(Thanks to Morningstar's John Rekenthaler for including one of my emails to him in a column consisting of reader reponses while he tended to his wife who, as he reports, suffered a fainting spell. We wish both of them well, of course.)
Do we need a recession or another credit event similar to 2008 to tell us stocks are overpriced and cause them to tumble? John Rekenthaler of Morningstar seems to think so. I sent him an email in response to an article he wrote doubting the verdict of recent bubble-callers like gmo and Research Affiliates. I said stocks were objectively expensive (using the Shiller PE), and that meant future returns would likely be low.
But John thinks that a turn in the economic cycle will determine a downturn in the stock market, and tell us, after the fact, if stocks are overpriced. Since we don't know when that will occur or what it will look like, we must remain agnostic as to the future returns of the stock market. As he responds to my email in a new article:
“One of these years the economic cycle will turn, thereby making projected corporate earnings wildly overstated rather than moderately so. Stocks will get crushed. If that happens in 2018 or 2019, then equity prices will indeed have been high, and returns will indeed be low. If the economy holds out until 2020 or longer, though, then today's values should look reasonable.”
Unfortunately, while stock markets tend to tumble when the economy goes South, since the Great Depression there's scant evidence that single recessions tell us anything about how stocks are priced or indicate anything about their future 10-year returns. For that all-important forecast, one must consult starting valuations more than recessions or moment in the economic cycle.
Consider the 50% decline the S&P 500 Index suffered from 2000 through most of 2002. The recession in 2000 was minor. In fact, it didn't' even meet the standard definition of two straight quarters of GDP contraction. GDP contracted in the second quarter of 2000, then again in the fourth quarter of that year, and never again.
