Cooperman: Markets Fairly Valued, Washington a Circus [VIDEO]

Leon Cooperman was on CNBC this morning along with David Tepper. Below are excerpts from Cooperman.

Leon Cooperman, Omega Advisors chairman & CEO, discusses the three phases of a bull market and why themarkets are now “fairly valued

Cooperman video segments and transcripts below

coupled with the modestly growing economies put the marketin fair valuation. the profits are growing modestly, so really thefuture — the market valuation is a function of what went into the earnings. and i choose to think in terms of 15 to 16 multiple. i put that on $109 in earnings. i don’t want to sound so precisebecause the market isn’t that precise. it gives you something like 1650, 1750 range or 17 and change. so the market is fairly valued. i don’t think it’s overvalued, i don’t think it’s a bargainanymore. i guess if you study the history of market cycles, generally bull markets move in three phases. the first phase, the bull market i refer to is wow, we survived. when you’re heading down, looks like the world’s coming to an end.nobody sees a turn, you get to turn because fiscal monetarypolicies and it’s the wow, we survived and that was really from the bottom of ’09 to late ’09. and the second phase of the bullmarket is reflecting that which is perspective. what i mean by that is the average economic expansion in the post war period has lasted about five years. you get four or five years of rising earnings and the market capitalizes that. andhe third phase of bull market normally is like the exuberance phase, the silliness phase where people forget about the mistakes of the last cycle. there are pockets of market valuation that are silly. i noticed, i think i owned it for three seconds. pot belly, you know, 100 and something times earnings, doubling from the ipo price, tesla having a market cap almost as great as half gm, a fraction of the revenues, you know, very competitive business.but by and large, we’ve not yet gotten into that speculativephase of the market. but i would say — excuse me, as an investor, i think the market is reasonably valued and i have to kind of work hard and find stocks or macro themes that would work.

i think there’s no question of the negatives out there we should not overlook. i thought maybe i read somewhere they closed the circus but they’re still paying the clowns. it’s disgraceful what’s going on there. but it’s very complex. i felt at the time last year it was a defining election history of the country. you had to make a decision. and the public went a different direction than i would have gone. and this is the stress that we’re seeing. and you know, i would — if you allow me, it’s a quote that’s attributal to abe lincoln. this is a message, i think, given my political persuasions more to mr. obama and nancy pelosi and harry reid. but this is what i would tell them. you cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. you cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. you cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. you cannot lift a wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. you cannot further the brotherhood of man by citing class hatred. you cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence. you cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do