Not so much the fact itself as the fact people are talking about the fact

 

U.S. Stocks Are Now Pricier Than They Were In The Dot-Com Era - WSJ

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— Nicholas Brown (@nicholasabrown.bsky.social) September 1, 2025 at 5:38 AM

 

This story has been getting a lot of coverage, and I think it may be important, though not necessarily for the obvious reasons.

 

 

U.S. STOCK MARKET REACHES MOST EXPENSIVE LEVEL IN HISTORY, OVERTAKING DOT-COM ERA AND 1929 PRE-DEPRESSION PEAK

— FinTwitter (@fintwitter.bsky.social) September 1, 2025 at 7:07 AM

 

We've been running a lot of posts recently describing various worrying stats and trends for the markets and the economy in general, everything from attacks on the Fed to an apparent bubble adding more to growth than consumer spending to smart, experienced analysts start to to routinely use the word "stagflation." 

 Given all these previous alarming revelations, I’m not sure how big a deal this one additional statistic could be.

From a market psychology standpoint, however, this might be more notable. Recently, retail investors have come to make up a larger and larger chunk of the market. At the risk of being patronizing, I’m not sure how deep these people tend to dive into the economic news or how skilled they are in processing what they do read (it's worth noting that stagflation may be getting lots of attention among econ types but it hasn't been trending strongly on Google), but I’m betting most of them check The Wall Street Journal or the business section of CNN or subscribe to channels like FinTwitter.

I don’t have any special insight into the minds of retail investors and this is the most non-random of samples, but it certainly looks like the message that the music might be about to stop is gaining traction, and while that might not trigger an exodus, it seems likely to accelerate the slide if things go south.