20 years later, the drop is just a wiggle

Time sure changes your perspective: that sickening plunge in the stock market in 1987 is now just a tiny wiggle on the chart.

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

Certainly change my life. I'd been a commission only stock broker for 10 days when that happened. I reconsidered rapidly.

[Tim Worstall]

"changed".

[Dave Tufte]

You get a similar pattern with business cycles.

I always ask students on the first day of a macro class to raise their hands if they were directly affected by the most recent recession, then indirectly affected, and then whether they merely know someone who was affected. I then repeat this for the second most recent recession.

The numbers decline with every passing semester. It's a great way to illustrate that the short-run phenomenon that we worry so much about - like recessions and stock market crashes - don't matter much in the big scheme of things.