We the stockholders are in a darned box and deserve better. We are owed an opportunity to make money that is dependent — at least somewhat — on a company’s fundamentals, and not just macroeconomic concerns. We deserve higher price-to-earnings multiples than the market gives us for the success of an enterprise, and not the severe judgment of a bond market that has been proven wrong time and again. Just consider all the stock gains made in the shadows of an inverted yield curve that proved incredibly wrong. The predictive value of these all-knowing pieces of paper has been revealed to be fraudulent and comical. The greatest expansion of our century — not the oft-predicted recession — occurred under the “un-watchful” gaze of bond buyers who believed the price on the 30-year Treasury was right. We can blame short-sighted owners, especially the banks. These financial institutions have been repositories of idiocy that is now costing them price-to-earnings multiples for their own enterprises. In fact, the valuations are now astoundingly below the level of this spring, when they were on death’s door after Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic Bank collapsed. They are reluctant sellers. We can blame the foreign sellers who seem as oblivious as they were when buying. The Chinese in particular are relentless. That’s a sure tell in itself of the shakiness of a country that now derives its power more by an insurgent military than a rising gross domestic product. Finally, we can blame the two evil twins: An endless Treasury issuance for an unfathomable budget deficit, and nightmarish quantitative tightening (QT) sales that have caused us misery and helped rates to skyrocket. The tyrannical linkage continues to control more than ever. We are about halfway through the most important part of earnings season, and it has been nothing short of a fiasco — despite incredible margin expansion and decent sales growth that has defied predictability. In…
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