S&P 500 breaks records as COVID-19 breaks US hospitals

The S&P 500 rose 0.7 percent last week, closing at a record high.

Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, told CNBC on Friday that the US economy is on the cusp of “nirvana”.

“Buy a little bit of everything,” he said. “Earnings are still going to continue to move to record highs.”

“I’ve got 5,000 on the S&P 500 by the end of next year or earlier,” he said.

However, Yardeni did say that there are risks.

“Nothing is cheap,” he said of stock prices, while inflation “has yet to demonstrate as actually transitory”.

And then there is the COVID-19 pandemic, which Yardeni described as “disturbing”.

Indeed, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said on Sunday: “I will be surprised if we don't cross 200,000 cases a day in the next couple of weeks, and that's heartbreaking considering we never thought we would be back in that space again.”

As it is, the US medical system is in dire straits.

"The system is breaking," CNN medical analyst Dr Jonathan Reiner said on Saturday. "It's not just the beds... But it's qualified people to staff those beds.”