The Federal Reserve is looking for any excuse to raise interest rates, global growth is slowing, and yet stock analysts are predicting the fastest earnings expansion since the bull market began. They better be right.

Hitting forecasts for next year would require S&P 500 Index companies to increase profits by 13 percent, something that hasn’t happened since 2011. Failing to do so would risk inflating equity valuations that at 20 times annual income are already the highest since the financial crisis.

While the confidence of analysts helps explain the stock market’s resilience, such profit growth is lately the one thing investors have been conditioned not to expect. They’ve just endured a five-quarter stretch where every prediction for higher earnings fell apart just as reporting season arrived.

“You’d have to have a lot of things working in unison to achieve that number, a lot of things would have to go correctly,” Peter Andersen, chief investment officer at Fiduciary Trust Co. in Boston, said by phone. His firm manages more than $11 billion. “You’ll have areas where growth will be quite strong, like certain technology areas, but other industries like financials will never have that kind of growth through 2017.”

While the U.S. equity market has sidestepped threats in the past ranging from Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis to the prospect of a government shutdown, it’s had much less success thriving in the absence of expanding earnings. Through 2014, both the price of the S&P 500 and the annual income of its members posted six consecutive years without a decline -- but that ended in 2015, when the index slipped 0.7 percent and profits dropped 3.1 percent.

The trend has worsened in 2016, with annual income earned by companies in the S&P 500 falling to $106 a share last quarter from a high of $113 in September 2014. Quarterly profits in the S&P 500 are headed for a sixth straight decline in the third quarter, matching the longest earnings recession on record, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Wall Street analysts have continued to push back the turning point. A survey of estimates as recently as July pointed to S&P 500 companies returning to profit growth in the third quarter of this year. Those same analysts now see a decline of 1.4 percent.

Hope springs eternal for the fourth quarter and analysts still predict annual income will increase 10 percent from now to $117 per share by the end of 2016. The projected expansion for the next 12 months is even loftier: to get to $124 a share at this point next year, profits would have to expand another 16 percent, a rate of growth that is twice the historical average.

David Fuller's view

Well, they would say that wouldn’t they, to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, if they and their clients are enjoying the benefits of a rising stock market. 

Earnings analysts are presumably using the US stock market as a lead indicator, while keeping their fingers crossed - understandably because stock markets have a decidedly mixed record as economic indicators.  Consider who buy and sells stocks – some very smart people for sure but on average, an emotional crowd of trend followers and momentum traders.  Black box systems are programmed to do the same.

Analysts will also be hoping that their luck changes, as we are now in the sixth quarter of flat earnings, on average.  Meanwhile, the Catch-22 for the Fed is that while they want to raise interest rates, there is a real risk that it could boost the Dollar, further weakening corporate profits in the process.

See also this informative Bloomberg video with Joseph Stiglitz: Unemployment in U.S. More Like 9-12%. This also contains some comments on the EU.