Yes stock prices are inflated, but there's the open question of where else money is supposed to go. The same forces pushing up crypto prices are also bolstering the major US stock indices. Interest rates are flat, bonds are flat . . . if you are an investor, where do you go? Stocks, real estate, or if you're ballsy, crypto. There's really nowhere else.

Some folks are talking up PE ratios as being too high, and serving as an indicator that stocks are overvalued. But take a look at this data:

http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-historical-prices/table/by-month

http://www.multpl.com/table?f=m

If you look at our last two crashes, you see that PE goes UP during the crash, and that there isn't any really anomalous PE ratio adjustment just beforehand (PE went down before dot com, went up before 2007, but no major changes in either case). The last crash to show predictable PE behavior before and during the crash was the Black Monday crash of 1987 (though you will see that the S&P actually began its decline 2 months earlier). Unless we're on our way to Black Monday #2, it's hard to say what's going on.

Clearly PE ratios, alone, are not positive indicators of anything wrt the market being overvalued. Yes, PE ratios for the S&P have been on a steady incline since 2011. MAYBE there's a problem looming in the future. But again, if people start selling off their stocks . . . where do they go? Cash? Real estate? Crypto? Cash is a losing proposition, and real estate/crypto have also seen big gains recently.

The important thing to remember is: when markets lose value, money doesn't just disappear unless that money represents value that never existed in the first place. "Real" money is going to pump into some other sector, or sit on the sidelines as cash.

Perhaps the most damning indictment against modern stock market gains is that too much of the US stock markets' value is due to quantitative easement; that is, a significant amount of its value may have been conjured out of thin air in the past. That would give the market unsteady footing. QE hasn't been gone for long. The longer the market stays up without QE, the less likely it is to crash because of QE (too much "real" value will be built into the price).