I thought this interesting because it discusses the high valuations of the magnificent seven tech stocks. Howard Marks is famous for picking the end of the dot com bubble in 2000.
If nothing else it's at least a discussion starter.
I've believed that we were something bubble-esque once the interest rates went up without this leading any drops in stock prices-- essentially I believe that stock prices should be discounted future dividends, or discounted profit not handed out as dividends, etc., and this is basically theory; and when the interest rates went from 1% to 5%, then obviously if they are held at 5% for a long time, then prices would have to go to 1/5, or profits would have to substantially increase to keep valuations constant, and then one can question where they're going to be long term.
One instructive field is offices. I think commercial real estate has gone down something like 8% since interest rate were 1% from some graph I found at one of the many federal reserve branches, but that's pretty minor considering the increase in interest rates and WFH, so I feel that US commercial real estate is probably overvalued.
I don't think any of this is a new insight. I think even Swedish banks have been very aware of this for quite some time, so it should probably be more obvious in the US.
Valuations of firms like Tesla (1.24 trillion USD) vs Volkswagen (0.051 trillion USD) or BYD (0.1 trillion USD) or even Boeing vs Airbus, show that something is at least a little bit crazy. When the market cap of US stocks is 55 trillion and and all stocks in the whole world are 111 trillion, whereas US GDP is 25%, the valuations don't really correspond to economic activity-- and one can say that one places expects growth and another not, but even a rubber tree farm has value and value can also result from the economic activity of others (i.e. the famous city lot of the Georgist parable) so, even if the rest of the world was just rubber plantations, I still think those rubber plantations should have a market cap approximately proportional to the fraction of world GDP they account for.
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