來自於紐約時報：
The most powerful reason is simpler: It’s the actions of the Federal Reserve.
Since March 23 — the day the stock market rally began — the Fed has done its best to ensure that the returns on bonds are quite low by signaling its willingness to buy unlimited quantities of Treasury and government-backed mortgage bonds. It has also ventured into buying corporate bonds, which helped push yields on such bonds lower too. The goal, in part, is to push investors away from the safety of the bond markets and into riskier assets, like stocks.
In a recent note, analysts at JPMorgan argued that these programs by the Fed “likely has a bigger positive impact on equity valuation, compared with the negative impact of the temporary earnings loss.”
Translation: The Fed’s efforts to keep interest rates and bond yields low has more than offset the collapse in profits for S&P 500 companies, helping to keep the market aloft even though corporate profitability and the economy look like they will be gloomy for a while.
A similar thing happened during the last financial crisis. Interest rates and bond yields fell to low levels that would have been unthinkable previously, which many partly attributed to central bank actions. And for the years that followed prices of assets such as stocks, bonds and real estate all rallied to levels that looked high relative to the sluggish level of economic activity after the crisis.
So while corporate profits are supposed to be the fuel that revs the stock market’s engine, in the short term, Federal Reserve policy remains in the driver’s seat. That explains why investors are willing to ignore what analysts have to say, at least for the moment.
