I was reading a recent JPMorgan strategy note and one stat really caught my attention. US household wealth is now sitting around 630% of GDP. For context, it was roughy 486% during the Dot-Com bubble and about 435% before the 1987 crash. It´s obviously that doesn’t mean a crash is around the corner, but it does suggest asset prices have been growing a lot faster than the underlying economy for quite a while.
Another thing they pointed out is how concentrated the market has become. The top 10 stocks now make up about 41% of the S&P 500, with a huge chunk of that tied to AI and mega-cap tech. A lot of investors probably feel diversified because they own an index fund, but if most of the performance is coming from the same handful of names, i’m not sure diversification means what it used to. Maybe, that´s fine if the AI story keeps delivering, Or maybe we’re all underestimating how dependent the market has become on a single narrative.
What’s interesting is that JPMorgan isn’t really calling for an imminent crash. No, the argument seems more subtle. Valuations are already prettty stretched, the Shiller CAPE is near 39, the S&P is trading around 25x forward earnings, and expectations for future growth remain incredibly high. Markets can stay expensive for a long time, but I keep wondering whether we’re looking at a genuinely new era of productivity… or just another period where investors slowly convince themselves that this time is different.
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/top-jpmorgan-strategist-shares-4-094501115.html
h/t MoneyMonsterStudios