15/4/16: Corporate Finance, S&P500 and Bubble Trouble...

Classical corporate finance tells us that companies should be valued on their earnings with past earnings being indicative of future earnings (predictive component). Which is tosh. In today's world that is.

Q4 2016 saw highest payouts to shareholders (combined cash dividends and share repurchases) in over 10 years (couple of slides from my course presentation):

And yet... yet... earnings have hit the brick wall back in Q3 2014 and have been trending down ever since:

You really can't call S&P500 anything but a sail-in-the-Fed-wind. There are no fundamentals sustaining it above 1600-1650 range. At least, not corporate fundamentals.

Unless, of course, one expects the recent extraordinary payout performance to remain indefinitely present in the future. Which only a sell-side analyst or a lunatic can...