I am posting to this topic for the first time. I note that for most of my life, the average P/E of stocks was far far lower than it has been in the past ten years.
Now, I do not know the exact numbers, so I will throw some approximate stuff out there. The specificity is not the issue, the general trend is.
I believe that the average Price to Earnings ratio from 1930 to 1990 was in the seven to eight range. Somewhere (exactly where is not important) in the 1990's the P/E ratio started to rise. By the end of the Ninties, stock prices had risen and pushed the P/E ratio into the teens. By 2001 P/E's had jumped to astronomical highs in tech stocks and outrageous levels elsewhere. I worked in the phone industry as a data communications manager for what is now AT&T. The P/E ratio for that stock (then SBC) was 30 as opposed to the normal 8 or 9.
With the reality of the escalation of stock P/Es behind us, it is now likely that the average P/E on stocks could return to the traditional average of seven to eight?
If so, the market could fall another forty to fifty percent. I do not know about buying back in when that is the risk.
What say you? Government Bonds are far safer when one realizes what the risk of buying into a falling/correcting stock market is. Is the correction that is occuring a fall to tradition in stock valuation absent this recent ten or so year exhuberance ?????????
I'm inclined to agree with your supposition.
The PE ratios have been a form of inflation, but one which our economist have been reluctant to acknowlege as such.
Bascially investments, all kinds of investments, have been a bubble.
This decline in the stock market was inevitable because the stock market has been far healthier than the economy upon which it depends.
The affluent class, which has been enjoying enormous tax breaks (let's remember that the true invetor class once had a 90% top tax rate...now it's 35%) had to put their money SOMEWHERE.
Nturally since they are affluent they invested much of it.
But while they were enjoying affluence, the working class has been suffering a fairly consistent loss of purchasing power.
So while the affluent classes were investing, their investments were basically creating a cituation where more and more money was chasing less and less profit.
PE rations had to eventually go down.
I'm simplifying this argument terribly, I know, but that is, in the marco sense, what I think is happening.
Basically the investment bubble is bursting.
When workers are more affluent, when they are ALSO making enough money to pay their bills, save for their retirements, put their kids through school, as so forth, THEN the stock market's rises will actually be supported by the economy upon which those rising prices are actually based.
The inflation of the prices in the stock market were no less artificial than the rising prices of real estate.
They were all fueled by cheap money thanks to the policies of the FED.