Hmm. While I share a general sense of uneasiness about how long this party has gone on, and how it was started and propped up by QE, my read on the Forbes article is that it is mostly a tool that a financial advisor is using to sow fear and drum up business. The author puts up several ominous-looking graphs and then concludes we are in a bubble that is about to pop, without ever really explaining the relationships between the parameters depicted on the graphs.
The first graph he shows really should be on a log scale instead of a linear scale. On a graph of an exponential function, of course the fluctuations on the right side are going to look bigger. He also fails to explain the two indices that are graphed. For instance, I'm curious why the GDP index continues to go up through all of the recessions except the Great Recession.
The second graph shows household wealth as a % of GDP, which is a more useful depiction of the data, and it does indeed indicate that we are in unprecedented territory. But we get no explanation of why the long-term average is an important target for "normal." The long-term average is meaningless, in my opinion. I see a graph that fluctuates through time, with a general long-term upward trend since the late 1970s, which, coincidentally, is when inflation peaked. If the long term average means something, then why did the statistic not even make it down to the long-term average at the bottom of the Great Recession? And why did it not even make it up to the long term average in 1966, right before the worst period of combined stock market and economic performance in US history?
The third graph shows a 300% gain in the S&P 500 from the bottom in early 2009 to the high point in early 2018. I concur with the general notion that this gain was enabled by QE. But so what? The 1949-56 bull market gained 266% in a shorter time period.
All of this strikes me as about as useful as CAPE. Yes, there is some rough correlation going on, but no one has ever been able to outline a good cause-and-effect relationship that enables predictions. CAPE and the household wealth analysis are part and parcel of the same basic measurement - valuation of assets. Trying to predict the economic future based on asset valuations is a case of the tail wagging the dog. Asset valuations increase during good economic times, and they decrease when the economy starts to turn down. High asset valuations are indicative of an economic expansion that has been going on for a while, but I've never seen any hard evidence that the valuations themselves are what brings the economy down. Which is why peaks and valleys in valuations never settle at the same place, and why the correlation is not very useful for making predictions.
