USUALLY, when asset prices boom, peo-ple get excited. As America's stock-markets scaled wild peaks in 1929 and 1999 they did so amid feverish enthusiasm. Search for such euphoria on Wall Street today and you will come back empty-handed. Look at underlying numbers, though, and it is at first hard to see why. Over the past 136 years the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (cape), a useful measure of how expensive stocks have become, has reached its current heights only twice before: during the dotcom bubble; and just before the Crash of '29.
展开▼
