My take: Trillions of dollars added to bank ledgers through four rounds of quantitative easing by the Fed. Those dollars went somewhere, and ever notice how the stock market de-coupled from the health of the economy when QE started? It’s kind of like they are playing with Monopoly money.

Anyway, lots of companies don’t even pay dividends. The only way to make money on them is through market trades of the stock. P/E was just sort of a fig leaf so traders could lie to themselves that there was some rational basis to what they were doing. The underlying asset doesn’t matter, as long as the buyers think that they can re-sell it higher. It doesn’t even have to be stocks they’re trading, it could be pogs, since the market works entirely on vibes now.