NYT’s Irwin: Whole Range of Financial Markets May Be in a Bubble

“A slew of financial assets around the world may have entered bubble territory, says New York Times columnist Neil Irwin.

“Welcome to the Everything Boom — and, quite possibly, the Everything Bubble,” he writes. “Around the world, nearly every asset class is expensive by historical standards.”

Among the examples Irwin cites are:

• Spanish bonds. Despite the fact that the country sports one of the weakest economies in the eurozone, its 10-year government bonds yield 2.68 percent. That’s not much above the 2.58 percent offered by 10-year U.S. Treasurys.
• The office building at One Wall Street in New York City sold for $585 million in May, only three months after one industry report estimated it would go for $466 million.
• In April, the French cable TV company Numericable executed the largest junk bond issue in history, with an interest rate of only 4.9 percent.

“We’re in a world where there are very few unambiguously cheap assets,” Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist at BlackRock, tells Irwin….”

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