Investor's Business Daily: Stock Market Crash Near? Nobel Laureate Sees 'Bubbles Everywhere'

Article by Matt Krantz in Investor's Business Daily

When Nobel Laureate and "Irrational Exuberance" author Robert Shiller says he sees bubbles in the financial markets — you'd better listen up. He literally wrote the book on stock market crashes and bubbles after all.

"I see bubbles everywhere," Shiller, economics professor at Yale University and author of just-published "Narrative Economics" told investors gathered in Los Angeles on Oct. 23. "There's no place to go. You just have to ride it out. You invest even though you expect the price to decline." Shiller famously predicted the 2000 stock market crash and the 2007 crash of the housing market.

The timing of Shiller's ominous warning comes at a scary time. This is the month of the 90th anniversary of Black Monday. That day on Oct. 28, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 13%. That still stands as the second-worst drop in history and, combined with the pounding the stock market took in early days of the depression, took 25 years for investors to recover from.

Shiller sees bubbles in the stock market, bond market and the housing market. "You get ... in a situation where you know it's going to decline, but you still saved enough to hold you over; you have no choice."

Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2013, told Investor's Business Daily he expects just 4.4% average annual returns in U.S. stocks over the next 30 years. That's a disappointing return expectation — less than half the market's long-term return and well short of what pensions are calling for. The S&P 500's long-term return is 9.84%, says Index Fund Advisors.

The problem? The stock market is richly valued!

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