Your Weekly Reminder Markets Are Pornographically Overvalued

So here we are, staring at headlines that whisper of a potential Russia–Ukraine peace deal, and useless sell-side analysts that appear on CNBC daily, looking for any excuse to backfit their evergreen “buy” ratings to some type of good news that can continue to explain 40x PEs and an S&P 200,000 target are salivating.

The narrative is obvious: peace means stability, stability means growth, and growth means stocks go higher. But anyone with more than a week’s experience in markets knows how this script can actually end: not with a euphoric rally, but with a “sell the news” thud. Markets don’t run on world peace; they run on liquidity. Take Covid for example: everyone thought the bubonic plague had landed and all life as we knew it was going to stop — so naturally the NASDAQ tripled off its lows after the Fed firehosed trillions in liquidity to the nation’s uber-rich.

I joked at the time: “The year is 2030. All mankind has died from Covid. A lone server in the basement of the New York Fed continues to bid the Dow to all-time highs.”

So now, if peace gets priced as “the last bullish catalyst,” then what’s left to keep this mania levitating? Has anyone that calls themselves a contrarian thought of the removal of war headlines becoming he trigger for a reversal?

Make no mistake, a reversal is overdue. I know, I know — there’s no point in reminding anyone again, because it feels like the market is never going to go down. I’ve been wrong before, loudly, and on more than one occasion (sometimes the only thing my calls crash are my own P&L). But I also know that when the data screams “bubble,” ignoring it usually doesn’t end well.

On almost every objective measure, the market is not just expensive — it’s wildly overvalued. June 30th data from CurrentMarketValuation.com doesn’t just say “overvalued” — it says “strongly overvalued,” and it says it across nearly every single model that matters.

Take the Buffett Indicator. It’s sitting around 200% of GDP, more than two standard deviations above its long-term average. The last two times it got anywhere near this level were...(READ THIS FULL COLUMN, 100% FREE, HERE).

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