We’re not the first to observe the rise of post-truth populism and how public opinion is increasingly shaped by personal beliefs and appeals to emotion, rather than facts. Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Brazil’s Bolsonaro and our very own Boris (unique in this group in that everyone is on first name terms with him) are all examples of individuals that have done well by exploiting the post-truth world.

Populism isn’t new, but social media is, and this new world has been facilitated in no small part by the social media revolution where, in contrast to most initial assessments, abundant information has not led to cleaner and more transparent decision making by politicians and electorates.

We’re not going to add to what has been written on this subject but we are going to draw a parallel to the political dynamics outlined above and the dynamics in financial markets. Specifically, for “facts” think economic data, for “public opinion” think financial markets and for “social media” think QE (quantitative easing), in the sense that it is also a new ‘technology’ that tends to distort data. In short, in both cases, facts are distorted as they pass through a transmission mechanism to the end user. In both cases, the facts are available but the end user chooses to focus on what suits them best.

To illustrate the point, for most of the post-GFC (Global Financial Crisis) period, bad economic news has not been seen as bad news but good news. In other words, poor economic growth data has been received positively because financial markets assume it will lead to more market-friendly QE. For some time, therefore, markets have been driven by the belief that there is no such thing as bad news. In a very post-truth way, bad news has, effectively, been banned by central bank QE programmes.

To give a recent example, last week saw very poor economic data come out of Germany, with both the German PMI manufacturing and the German IFO business surveys worsening, even though they were previously at multi-year lows. This data adds to the woes for the region but, the same week, the ECB’s Mario Draghi signalled further easing for September. And the can gets kicked…

Without facts, or with the reduced importance of facts, credibility is everything. So far, be it with the recent populists or the central banks, moving to ever more extreme positions has only added to their credibility and their power. Do facts win out in the end? Post-truth is unlikely to go into reverse anytime soon: parties are on an election footing in the UK, and US elections are next year, while in Hong Kong and Russia demonstrations are increasing in scale. Information is not power: power is how information is manipulated.

Drawing analogies between the way markets and electorates are responding to data is not to suggest they are completely different worlds, far from it. We have been drawing the link for some time now between QE and populism, the conduit being inequality. There might be other similarities too. Populist regimes tend to end in an inflationary spiral as politicians try to buy popularity but, eventually, bad news is seen as bad news. Similarly, there have been many that assume the QE experiment will also end in inflation, and well it might, eventually, especially if the pressure for fiscal spending to team up with monetary expansion is realised. But that’s no help in understanding financial markets in the here and now.

In the shorter term, markets will be looking to September, when the Fed and the ECB next meet. Then, they will judge their actions and their communication skills, as without facts there is only the credibility of the manipulator.

Risks:

The value of stock market investments will fluctuate and investors may not get back the original amount invested.

Forecasts are not reliable indicators of future returns.