Are U.S. stock markets ‘whistling past the graveyard?’ Stifel takes a close look at the great American ‘money illusion'

A question looms over Wall Street as it digests the stock-market highs in the dog days of summer 2025: is this another version of the dotcom bubble? Apollo’s Torsten Slok has already calculated that the top 10 S&P 500 companies today are more overvalued than in the late ’90s tech boom. Now the investment bank Stifel is predicting that even as “euphoric markets party like it’s 1999,” a stock market correction and stagflation are ahead.

Stifel’s strategists, led by Barry Bannister and Thomas Carroll, wrote in a research note that they are simply “uncomfortable” with the S&P 500 gaining 32% off its April 7 intraday low as the latest GDP figures show the actual economy slowing almost to a crawl. They further warn that “hopium” is a powerful drug and that stock markets may be “whistling past