The US stock market is rushing from record to record – including when it comes to crisis indicators.
May 10, 2026, 05:28May 10, 2026, 05:28
A strange parallelism of events has been evident on the US stock market for years. On the one hand, there are the stock market price indices that are rushing from record to record. Despite all of Trump’s tariffs. Despite the Iran War. Despite rising energy prices. Despite rising inflation again. Nothing can stop them. The S&P has reached a new all-time high.
Waiting for the crash? The US stock market is moving at dizzying heights.Image: keystone
On the other hand, those indicators that signal an exaggeration, an imminent end to the boom or even a crash are also rising higher and higher. The scariest indicator from this cabinet of horror so far has been that of Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller. Its P/E indicator puts prices and profits in relation: the higher the share prices in relation to profits, the scarier the picture.
This indicator is currently only two points lower than it was around the turn of the millennium, when investors lost sense of the relationships during the Internet hype. Otherwise this index has never been higher. Never in the last 150 years. Not even in the boom of the 1920s. Never.
An addition to the cabinet of horror came this week from UBS, as the “Financial Times” reported. According to UBS, never before have so few companies contributed significantly to the S&P500 as now. In normal times there are around 100 – currently 42. Only five companies contributed half to the recent surge – all of them tech and AI companies.
“The S&P 500 is dominated by a small number of extraordinarily profitable technology companies,” says Torsten Slok, describing the same problem to others Way. The chief economist at asset manager Apollo even says:
“The S&P 500 is no longer a diversified index.”
The “Royal Bank of Canada” calls this the “great narrowing” and shows this as an illustration: a narrow path in the mountains, steep slopes on both sides.
So far, so scary. But the stock market boom has so far not only survived Trump’s tariffs, his war in Iran, rising energy prices and inflation. He also literally ran over all the warners. In recent years, opposing this boom has been just as scary as all the warning signs from the horror cabinet of crisis indicators. (aargauerzeitung.ch)