Eye on the Market | August 4, 2011 J.P Morgan Today the Delaware, with the caption “America’s structural resilience, fortitude and ingenuity will carry the economy and financial markets in 2011 — and beyond”. Our job is not to point to where we would like the financial markets to go, but rather to point to where they might end up. It’s like the scene in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, when Nixon looks up at a portrait of JFK and says, “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.” Our job is to see financial markets for what they are. 6. All that said, we have lessons to learn here. Too many of our investment discussions this year focused on the negative real return characteristics of cash, and why to reduce it. In a world of deflation risk on financial assets (rather than of goods and services), cash retains substantial option value at times like these. We could have connected the dots more aggressively on our views on Global monetary and fiscal policy weak growth and easy monetary policy, and owned more gold. While %p.a. Chginnetfiscal Pt we have had rising price forecasts for gold and owned it in portfolios, 5 lending 2 we did not have large enough allocations. ‘ ; od. : 0 Given the all-time high of US government transfers to households and negative real interest rates, we should not have interpreted positive 3 A economic data earlier this year as being highly representative of the -2 true run-rate of the US economy. The same goes for the global ‘ 4 economy, which as shown in the chart from JP Morgan Securities, has i 4 ‘ ' . ‘ olicy rate been the beneficiary of a lot of stimulus that is now fading, for a , : variety of economic and political reasons. 02 04 06 08 10 12 Great corporate profits are no guarantee against a problem in financial markets. Corporate profits and P/E multiples were fine in June 2007, but rested on top of a systemic problem in private sector credit markets and private sector b