Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Hovering With an Anvil

In July 2011, just before the market lost nearly 20% (but also the last time it corrected materially), I observed “Like Wile E. Coyote holding an anvil just past the edge of a cliff, here we are, looking down below as if there is much question about what happens next.” In my view, the stock market is hovering in what has a good chance of being seen in hindsight as the complacent lull before a period of steep losses. Meanwhile, we would require a certain amount of deterioration in stock prices, credit spreads, and employment growth to amplify our economic concerns, but even here we can say that there is little evidence of economic acceleration. Broad economic activity continues to hover at levels that have historically delineated the border of expansions and recessions.

With the S&P 500 price/revenue ratio more than twice its historical norm prior to the late 1990’s market bubble, the ratio of market capitalization to GDP also more than twice its historical norm, the most lopsided bullish sentiment in decades, an overbought market trading at a record highs – and two standard deviations above its 20-period moving averages at weekly and monthly resolutions, a “log-periodic” bubble at its most likely finite-time singularity (see Estimating the Risk of a Market Crash), bond yields well above their 6-month average, an economy where growth in real GDP, real final sales and employment are all near or below the growth rates at which historical recessions have started, and our own estimates of prospective market return/risk quite negative based on a broad ensemble of observable market conditions, we view prospective near-term and multi-year returns as strongly unfavorable, and prospective market risk as unusually elevated.