react to them before considering adding the country to its premier league.That might be a blessing in disguise. South Korea should not rush into an upgrade, says Hwang Sun-woo of Korea University. Its economy, which depends heavily on exports, could be rocked in the event of a hasty opening of its foreign-currency markets. And the potential rewards should be put into perspective. The expected capital inflows, small relative to the size of South Korea’s markets, would mostly benefit big companies. They could also be reversed. After luring money upon its promotion in 2010, Israel, the country to most recently graduate to developed-market status, suffered $2.5bn in net outflows the next year, which erased all earlier gains.Membership of elite clubs will not in itself cure South Korea’s reputational ills; after all, these have persisted despite its inclusion in top indices created by other blue-chip providers, such as Dow Jones and FTSE Russell. To do so, the reforms will have to convince a wider public. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

The intensifying rivalry between America and China has not been kind to open markets. Letting defence or foreign ministers dictate trade policy, it turns out, is not conducive to making goods move more smoothly across borders. Yet even as globalisation crumbles, a race to gain commercial clout in the world’s most populous and fastest-growing region has kicked off. It is a race China is quietly winning.Both America and China are keen to trumpet to Asian countries the benefits of the regional pacts they sponsor (each of which excludes their rival power). On May 27th a group of 14 countries agreed to set up an early-warning system over supply-chain problems—the first building block of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), President Joe Biden’s flagship offering. On June 2nd the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a China-backed trade deal which includes Australia, Japan, New Zealand, all of South-East Asia (bar East Timor) and South Korea, came into force in the Philippines, the last of the pact’s 15 members to ratify it. At first blush the two pacts look mostly insubstantial. American negotiators are not interested in offering greater market access for Asian exporters, robbing IPEF of the raison d’être of a trade deal. Critics dismiss RCEP as broad but shallow because it does not cover labour rights, the environment and state-owned enterprises.Despite those limitations, however, RCEP is already expanding More

Masterly inactivity is back in vogue at the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee. After its meeting on June 14th it kept its benchmark rate on hold, rather than raising it, for the first time since January 2022. One or two more rate rises may lie ahead: Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman, suggested so in his post-meeting press conference, and that is what investors expect. Gradually, though, the main debate among Fed watchers has shifted from how high the rate will go to how long it will stay there before being cut.That is a knotty problem, made knottier by the fact that core prices in America (excluding volatile food and energy) rose by 5.3% in the year to May. It is also not the only one facing Mr Powell and his colleagues. They have spent the past year steadily shrinking the Fed’s huge stock of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities (MBS), the face value of which has fallen from $8.5trn to $7.7trn. Each month the Fed allows up to $60bn-worth of Treasuries, and $35bn of MBS, to mature without reinvesting the proceeds. Now it must decide when to stop.This vast portfolio was amassed via the Fed’s quantitative-easing (QE) programme, through which it bought bonds with newly created money. Conceived amid the global financial crisis of 2007-09, it was put into overdrive during the covid-19 pandemic. QE flooded markets with liquidity and nudged nervous investors into buying riskier assets—because the Fed was already buying the safest ones, which pushed their yields down. That kept the supply of credit and other risk capital flowing into the real economy. Critics decried all this as reckless money printing. But with inflation low and deflation more of a threat, they were easy to dismiss.The return of high inflation makes QE’s reversal (quantitative tightening, or QT) desirable on several counts. Just as buying Treasuries brings long-term rates down, the disappearance of a buyer should raise them, complementing the tightening effect of the Fed’s short-term rate rises. And if the Fed is not buying Treasuries, someone else must be holding on to them. That means they are not buying a riskier asset such as a stock or corporate bond, reducing the supply of capital to an overheated economy. Both effects should dampen price rises.QT also bolsters the Fed’s credibility. If it only ever conducted QE, and never reversed the process, accusations of money printing and currency debasement would be much harder to brush off. Inflation expectations could rise, self-fulfillingly and perhaps disastrously. So the Fed must prove it is willing to hoover up dollars as well as pump them out.In that case, why stop at all? The simplest reason is that the Fed’s tightening cycle is approaching its end. Eventually it will consider cutting short-term rates again, especially if economic cracks appear. To still be pushing long-term ones up at that point would be akin to a driver pressing the accelerator and the brake at the same time.The more troubling reason is that, just like raising short-term rates, QT can inflict its own damage. Having been tried only once before, from 2017 to 2019 and at a much slower pace, its side-effects are poorly understood. That does not make them less dangerous. By sucking cash out of the system, the previous bout of QT prompted a near-failure of the money markets—the place where firms borrow to meet immediate funding needs and one of the world’s most important pieces of financial plumbing. The Fed cleared the blockage with an emergency lending facility that it has since made permanent. It also had to halt QT.This time it would be something else that breaks. The stockmarket is an obvious, if unthreatening, candidate: only a devastating crash would threaten financial stability. A broader liquidity crunch would be worse. Credit markets, already tight following several bank failures and rising defaults, are more likely to seize. America’s Treasury, meanwhile, is set to soak up yet more liquidity. It must sell more than $1trn of debt over the coming three months to rebuild its cash buffers after the latest debt-ceiling drama. By increasing the risk of sudden market moves, that raises the odds of participants suddenly needing to raise cash for margin calls—and the risk that they cannot.However small the ideal size of the Fed’s balance-sheet, ever more shrinking could be dangerous. So QT must stop before it risks sparking a crisis that requires a return to QE. But when? That is the central bank’s next big dilemma.■Read more from Buttonwood, our columnist on financial markets:Surging stockmarkets are powered by artificial intelligence (Jun 7th)Investors go back into battle with rising interest rates (Jun 1st)The American credit cycle is at a dangerous point (May 24th)Also: How the Buttonwood column got its name More