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IPFS News Link • Federal Reserve

"The Fed Is All The Buyers Have": The Banks Agree Stocks Have Never Been More Expensive

• https://www.zerohedge.com, by Tyler Durden

Late last week, we showed a chart from Credit Suisse which we described simply as "insanity" because it demonstrated that as the US careened into a depression, with GDP crashing and the unemployment rate soaring, between the latest Fed-driven surge in stocks and the collapse in earnings estimates, the PE multiple on the broader market had eclipsed the previous record of 19.0x set during the market's February all time high, and had now hit a new all-time high of 19.4x. In other words, the market has never been more overvalued than it is right now.

The chart eventually made its way to Jeff Gundlach who yesterday tweeted that "U.S. GDP looks to be down 15%ish, unannualized, from its peak. SPX is presently down a similar amount from its peak. Ergo (and I over simplify to make a valid point) stocks now are back to the Feb 19th highs from a valuation perspective. "In Fed We Trust" is all the buyers have."

Gundlach's math is not quite correct because as JPMorgan showed last week, the beta of corporate profits to moves in GDP is about 7x during financial crises. As a result, according to the bank's chief economist Joseph Lipton, in the current recession in which JPM expects global GDP growth to collapse by the same 9.8%-points in Q2,  the bank is applying the same profit drop beta of seven—on par with the global financial crisis-- which implies a plunge in corporate profits of roughly 70% in the year through 2Q20.