Percent of IPO's with Negative Earnings

Having lived in San Francisco both then and now I can say it does all look and feel familiar.

"Its Worse Than 2007"

Its been a while since I've posted because, frankly, nothing has changed. Markets seem to be as irrational as ever until just the last few days. It remains to be seen whether this is a brief pause or the beginning of a more substantial re-evaluation of market prices. Nearly every single asset class is over valued by nearly every metric. Yet, until the last two days the market has completely ignored the economic data and blaming every data point on the cold weather of the 1st QTR. Never mind that the data has been poor around the world, not just north America.

Below, William White of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) provides a rare dose of reality:

Via Finanz Und Wirtschaft,
William White is worried. The former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements is highly sceptical of the ultra loose monetary policy that most central banks are still pursuing. "It all feels like 2007, with equity markets overvalued and spreads in the bond markets extremely thin", he warns.
Mr. White, all the major central banks have been running expansive monetary policies for more than five years now. Have you ever experienced anything like this?

The honest truth is no one has ever seen anything like this. Not even during the Great Depression in the Thirties has monetary policy been this loose. And if you look at the details of what these central banks are doing, it’s all very experimental. They are making it up as they go along. I am very worried about any kind of policies that have that nature.

But didn’t the extreme circumstances after the collapse of Lehman Brothers warrant these extreme measures?

Yes, absolutely. After Lehman, many markets just seized up. Central bankers rightly tried to maintain the basic functioning of the system. That was good crisis management. But in my career I have always distinguished between crisis prevention, crisis management, and crisis resolution. Today, the Fed still acts as if it was in crisis management. But we’re six years past that. They are essentially doing more than what they did right in the beginning. There is something fundamentally wrong with that. Plus, the Fed has moved to a completely different motivation. From the attempt to get the markets going again, they suddenly and explicitly started to inflate asset prices again. The aim is to make people feel richer, make them spend more, and have it all trickle down to get the economy going again. Frankly, I don’t think it works, and I think this is extremely dangerous.