The lemmings are now in full stampede toward the cliffs. You can literally hear the cold waters churning, foaming and crashing on the boulders far below.
From bitcoin to Amazon, the financials, the Russell 2000 and most everything else in between, the casinos are digesting no information except the price action and are relentlessly rising on nothing more than pure momentum. The mania has gone full retard.
Certainly earnings have nothing to do with it. As of this morning, the Russell 2000, for instance, was trading at 112X reported LTM earnings.
Likewise, Q3 reporting is all over except for the shouting and reported LTM earnings for the S&P 500 came in $107 per share. That’s of signal importance because fully 36 months ago, S&P earnings for the September 2014 LTM period posted at $106 per share.
That’s right. Three years and $1 of gain. They talking heads blather about “strong earnings” only because they think we were born yesterday.
What happened in-between, of course, was the proverbial pig passing through the python.
First, the global oil, commodities and industrial deflation after July 2014 took earnings to a low of $86.44 per share in the March 2016 LTM period.
After that came the opposite—the massive 2016-2017 Xi Coronation Stimulus in China. The new Red Emperor and his minions pumped out an incredible $6 trillion wave of new credit, thereby artificially stimulating a global rebound and a profits recovery back to where it started three years ago.
The difference of course is that $106 of earnings back then were priced at an already heady (by historical standards) 18.6X, whereas $107 of earnings today are being priced at a truly lunatic 24.6X.
After all, nothing says earnings bust ahead better than an aging business cycle, a cooling Red Ponzi, an epochal shift toward central bank QT (quantitative tightening) and a massive Washington Fiscal Cliff. Yet every one of those headwinds are self-evident and have made the presence known with a loud clang in the last few days.
Self-evidently, we are now 36 months closer to the next recession in a business cycle which at 101 months is already approaching the 1990s record of 118 months and facing far greater headwinds. Foremost among these is the unprecedented but unavoidable turn of the central banks—after two decades of relentless expansion— toward interest rate normalization, QT (quantitative tightening) and trillions of debt and other securities sales (demonetization or balance sheet shrinkage).
The new Janet Yellen in tie and trousers made that perfectly clear at Wednesday’s confirmation hearing:
Powell said he expected the balance sheet to shrink to about $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion over the next three to four years under a program set in motion by Yellen……On interest rates, Powell said: “I think the case for raising interest rates at our next meeting is coming together.”
