> Sorry for giving you a response you don't wanna hear. I like the idea of you destroying my model and banker's model as well which is used by pretty much everyone on street by saying what if the model is wrong. I like this approach.

No apology necessary. Your response was thoughtful and that's all I expect. If someone has a thoughtful retort, that's how we learn. My big problem on here is when people leave the thoughtful space and dig in too hard without considering the competing idea. You considered my position, and I appreciate that.

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> So let me first explain the chart you sent me for PE ratio. First pt that is a multpl model. Meaning it does not align with bankers/ hfs and inst model. Your chart says PE ratio must be at 22-23x. But bankers model says it's at 18 PE. This is the first point. I am not trying to throw a shade. It's just a misconception even i made during my beginning yrs. Second pt let's say you really wanna dig that multpl model upside and down. So the way i look at is.

Fun fact about me: I used to be a banker, working in infosec and risk.

We may be running into a language gap here, but I think what you're saying here is that the banking world and institutions use complex fundamentals analysis, not just multiple, to determine their targets and I agree with that, but the target multiple being talked about relating to the S&P 500 is still a target multiple, and we have to look at that with a critical eye.

My old colleagues and I have talked about this. 17-19 is pretty much the institutional target P/E range for the S&P 500 among most money managers... no disagreement that, and that can create self-fulfilling prophecies, but these targets also often don't hit, and to understand why you have to understand the mindset of a risk manager and an institutional investor. We're still subject to linear bias and you have to be crazy not to look at the current condition and see risk.

What I hear from my old colleagues is that they know about the problems with CAPE/Shiller-PE and other historical multiple comps, and they're aware of the problems with under-guessing at earnings, but with the Fed in uncertain times the tendency is to accept a lower floor than what they think will actually hit.

Basically, money managers are accepting bad data because in this circumstance they judge it's better not to recommend a long position when they don't know whether the floor is 20 or 17.

It just being the common banker model doesn't inherently mean it's going to end up there. Maybe it will, we're pretty close to the target... but I'm not speculating when I say that the banking model is inherently targeting a lower-than realistic fair valuation for the market.

Please feel free to expand: Is there anything of substance I'm missing from your argument here?

If there's a calculation I'm not considering, I'd love to see it.

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> From 1900 - 1990. PE ratio used to trade in range 10-20 range.

Yes, that's what I was saying and what the chart says. We agree on the timeframes and the historical behavior.

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>Therefore PE was 8 in 1974. Same was the case in 1980 when 14.x% inflation and 6.y PE. Okay so now we understood stagflationary decade,

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> WW2
>
>WW1

This is all during or under the shadow of Bretton Woods or the gold standard. This is important, a big part of the reason why market P/Es ranged until 1990 has little to do with inflation and everything to do with the lack of money supply expansion, which constrains The P portion of the multiple equation.

That's why things become decoupled in 1990, because the Volcker regime was basically responding to monetary policy whipsaw after the 1970s and after Bretton Woods ended. Now I personally am not on-board with blaming the entire economic situation on Bretton Woods since I think it's more complex than that, but it has to be factored in since breaking the forex gold alignment that kept the 1st world markets on stable footing really changes the game. That opens the door to money supply expansion after the Volcker regime.

>So what can we take away from it is. Inflation usually comes in cycle and when it appears market usually go sideways and does not go for ATH if it is supply shock driven and go ATH but then crashes in stagflationary environment. Reason being the debt/gdp ratio. But you need to remember one important thing. This is not 70's, 40s or 20s where manufacturing came and saved us with their earnings boost.

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We can't conclude anything from these historical examples. In fact, for half of them the primary mode of transportation was horses and the telephone was a new and uncommon invention. TV wasn't even in most households for most of the examples. Modern computers weren't even a twinkle in the mind's eye for most people until the 1990s and even then people would be shocked to see a smartphone.

You don't get to cherry-pick the differences in economic timeframes. You can't say "This is not 70's, 40s or 20s where manufacturing came and saved us with their earnings boost" and then ignore all of the extremely significant and major economic contexts that are wildly different. Just even algorithmic trading by itself changes how crashes happen as a mechanical reality.

In 1929, a whale who wants to protect themselves against a crash and who is tied in with the system was relying on a closed-loop ticker feed with lagged reads, and on transactions that if they were lucky filled by the close.

Now? That same whale can shift a buying zone in milliseconds, and can acquire funds via direct wire and brokerage funding in almost as short a time.

NYSE and ICE no longer just watch in awe as markets decline, they have halting rules and realtime analysis. The mechanics of the market are just wildly different than they were in your examples... hell trading now is wildly different than even it was 10 years ago. If you told an investor 20 years ago that people bought 0dte options on the regular on their phones they'd have called you a liar because it would have been incomprehensible to them, but that has a moderating influence on the patterns in the market.

But back to that "manufacturing's not going to save us" statement. I'll buy that for the 20s and 40s, but the 70s/80s were in part due to the decline in manufacturing. The 1980s was kind of a last gasp for American manufacturing as globalization was ramping up, but the damage was already done throughout America at that point.

Fast forward and we're seeing manufacturing come BACK to the United States. Infrastructure spending is a huge part of the common bear case, under the claim that this will drive inflation in the United States and to be fair, that's probably marginally true. The change in salaries will reduce margins to some extent, but that's also somewhat made up in changes to transportation costs and reduction of supply chain sensitivity, but I'll accept that it's not a perfect offset.

But you can't have your cake and eat it, too... either manufacturing is part of America's story in this current economic era, or it isn't.

Again, in real economics, you can't pick and choose... you get both the good and the bad.

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