In his morning note today, Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg argues not only that stocks aren’t cheap today, but that the lows we hit back in March weren’t, well, very low.

…This notion that we had moved to Armageddon lows in equities [back in March] does not seem to hold water. After all, the forward P/E multiple on the S&P 500 at the lows was 11.7x. That was not a multi-decade low or some massive standard-deviation figure — we were actually lower than that at the October 1990 lows when the multiple was 10.5x and frankly, coming off the 1987 collapse, the forward P/E had compressed to 9.8x. As it now stands, the multiple is back very close to where it was at the October 2007 market high, when the multiple had expanded to 15.0x. The range on the forward P/E over the last quarter-century is between 9.8x and 21.8x (excluding the tech bubble), so at 14.5x currently, it is hardly the case that this market can be viewed as a bargain.

…With the U.S. government now putting its fingers into more than one-third of the economy (health, finance, autos, energy, housing), one would expect that the fair-value multiple in the future will be lower than it has been — given the implications for productivity and the potential non-inflationary growth potential.