David Rosenberg, chief market strategist of Gluskin Sheff, hedge fund tycoon Leon Cooperman and numerous others have singled out Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s left-wing presidential platform as the most prominent threat to equity prices in the next 18 months. Yet several professional investors at Financial Advisor’s Inside Alternatives conference in Philadelphia last week, noting that Warren is well-connected to powerful financial interests, dismissed the notion outright.
So far in the campaign, Warren has promised free Medicare for All, universal childcare, free tuition to public colleges, and the elimination of fracking and all forms of private health insurance. All of this will be paid for by corporations and th ultra-wealthy.
In the view of skeptics, Warren’s bark is a lot louder than her bite. One money manager wryly noted that Warren still publicly describes Obamacare as totally inadequate, yet her past actions speak otherwise.
Only a few years ago, she was one of many senators on both sides of the aisle supporting repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s tax on medical device companies. It might just be a coincidence, but a number of those concerns have major operations in Massachusetts.
There are other reasons why any damage caused by Warren’s proposals could be limited if she became president. Paramount among them is that most of her plans are so sweeping they are unlikely to be enacted. Bloomberg columnist Al Hunt has observed that her biggest plan yet may be a plan to "walk back some of her diciest," most impractical, previously announced plans. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has said that her Medicare for All simply isn’t happening.
Then there is the issue of the individual industries Warren has targeted: Energy, health care and banks already have been badly beaten up by the market.
And while support for cracking down on Big Tech or even breaking it up appears bipartisan, several speakers at the Inside Alternatives event said they think valuations are a much bigger problem with that sector. Ali Motamed, manager of the long-short Invenomic Fund, believes that mega-cap tech stocks face valuation and law-of-large-numbers issues. Apple, he noted, is making almost exactly what it was five years ago.
While profitable companies like Facebook and Alphabet are confronting saturated markets, other growth stocks are trading at lofty prices with flimsy earnings. Motamed said there is value in a number of cheaper areas of the market, but even if some of these companies’ shares appreciate they are unlikely to exert a significant impact on the major indices.
Chuck Clough, CEO and portfolio manager of Clough Capital, said that after a decade of stellar performance by large-cap U.S. equities, it’s time to look elsewhere. Specifically, he believes China will be the big investment theme of the next decade. Compared to America, with its 80 million “pessimistic” millennials, China could be poised for another leg of growth with 800 million “aspirational” millennials.