By Shawn Langlois, MarketWatch

Getty
The man behind the iBankCoin blog on Thursday morning asked his readers: “Where were you when Snap ripped off America?”
While his rant focused on the wild valuation the Snapchat parent /zigman2/quotes/205087158/composite SNAP -5.37% reached in its debut, others may see the booming IPO as a last gasp before the bubble pops like it did back in the days of Pets.com and Webvan.
But the truth is, this market climate -- which has seen record runups for the Dow /zigman2/quotes/210598065/realtime DJIA +0.08% , S&P 500 /zigman2/quotes/210599714/realtime SPX -0.39% and Nasdaq /zigman2/quotes/210598365/realtime COMP -1.20% -- is nothing like we saw during the dot-com hey day. By many measures, it’s actually worse, according to numbers crunched this week by 720 Global’s Michael Lebowitz .
“Even though current valuation measures are not as extreme as in 1999, today’s economic underpinnings are not as robust as they were then,” he wrote. “Such perspective allows for a unique quantification, a comparison of valuations and economic activity, to show that today’s P/E ratio might be more overvalued than those observed in 1999.”
In this chart, Lebowitz stacks up the metrics from the years running up to the dot-com explosion versus what we’ve seen since 2012:

Lebowitz acknowledged, of course, that equity valuations back in 1999 were, as proven after the fact, “grossly elevated.”
But when put up against a backdrop of economic factors, he says those numbers appear to be relatively tame compared with today.
“Some will likely argue with this analysis and claim that Donald Trump’s pro-growth agenda will invigorate the outlook for the economy and corporate earnings,” he wrote. “While that is a possibility, that argument is highly speculative as such policies face numerous headwinds along the path to implementation. Economic, demographic and productivity trends all portend stagnation.”
His bottom line: “There is little justification for paying such a historically steep premium for what could likely be feeble earnings growth for years to come.”
Meanwhile, Snapchat’s surging market capitalization just surpassed that of American Airlines /zigman2/quotes/209207041/composite AAL -0.18% and CBS Corp. .








