We reported on last year’s partial deflation of the “everything bubble,” aided in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and erratic response to it.
But it could be a bit premature to consider that partial crash a singular event, followed by another period of economic recovery.
In fact things seem a lot worse economically, and this time in the worst way possible. At The Hill, Desmond Lachman describes how the U.S. may have reached the end of the economic road:
Herb Stein famously said that if something cannot go on forever it will stop. He might very well have been talking about today’s everything bubble in U.S. and world financial markets, which has largely been fueled by the Federal Reserve’s extraordinarily easy monetary policy.
The “everything bubble” Lachman refers to is easy to see in the current Shiller Price Earnings Ratio. It’s higher than the 1929 Depression, and on a trajectory towards “dot-com bust” levels from 2000. You can see for yourself on the latest Shiller PE chart below:
Schiller PE measures the price to average earnings from the past ten years. Today, on average, an investor pays $34.87 to secure $1 annual earnings.
Both of the past economic peaks, the Great Depression and the Dot-com crash, were “everything bubbles”. Today’s Shiller PE ratio has already surpassed Black Tuesday‘s…
You’ve seen charts before – why care about this one? A few reasons: its inventor, Robert J. Shiller, won the 2013 Nobel Prize for economics (and a bucket of other prizes). He’s been on the list of 100 most influential economists in the world since 2008. His book Irrational Exuberance came out in March 2000, warning that the stock market was in a bubble. (He was right.) Almost exactly one year before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Shiller authored a prescient warning – here’s the summary:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
