For the first time since the Great Recession ended in 2009, every one of the world's 45 largest economies is growing.
"We haven't seen it for a decade," Jeffrey Kleintop, chief international investment strategist at Charles Schwab, told advisors attending the firm's Schwab Impact conference in Chicago Tuesday. Of course, the last time this happened was in 2006 and 2007.
Is the global economy too good to last? Kleintop doesn't think so, at least not for the next 12 months.
In every part of the world, stocks are "locked into global growth," he noted. In other words, rising earnings are supporting the surge in stock prices.
Even in South Korea, which sits at ground zero for a potential nuclear confrontation with North Korea, the economy is booming.
How do we know it's not a bubble? Kleintop said he examined four bubbles in the last five decades—the Nasdaq tech, home builders, oil and silver bubbles—and discovered a startling similar pattern.
All four of these bubbles inflated at a rate of 1,000 percent over 10 years almost to the precise month before bursting. If one wants to look for a record-setting bubble, Bitcoin is up 1,000 percent in the last year.
Yet it's "hard to say that Bitcoin will tip us into a recession," he said. It's true that FANG stocks are up 1,800 percent since 2009, but they represent only 6 percent of the market. In contrast, the Nasdaq tech bubble was 40 percent of the total market in 2000.
Bears have been bruised and battered. Liz Ann Sonders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, told advisors that at some point they'd come out of hibernation. "We may be entering the late phases" of this bull market, she said.
The U.S. economy is kicking into high gear, with capital expenditures accelerating. This means productivity, a lagging indicator, should pick up, she said.