(October 10) – “It has been a bull market to end all bull markets, writes E.S. Browning in today’s Wall Street Journal.
“In the decade since it began — on Oct. 11, 1990, by the reckoning of many stock-market gurus — the total value of all U.S. stocks has soared to $15 trillion from $3 trillion.
“Investors’ appetite for stock has become so voracious that, despite the market’s black eye this year, they have bought a record $72.3 billion in new stock issues this year, compared with a trifling $4.5 billion in 1990. Today, for the first time ever, half of all American households own stock, compared with just one-third of households in 1989.
“Numbers hardly begin to tell the story.
“As much as the bull market has been a financial event, it has been a cultural event as well. Buying and selling stocks has become a staple of life, alongside work, family and religion. This fall’s prime-time television lineup includes two new series about Wall Street, “Bull” and “The $treet.”
“The hottest selling nonfiction books include tomes on investing. The new national pastime of investing even intersected with the old national pastime the other day, when a baseball manager went out on the field to talk to a player at a crucial turn in a recent playoff game, and the manager later joked that they were talking about how the Nasdaq Composite Index had done that day, and whether Cisco Systems was worth buying.