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The manic-depressive market
By Dr. Nassir Ghaemi
Created Oct 2 2008 - 2:30pm
The great financial investor Warren Buffet has famously analogized the market to a person with manic-depressive illness (Mr. Market). When it goes up, the market becomes unrealistically giddy, full of "irrational exuberance," euphoric and grandiose. And when it goes down, the world appears to come to an end, there is no floor, no hope, all falls down. Suicide even happens, as investors jump off buildings.
As a specialist in manic-depressive illness, with one exception (Peter Whybrow's book American Mania, see my full review of it here) I do not believe my peers have ever analyzed the metaphor of the manic-depressive market. Since I am no expert in financial investing, I will take Warren Buffett's word that the analogy is apt. The question then becomes: Does our most up to date knowledge of manic-depressive illness (MDI) give us any insights about the market?
A key concept is that there is a psychological, and financial, law of gravity: What goes up must come down. Mania leads to depression in MDI, and financial highs eventually cause depressions. The question is how we can stabilize moods, and markets, not removing them altogether, and not leaving us chronically depressed.
Here are a few facts about MDI, with relevant extensions to the market, and perhaps to the tough political decisions of today:
1. Nature (more commonly invoked if you live in the North) or God (more commonly invoked if you live in the South) cures: All mood episodes are self-limiting. No one is ever depressed for decades, and no one is manic for years. The average depression in MDI lasts 3-6 months, the average mania 2-4 months - untreated. The main danger is the harm that might be caused during the episode: suicide from depression, bankruptcy or divorce from mania. The treatment is to control the extremes of the episode while hastening the natural healing process.
Applied to the market: This too shall pass, as long as we do not let the decline lead to economic suicide. Let's try to make some rational decisions for the short term, and try to simply survive until the long term comes to our rescue.
2. The essential feature of MDI is recurrence: Every episode goes away; every episode always comes back. Untreated, the average patients has an episode every one to two years, or about 20 or more in a lifetime. The goal of treatment is to prevent the future recurrence, not so much to treat the current episode.
Applied to the market: Let's do what we need to do now, but let's put most of our effort into trying to prevent future severe declines or rises. Let's honestly examine what led to this fall, and outlaw such activity in the future.
3. Mania is characterized by lack of insight. Most patients who are manic do not realize that they are ill. To paraphrase Robert Lowell: Depression is a burden to oneself, mania to one's friends.
Applied to the market: When things are good, maintain some skepticism. They are never as good as we think they are, and they will not stay that way. The nature of the illness is eventual recurrence. All we can do with our treatments is to make those recurrences less severe and less frequent.
4. Depression can be the result of realism: Psychological research on depressive realism indicates that people often become depressed because they have a valid and correct assessment of the reality of their lives, not because of cognitive distortions.
Applied to the market: Declines happen for a reason. Something is awry in the economic world, and the decline of the financial markets is a symptom, not a cause. Let's use the decline to assess the health of our economy and look at where it has weaknesses that may have led to this decline. Could it be, for instance, that our housing market, propped up by the backhanded government subsidy of tax deductions, is in need of reform?
5. Antidepressants can make MDI worse: they cause mania and more and more mood episodes over time (rapid-cycling). Treatment of MDI is just as much about what not to do, as about what to do.
Applied to the market: One should be careful about just focusing on the periods of decline, cutting taxes and interest rates to stimulate the economy. It is just as important to keep the lid on the economy, because what goes up must come down.
6. Perhaps most importantly, many patients with MDI do not want to take the treatment that makes them better: mood stabilizers. They often are willing to take all kinds of other drugs - antidepressants, valium, amphetamines - but not the cure. I know this is politically incorrect and "paternalistic," but there is a reason why the doctor signs the prescription pad and not the patient: it is the job of the doctor to do what is in the best interest of the patient, not necessarily to do what the patient likes. I always tell my patients that this is a free country, so they can get other doctors who might do what they want. But I will give them what they need, rather than what they like.
Applied to the market: The government is the doctor, and the public is the patient, and it is poor statesmanship to simply leave the market to its own processes or to go with public opinion. Statesmen do what is in the best interest of the country, no matter what the populace thinks. John Kenneth Galbraith once noted that the majority is usually wrong. The public cannot get another government, so there is no choice but for the government to be proactive in the interests of the people.
No person willingly wants to take psychiatric medications; the presence of an illness like MDI that needs to be treated makes the decision necessary. So it with the manic-depressive market: Galbraith said that politics is not the art of the possible, it is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Some treatments work for MDI; some do not; some even make it worse. Politicians of all stripes will offer nostrums, but I suggest that only some of them will work: those that involve a positive attitude toward government intervention, with as much attention to avoidance of overstimulating the economy as to enhancing it when it is down, and with a long-term perspective as its primary modus operandi, rather than short-term reactivity to crises.
Economists like John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith had this kind of wisdom, and now the time is coming for our country to choose a leader with this kind of wisdom. Of our two choices, one seems more in this tradition than the other.
Let's do what we have to do, and then choose a president who, rather than doing nothing (like letting the market get out of control), or doing the wrong thing (like starting expensive wars), will make the right decisions to get us where we need to go from here.
source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moo ... ive-market
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