
Book Review: Investing Amid Low Expected Returns
The best predictor of an investment’s long-term return is its current yield – for fixed income that’s the effective interest rate and for stocks it’s the earnings yield. As of September 2021, both were lower than they had been in over a century. Ilmanen notes that after four decades of very good investment returns, investors have come to expect higher than normal returns instead of the lower than normal expected returns corresponding to today’s price levels.