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Are Stock Prices Unhinged from Reality?

Nobel winner's math suggests S&P 500 is far over-valued; his adherents blame quantitative easing for the imbalance.

By Lu Wang and Jennifer Kaplan, Bloomberg | Updated on May 18, 2015

If you sold every share of every company in the U.S. and used the money to buy up all the factories, machines, and inventory, you’d have some cash left over. That, in a nutshell, is the math behind a bear case on equities that says prices have outrun reality.

The concept is embodied in a measure known as the Q ratio developed by James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Yale University who died in 2002. According to Tobin’s Q, equities in the U.S. are valued about 10 percent above the cost of replacing their underlying assets—higher than any time other than the Internet bubble and the 1929 peak.

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