One of my main points is that you need to look beyond earnings per share to see the bigger trend.
What slide/s would you use from the JP Morgan Guide that is better than the St. Louis Fed chart I featured?
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qx3r
The question I would ask is why the stock market graph looks so different than the St. Louis "Corporate profits before tax" graph?
My hypothesis is that many of these companies borrowed a lot of money in the bond market to buy back their shares and thereby juice their earnings per share.