The lesson for today’s investors, many of whom were caught out by this year’s bull market, might seem obvious. Forget about a downturn that may or may not materialise. Just buy and hold stocks, and wait for returns that will erase any number of brief dips. Unfortunately, there is a catch. What matters today is not historical returns but prospective ones. And on that measure, shares now look more expensive—and thus lower-yielding—when compared with bonds than they have in decades.
What of the next few years? Estimating the return on a bond is easy: it is just its yield to maturity. Gauging stock returns is trickier, but a quick proxy is given by the “earnings yield” . Combine the two for ten-year Treasury bonds and the500, and you have a crude measure of the equity risk premium that looks forward rather than back. Over the past year, it has plummeted .
Sustained earnings growth is the dream scenario. The second option, though, is less rosy: that investors have let their revived animal spirits get ahead of them. Ed Cole of Man Group, an asset manager, argues the squeezed equity risk premium is a bet on a “soft landing”, in which central bankers quash inflation without a recession. This has become easier to envisage as price rises have cooled and most countries have so far avoided downturns.
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