Earlier, we reported that Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan called for an end to Europe’s cheap-money policies and asked that the European Central Bank not use the strengthening euro as an excuse to keep printing money.
According to Bloomberg, Cryan said that the bank is “seeing signs of bubbles” across capital markets while low interest pummel European banks’ earnings.
“We are now seeing signs of bubbles in more and more parts of the capital market where we wouldn’t have expected them,” Cryan said, adding that the interest-rate policy has been partly responsible for the decline in earnings at European banks.
“I welcome the recent announcement by the Federal Reserve and now also from the ECB that they intend to gradually bring their loose monetary policy to an end.”
Now, barely a day later, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has joined his fellow bulge bracket bank chief in expressing his uneasiness with contemporary valuations and the central-bank money printing that has helped pump up asset prices around the world.
Blankfein said that “things have been going up for too long” and that “when yields on corporate bonds are lower than dividends on stocks, that unnerves me.”
Here’s more from the Wall Street Journal:
“Goldman Sachs Group Chairman Lloyd Blankfein on Wednesday sounded a warning about the markets, saying that some of what he sees “unnerves” him.
Mr. Blankfein said the current market environment “doesn’t feel like tulip-bulb-mania,” a reference to the famous speculative bubble in the Netherlands in 1637, but was nonetheless concerning.
‘Things have been going up for too long,’ he told attendees at a Handelsblatt business conference in Frankfurt.
‘When yields on corporate bonds are lower than dividends on stocks? That unnerves me.’”
