Dr. Alan O'Sullivan

You were waiting to get back to that mean and it almost never happened.

You sort of got there for a moment in 2008-9, but otherwise we've been in this new regime of

higher equity valuations and it being a contrarian, assuming mean reversion, it has been a recipe for perpetual disappointment.

If you are just sort of taking more humbly this yield class growth, you still have been too cautious in the last decade, the last 15 years, but

at least you didn't sort of make the problem worse by assuming that we would go to those lower valuations.

In the end, we ended up going to this record high.

I tend to say from GFC, we went from 2010, 2011, we had already mildly above average valuations.

And then we've gotten to these wildly above average valuations, again, K-price of 40 or something like that.

And that explains a lot of this strong realized return.

But investors should really understand that that strong realized return has come at the expense of lower future return.

We have, sometimes we say, we have been borrowing returns from the future or we have brought future returns forward by having these very high valuations today.

So great for today's wallet, I meant to say, and not so great for prospective returns.

I think it was very important.

It influenced many asset classes, not just bonds, but equities and many private assets.

They all benefited from the fact that real yields were brought down to very low levels.

I've got some uncertainty how much it was sort of proactively central banks were doing or whether they were sort of responding to the I don't know wet logs type of environment where if they hadn't done that we could have had really ugly 2010s so that's and then the other counterpoint again I do sympathize with what you say but the other point I think it

has been important.

The tech part has been very important.

You know, the shift from physical to digital, internet and now more recently, AI type of thing.

So they maybe didn't have, they were not directly influenced by the low rate phenomenon and they were independently causing this very bullish environment, especially for US equities.