valuations

View Full Image (The Economist) To a certain extent, this record-smashing is to be expected. Dump the losers periodically, as benchmark indices tend to, and the history of equities is one long (albeit frequently interrupted) march upwards. Bear markets and crashes abound, but once prices recover to set one new high, a stream of others usually follows. This has led global stocks to deliver an annualised real return of 5.1% since 1900, and American ones of 6.5%. Worry all you like that the narratives being spun around today’s boom—from techno-euphoria in America to a corporate-governance revolution in Japan—are overblown, and…