Can CAPE guide us around the world? One reasonable complaint during the last week’s debate on cyclically adjusted price/earnings multiples is that the discussion is too US-centric. There are reasons for this. The US is still by far the world’s biggest stock market, the data are more reliable and go back further, and most of the academic players in the debate are based in the US. But it is still a reasonable complaint.
Here then are the results of the exercise in using multiples of 10-year rolling average earnings to value a range of world markets, as carried out by Mebane Faber of Cambria Investment Management, who kindly gave me his data. One huge caveat is that the data do not go as far back as for the US (although this at least means that we do not need to have arguments about whether it is possible to make comparisons with earnings from the late 19th century). The Faber data for the UK go back to 1927; none of the others go back further than 1969; and for some of the emerging markets the data only go back to the 1990s. The full details can be found on this post, and Mr Faber provided me with updated results to the end of July this year.
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