How 'the mother of all bubbles' will pop in the U.S. stock market

financialpost.com:

Having tagged America’s inordinately large share of global financial markets as “the mother of all bubbles” in my last column, the main pushback I got, even from the few people who share my view, was that there is no sign this bubble will deflate any time soon.

Almost no one foresees an imminent pop. Virtually every Wall Street analyst predicts U.S. stocks will continue outperforming the rest of the world in 2025. But all this enthusiasm only tends to confirm that the bubble is at a very advanced stage. If the consensus on “American exceptionalism” is so overwhelming, who is left to hop on the bandwagon and inflate it further?

The certainty of Wall Street has spilt over into the popular media, which often picks up on market trends only when they are well established and near an end. Hype for American superiority is now the stuff of TV, radio, podcasts, newspaper columns and magazine cover stories, which have a record of pointing the wrong way on future trends.

The bulls say America can remain dominant, owing to impressive earnings of the country’s corporations. But U.S. earnings growth would not look so exceptional if not for the supernormal profits of its big tech firms, and massive government spending. Over time, supernormal profits get competed away. Growth and profits are also getting an artificial lift from the heaviest deficit spending ever recorded at this stage of an economic cycle, by far.

Most economists nonetheless argue that, with the balance sheets of U.S. households and companies in good shape, the economic boom will endure. The few who worry about president-elect Donald Trump’s tariff or immigration plans tend to think they will hurt foreign economies more than the U.S.

But every hero has a fatal flaw.