"how late in the business cycle are we?" As Hartnett summarized it, we are now so "long in the vermouth", the late-cycle is starting to get "tipsy", and presented the following as evidence:

2017: Bitcoin's rip from $300 to $19,600 in 3 years made it the biggest bubble ever

2017: Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi sold for $450mn (would take average American 7,500 years to earn)

2017: Argentina (8 defaults in 202 years) issued a (oversubscribed) 100-year sovereign bond

2017: European high yield bonds were priced as less risky than US Treasuries

2017: the market cap of Facebook (25k employees) exceeded that of India (1.3bn people)

2018: US, UK, German, Japanese unemployment rates are at multi-decade lows

2018: the global stock of negatively-yielding global debt remains >$10tn

2018: S&P 500 trailing price-to-earnings ratio >20X…a level exceeded in just 12 of past 120 years

2018: S&P 500 price-to-book ratio >3X…a level exceeded in just 5 of past 70 years

2018: US tax cuts of $1.5tn will coincide with US corporate bond issuance of $1.5tn and US equity buybacks of $0.9tn

2018: QE "winners" (REITs, credit, EM assets) have started to underperform QE "losers" (volatility, US$, commodities, cash)

Aug 22nd, 2018: S&P500 bull market becomes longest of all-time

Dec 2018: Fed will be 9 hikes into tightening cycle & G4 central bank liquidity will be contracting

May 2019: global profits are forecast to be 1/3 higher than their prior 2008 peak (IBES $3.3tn vs $2.4tn)

July 2019: the US economic expansion will become the longest since the Civil War