The Equity Risk Premium (ERP) is a handy way to compare valuations of equity with fixed income. It compares bond yields with the earnings yield on stocks (the earnings yield is reciprocal of the price/earnings ratio). Six years ago, when the Fed was well into quantitative easing and bond buying, it gave a clear signal that stocks were a far better long-term investment than bonds. The yield on ten-year treasuries was below 2%. Government policy was to create a huge disincentive for investors to hold fixed income through unattractively low rates, and it worked. Holding risky assets such as equities has substantially outperformed less risky bonds.

It’s not only relative valuations that supported stocks, but earnings growth. 2018 earnings on the S&P500 are coming in 22% higher than 2017. Pessimists will note that this growth won’t be sustained into next year, but the FactSet consensus estimate for 2019 is still 10% growth, which isn’t bad.

So what is the ERP telling us now? In 2012 the difference between yield on S&P500 earnings and ten-year treasuries reached 5.6%, the widest since the 1970s and fully 5% above the 50+ year average. Interest rates were artificially low, and had they risen rapidly, the relative attraction of stocks would have quickly receded. But there were good reasons to expect low-interest rates to persist, as I wrote in Bonds Are Not Forever; The Crisis Facing Fixed Income Investors. A financial crisis caused by too much debt required low rates to ease the deleveraging. Although bond yields have been rising, they’re still not historically high. The long-term real return on ten-year treasury notes is 2%. That suggests 4% is a neutral yield (2% historic real return plus 2% projected inflation). At a little over 3%, rates are still well short of neutral. It would take a jump of at least 2% in bond yields before they’d look historically attractive.

Although Trump is so far associated with a strong stock market, October’s rout has pretty much wiped out any positive return for the year. As Stephen Gandel pointed out in Bloomberg last week, on a valuation basis equities are now lower than they were before the 2016 election. In other words, earnings growth has outpaced the market.