Stocks and bonds are overvalued, while safe haven investments are undervalued in comparison.
I've been hearing stock-market bears saying that corporate stocks are overvalued for years now, and I've been thinking for some time that their (the bears) assessment is not altogether consistent, and that however much stocks are overvalued, it's possibly not as much as they continue to say. Let me explain.
The basis of the "overbought stocks" argument is that it's funded by cheap money from the Central Banks. And that doesn't make sense, precisely because the market increase has been funded by money printing, not with pre-existing investment capital. They're still probably overpriced, but the bearish argument tends to imply that every extra fiat currency unit printed is a dollar over fair value, and that isn't necessarily so.
Because the massive expansion in the money supply has been largely sequestered in the stock market (as only large financial firms have access to Central Bank borrowing facilities), that means the real economy has not seen the amount of price inflation that stocks have. But that does not mean that the money in stocks will not eventually seep out into the real economy, and when that does happen (i.e. when the stock market corrects itself and stockholders sell equity for assets in the real economy) the price inflation that has so far been fenced-in to the stock market will suddenly spread into the real economy too.
And the fact is that while bonds are seriously overvalued (as the negative yields and the huge unservicable debts they constitute make them entirely non-productive assets, just false safe haven assets that only central banks either buy or hold these days), stocks in aggregate are a functional, productive asset, as they represent real business interests making real profits from real economic activity. So, once the real economy has absorbed the price inflation it has been sheltered from these past 8 years, stocks could make a considerable come-back from where they were talked down to (in this near-term scenario).
