Some of this article is private score-settling between Zero Hedge and Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg. What’s noteworthy is Wells Fargo Capital’s Jim Paulsen’s changed stance on the stock market. He has been among the staunchest of permabulls, since well before the financial crisis, but he has grown cautious. His caution stems from various valuation measures at all-time highs.
Back in January 2012, all was well with the centrally-planned world: Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg was staunchly bearish, while his arch-nemesis, Wells Capital’s Jim Paulsen, was the opposite. This rivalry culminated with Rosenberg writing an extensive breakdown of his showdown with “bullish strategist” Paulsen at a CFA event (see “David Rosenberg Explains What (If Anything) The Bulls Are Seeing”) in which he said that the one thing that he could “identify as market positive” was valuations, to wit: “we do understand that P/E ratios at current low levels do serve up a certain degree of confidence that there is some downside protection to the overall market here.”
Fast forward three years, and the world, while still centrally-planned more so than ever now that the BOJ has and the ECB is about to join the massive monetization fray, has been thrown into conventional wisdom turmoil. The reason is that while David Rosenberg infamously flip-flopped from bear to bull (because somehow, somewhere he foresaw rising wages) in the early summer of 2013, none other than Jim Paulsen has just thrown in the permabull towel and in a letter to Wells Capital clients titled “Median NYSE Price/Earnings Multiple at Post-War RECORD”, admits that the market is about as overvalued as ever, based on numerous criteria but mostly due to the median (not average) P/E multiple surging to fresh all time highs!
For the rest of the article: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-10/permabull-throws-towel-stocks-are-massively-overvalued-key-multiples-are-post-war-re
