marginmike, here's the data.
According to Robert Shiller, (Professor of Finance at Yale, and author of Irrational Exuberance), the PE of the S&P 500 peaked at around 33 in 1929, and at about 44 in 2000.
Note that Shiller does not use canned data for his PE numbers. He calculated them himself, using the following formula:
Numerator = real (inflation-corrected) S&P 500 Composite Stock Price Index.
Denominator = moving average over preceding ten years of real S&P Composite earnings.
He got his data from the S&P Statistical Service, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cowles & Associates' Common Stock Indexes,, and Warren and Pearson's Gold and Prices. (The latter two sources were used for pre-1926 and pre-1913 data, respectively.)
My source for this is Shiller, page 8, note to figure 1.2, and page 6, note to figure 1.1. In addition, he goes into more detail on his sources and methods of number crunching in a rather lengthy footnote. |
