The U.S. stock market has been on a run, with the S&P 500 up nearly 4 percent so far this week, and more than 25 percent for the year. Fears about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus quickly faded, with stocks regaining lost ground.
This makes some market watchers nervous, the DealBook newsletter reports, because of a metric that suggests that stock prices may be too high given the level of corporate earnings and rising inflation.
The S&P 500 now has a real earnings yield — the inflation-adjusted ratio of earnings per share to the stock price — approaching negative 3 percent, the lowest since 1947, Bank of America equity strategists led by Savita Subramanian wrote in a recent note to clients. Negative yields are rare and often precede a stock market slump, the analysts wrote.
A low earnings yield means that corporate profits are not keeping up with stock prices. And because real yields subtract inflation from the measure, a negative real earnings yield means that a company, based on its stock price, is not generating enough profits to keep up with rising prices. (Using October’s inflation number, Tesla’s real earnings yield is negative 5.2 percent.)
The last time the S&P 500 had a negative real earnings yield, the Bank of America analysts said, was in 2000, before the tech bubble burst. It also happened twice during the stagflation of the 1970s and ’80s. This year, the S&P 500’s real earnings yield turned negative months ago, but it really sank recently as inflation has marched higher.
Besides a bear market, there are two ways a negative earnings yield can turn positive:
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First, inflation would have to drop significantly, which some economists think is possible.
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Second, at a time when wages are rising and supply issues are interfering with plans, corporate profits could accelerate faster than expected.
After the initial shock of the pandemic, stocks have shrugged off negative news and set a series of records. But the more that analysts consider the numbers, the more they worry that the gravity-defying rise may not last much longer. (Stocks fell on Thursday.)
That said, “we live in a world where real negative rates are almost acceptable as a norm,” Ms. Subramanian noted.
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