Rallying S&P 500 Never Cheaper in Europe on Dollar-- Bloomberg.com

I am still not a buyer here but...

Bloomberg.com ran a story this morning with an interesting take on the valuation of the stock market. Excerpts from the story: Investors outside the U.S. are purchasing companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index at the cheapest valuations on record, their buying power boosted by a seven-month decline in the dollar... The S&P 500 is priced at 19.9 times earnings, the biggest discount to the MSCI World Index of 23 developed countries since May 2003, according to monthly data compiled by Bloomberg. For Europe-based money managers, currency translations push the average cost for a dollar of U.S. profits down to 13.6 euros, the lowest level ever relative to global equities... For overseas investors buying stock with currencies that appreciated versus the dollar, shares of S&P 500 companies may be an even bigger bargain relative to global equities. Adjusted for euros, earnings for S&P 500 companies are about 50 percent cheaper than those in the MSCI World, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That makes U.S. stocks less expensive now for money managers in Paris and Frankfurt than they were for American investors near the end of the bear market in 2002, when S&P 500 companies sold for a record 42 percent less than the average global ratio.

Interesting take that I had not thought about.