The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Just one

guest today, Yasher Levine, author of Surveillance Valley, who will tell us

how the internet has been about spying on us from the first.

But first a few words about that wild and crazy stock market.

There's a longer version of this with pictures on my blog, LBO hyphen news. Stock markets have more or less stabilized at least for now. dot com.

Stock markets have more or less stabilized at least for now. What does it all mean?

There's no doubt that stocks have been due for a come-upence for some time. They're very

expensive. Since stocks represent claims and corporate profits, the

conventional way to value them is by measuring their price against those underlying

profits. The standard measure for that is the price earnings, PE ratio. The price of a

of a stock divided by corporate profits per share.

Since the late 19th century, the PE ratio for the broad stock market has averaged 16.

Since 1950, it's averaged 18 it's now 27 but PEs can be

volatile to adjust for that Yale economist Robert Schiller has invented a longer

term measure which adjusts profits for inflation and measures current prices

against their 10-year trailing average.

The Century Plus average is 17.

It's now 33.

Schiller's PE now is

today than any point in history except for the climax of the late 1990s bubble.

It was lower in 1929 than it is today.

And what about those profits?

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